The Peace That Was Signed by Fax: How Ceasefires Get Negotiated When Nobody Can Meet

Shuttling envoys, encrypted chats and third-country hotel lobbies do the work that a negotiating table can't — and the sequence of concessions is more choreography than compromise.

By the Jester Desk · October 11, 2026

On November 5, 1973, Henry Kissinger began flying. The US secretary of state hopped between capitals that would not speak to each other directly, and the term coined for it — shuttle diplomacy — stuck. Wikipedia credits that shuttle with facilitating the cessation of hostilities after the Yom Kippur War. Half a century later, the mechanics have gone digital, but the logic hasn't changed: when principals can't sit in the same room, the room comes to them, one airport at a time.^[12]

First, Decide What You're Actually Signing

The vocabulary matters more than it looks. There is no official legal definition of "ceasefire," according to Oxford Public International Law, and truce, armistice, ceasefire and cessation of hostilities get used interchangeably in everyday speech. But the distinctions shape the paperwork. A ceasefire is generally meant to be binding, unlike a declaration of a cessation of hostilities or a truce, and it often applies to the entire geographical area of a conflict. An armistice, by contrast, connotes a permanent cessation of hostilities without normalization of relations — a formal end to a war, whereas a ceasefire may be a temporary stoppage.^[3][7]

Researchers Govinda Clayton and Valerie Sticher sorted civil-war ceasefire agreements into three types: cessation of hostilities, preliminary ceasefire, and definitive ceasefire. The durability gap is stark. Within three months of initiation, 30 percent of cessations of hostilities, 50 percent of preliminary ceasefires, and 70 percent of definitive ceasefires still had no conflict-related deaths, per Wikipedia's summary of that research. A preliminary agreement normally specifies how forces stop firing, withdraw weapons and disengage — and how that gets monitored. A definitive one adds disarmament, demobilization, and cantonment of forces and equipment.^[4][7]

"Within three months of the ceasefire initiation, 30 percent of cessations of hostility, 50 percent of preliminary ceasefires, and 70 percent of definitive ceasefires still had no conflict-related deaths."

The Sequence Is the Whole Game

Here's the structural problem every mediator walks into. Armed groups ask for guarantees of political talks before renouncing violence; governments usually argue for a ceasefire as a prerequisite to peace talks, according to Norway's Forsvaret publication on negotiating ceasefires. Somebody has to move first, and nobody wants to. The mediator's job is to make the first move cheap enough to survive.^[9]

The options list reads like a playbook for face-saving: let parties save face, introduce the Mitchell principles, start small with localized ceasefires, and build the parties' responsibilities into the monitoring mechanisms themselves. The UN's own Guidance on the Mediation of Ceasefires, drafted by the Mediation Support Unit in the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and published in September 2022, is blunt that ceasefires defy a rigid template and instead follow a flexible set of technical, thematic and political parameters.^[1][9]

Sequencing isn't just a ceasefire question. Comparative evidence on negotiations to end wars covers how talks start, how they're prepared, how they're sequenced, and how agreement types and negotiation formats differ — plus the role of intermediaries and the factors influencing outcomes, per Inclusive Peace's report on negotiating an end to wars. The ceasefire process and political negotiations are distinct processes, often involving different actors, strategies and challenges, yet closely intertwined, per ETH Zurich's Center for Security Studies.^[2][10]

Timing varies wildly. Colombia's government and FARC negotiated politically without a bilateral ceasefire, agreeing to stop the violence only once they reached agreement on the main conflict issues. In the Philippines, a ceasefire came very early between the government and the MILF, contributing to a drawn-out but successful process. Burundi's initial attempt at a comprehensive ceasefire between the government and the CNDD-FDD failed — until an earlier peace agreement began to bear fruit, after which efforts progressed more smoothly. Syria tried a range of strategies; at the time of writing, all ceasefires and political negotiations had failed to stop the war.^[2]

