From Shaking Hands to Sustaining Peace: Rethinking Pathways for Mediating and Implementing Agreements

While peace agreements are frequently symbolized by handshakes, their implementation and the broader goal of sustaining peace present formidable challenges. Despite the extensive efforts and substantial time invested in negotiations, violence often persists, and peace agreements routinely struggle to be put into action. In these contexts, sustaining peace can seem remote and, at times, insurmountable. This White Paper, associated with this summary by the Global Institute for Strategic Research (GISR) in Qatar, critically examines the reasons why peace agreements falter and explores the role of design, capacity, and political will. It highlights the importance of understanding the wider environments that characterize and shape peace processes and reflects on implementation mechanisms and wider cross-cutting issue areas, where promising practices are evolving to address the shifting landscapes of peace agreement implementation, its aftermath and sustainability. Within this context, the paper also explores that the increasingly influential roles that emerging and non-traditional small state actors are playing also need to be better understood, and as this paper argues, supported. In the contemporary geopolitical context witnessing growing resistance to Northern- or externally-led political processes, the different perspectives, experiences, and approaches that these actors bring deserve greater attention.