Eyes in the Sky, Boots on the Ground

Verification and monitoring are not the same animal. Ceasefire verification is the technical assessment of a party's compliance with specific terms, typically done by a small team of military personnel with technical expertise — redeployment of heavy weapons, air base lockdowns, troop redeployments. Monitoring is broader: general observation of compliance, often using a large monitoring force, covering commitments like refraining from negative propaganda, legal reforms, respecting human rights, and restoring access to services like the internet, per PILPG training materials.^[5]

The technology stack, per the Ceasefire Project, includes drones, cameras, satellites and acoustic sensors. But the same source warns that technology cannot replace direct contact between observers and the parties to the conflict, as well as affected civilians — contact that is crucial to building trust in the mechanism. Trusted international actors are often asked to monitor and support a ceasefire to provide third-party objectivity: the UN and other international actors, plus regional bodies such as the African Union and the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe.^[4][5]

To build trust, conflict parties need to be involved in joint monitoring, verification and compliance mechanisms, where necessary with third-party support. Ceasefires fail for different reasons, one being the poor quality of agreements and their insufficient monitoring and verification. The durability of any deal is affected by demilitarized zones, withdrawal of troops, and third-party guarantees such as monitoring or peacekeeping.^[4][7]

The Spoiler in the Lobby

Spoilers are leaders and parties who believe the emerging peace threatens their power, worldview and interests, per GSDRC's work on spoiler problems. Insider spoilers are parties to the peace and tend to use stealth; outsider spoilers aren't parties and often use violence. They come in three flavors: limited spoilers with goals like a share of power, total spoilers pursuing total power with immutable preferences, and greedy spoilers whose goals expand or contract based on cost and risk.^[6]

In the 1990s, international custodians of peace processes pursued three strategies: inducement (giving the spoiler what it wants), socialization (changing behavior to adhere to established norms), and coercion (punishing spoiler behavior). The threat of withdrawal is coercive, but it only works if the target views it as punishment, the custodian can credibly seem indifferent to the war ending, and all parties are limited spoilers who want a settlement to succeed and are equally culpable in failing to meet obligations. Diagnosis comes first: total spoilers cannot be accommodated in a peace agreement; greedy spoilers can be, if the costs of war are sufficiently high.^[6]

Why the Fax Machine Still Matters

Shuttle diplomacy is the action of an outside party serving as intermediary between principals without direct principal-to-principal contact, entailing successive travel from one principal's working location to another. It avoids the problem of parties sitting at the same table — it's a series of distinct but linked negotiations involving negotiators and stakeholders directly, per an Arcadia University study analyzing the Iran nuclear negotiations, the Sudan-South Sudan conflict and Brexit. The study finds third-party mediation, sequential negotiations and confidence-building measures among the tools of successful shuttle diplomacy, and recommends strengthening cultural proficiency, investing in trust-building mechanisms, and engaging local stakeholders.^[12][13]

The MEND case shows what happens when the shuttle stalls. In late January 2010, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta suspended a unilateral ceasefire until the Nigerian government agreed to meet with a MEND delegation, per Forsvaret. A unilateral ceasefire, after all, is one party declaring without seeking one from the other — the cheapest move on the board, and the easiest to take back.^[3][9]

So when the next ceasefire headline lands, read it as a sequence, not a switch. Ask what type of agreement it is, who is verifying what, which spoiler was bought in and with what, and whether the parties ever actually met. The Karachi Agreement of 1949, signed by Indian and Pakistani military representatives under the UN Commission for India and Pakistan, established a cease-fire line in Kashmir — a line drawn by people who found a way to work without a summit. Since 1950, the rate at which interstate wars end with a formal peace treaty has substantially declined, per Wikipedia. The fax, the drone and the hotel lobby are not substitutes for peace. They are just how the paperwork gets done while everyone waits for one.^[7][8]

Reported with AI assistance using internet sources.