The world is not becoming more peaceful—in fact, it is increasingly adapting to living in conditions of war. In 2025, the number of active armed conflicts reached a historical high for the entire period after World War II. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), last year there were 65 conflicts in 35 countries, resulting in over 245,000 deaths. The sharp increase was primarily due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Gaza, and the escalation of violence in Sudan, including the siege and mass killing in the city of Al-Fashir.
“Today, the world is experiencing more than a decade of consistently high levels of violence. Every year since 2013 has been more violent than nearly any previous year after the end of the Cold War,” the report states. Analysts also add that the increase in global violence is not limited to one region but reflects a broader deterioration in international security.
This means the problem is no longer limited to individual ‘hot spots.’ The international system increasingly operates in an environment where war, escalation, and the risk of new conflict become constant parameters of policy. This is what changes the main question of diplomacy: instead of always seeking a way to definitively end a conflict, states are increasingly forced to think about how to contain its spread, reduce the cost of violence, and prevent the next crisis from turning into a larger war.
Can preventing escalation actually prolong wars?
In modern diplomacy, preventing escalation is almost always seen as an unconditional good. Preventing direct confrontation between nuclear states, stopping a local war from turning into a regional one, avoiding the most dangerous scenario—these are goals that are hard to question. But this is where the question arises: what happens to a war that is contained but not ended?
“Managing escalation can reduce immediate pressure on the parties, forcing them to make painful compromises, creating a conflict that is acceptable to decision-makers, even if it remains unbearable for those who endure it. But the alternative to containment might be a much wider and more destructive war. The real danger is not in managing escalation per se but in allowing it to become a substitute for political strategy. Containment should create space for diplomacy, not become an end in itself,” remarks Simon Chesterman, an Australian legal scholar and one of the most renowned specialists in international law, international organizations, and global governance, in a comment to Tyzhden.
Meanwhile, American political scientist, professor of international relations at the University of Florida, researcher of international security and the conclusion of armed conflicts David Siroky, based on his research, argues that post-war peace is actually prolonged by two things: legitimacy, meaning whether the conflicting parties recognize the post-war order as binding for themselves, and organizational capacity, meaning whether they maintain the people, weapons, and networks necessary to resume fighting.
“Peace is maintained when at least one of these components is limited. It collapses when none are restricted. As global data we analyze shows, ceasefires are the least stable form of ending a war — much less stable than negotiated peace agreements or military victories. The reason is not that a ceasefire implies a compromise. It’s that they usually suspend violence without resolving the core political dispute or affecting either side’s ability to resume hostilities. The power dispute remains, and armed organizations stay intact. Both paths back to war remain open,” he notes to Week.
Meanwhile, managing escalation can create something similar at the level of international diplomacy.
“Reducing the immediate cost of conflict continuation without combining this relief with something that either diminishes the fighting side’s capacity to conduct hostilities or increases its acceptance of a settled order alleviates urgency but doesn’t create resolution. That’s the true risk. Not that the desire to prevent escalation is wrong. The risk lies in treating de-escalation as a substitute for settlement rather than a bridge to it, which generally freezes the conflict in a form most prone to repetition instead of resolving it,” believes David Siroki.
Prolonged wars as the norm, not the exception
Today, more and more conflicts exist for years without any resolution: they may change intensity, transition into ceasefires, resume after pauses, and even involve negotiations — but not disappear. Yet, this is far from a novel phenomenon in history.
“Certainly, in the past, we had longer wars, particularly in the 20th century: world wars, the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, and others. Older conflicts also ended with unstable ceasefire regimes, such as the truces that ended the Israeli War of Independence, the Suez War of 1956, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, various Indo-Pakistani wars, and other conflicts. I agree that we currently have prolonged conflicts, but I’m not sure it’s anything new, as prolonged conflicts existed in the past, though some were civil wars, and some didn’t involve major powers,” says Week American political scientist, international relations expert, war and military strategy scholar, and professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, Dan Reiter.
As an example, he cites the end of the Colombian civil war in the late 2010s, which lasted decades. “In the 1980s, there were many prolonged conflicts, including the Soviet-Afghan conflict, the Lebanese civil war, and the Iran-Iraq war. Additionally, since 1945, we’ve observed regional rivalries that fluctuated between peace and war, perhaps most notably between Israel and its Arab neighbors, as well as between India and Pakistan,” he adds.
Meanwhile, Simon Chesterman notes that, in a sense, the relatively optimistic period regarding prolonged conflicts after the Cold War was rather an exception.
“The number of conflicts supported by external states, internal political incentives, and deep disagreements about the very legitimacy of the international order is changing. This may lead to more militarized borders, proxy conflicts, and recurring crises. At the same time, ‘protracted’ does not mean ‘permanent.’ Political circumstances change, leaders change, and agreements that once seemed impossible may become feasible,” he tells Tyzhden.
David Siroky argues that wars, especially those actively involving external forces, increasingly rarely end in clear victories or comprehensive settlements that dominated in previous decades. His upcoming book, along with Erin Jenn and Milos Popovic, “Clients, Rivals and Rogues: Why Great Powers Intervene in Revolutionary Civil Wars,” is dedicated to why great powers intervene in revolutionary civil wars. One of the conclusions of this research is that external support often allows the weaker or losing side to continue fighting much longer than it could have managed on its own.
“External support not only prolongs wars. It also changes the incentives of at least one sponsor, forcing them to prefer an unresolved conflict over the complete defeat of their client, as defeat brings reputational and strategic costs. If protracted, controlled conflict becomes the norm, the international system simultaneously suffers several types of losses,” he notes to Tyzhden.
For example, it will spend more diplomatic and military resources managing simultaneous crises instead of resolving at least one of them. “Civilian populations will live in chronic danger for years instead of moving to post-war recovery, and states increasingly become accustomed to viewing low-intensity violence as acceptable, which may subtly weaken the norm against war as a policy tool, even when all involved parties describe their approach as controlling escalation,” David Siroky believes.
Ending Wars in the 21st Century: A Challenge of Diplomatic Failure or Complexity?
If wars increasingly last for years, the question naturally arises: is the problem that international diplomacy has lost the ability to end them, or have the conflicts themselves become more complex to resolve? The answer probably does not lie on just one of these poles. Modern diplomacy indeed faces the weakening of international institutions, great power rivalries, and decreasing trust in agreements. However, the nature of many wars has also changed—with more participants, external patrons, different levels of conflict, and incompatible goals.
“Diplomacy cannot artificially create an agreement when the parties believe that time is on their side, view the stakes as existential, or depend on external allies willing to support the fighting. It is sometimes said that diplomacy can be most effective when parties reach a mutually painful stalemate. In other words, neither party has a path to ‘victory,’ and both seek to end the current deadlock. Modern conflicts also tend to involve more actors, competing narratives, and fewer reliable intermediaries. Therefore, diplomacy may appear less as negotiations over a single major peace agreement and more like creating a series of limited agreements—on humanitarian access, prisoners, weapons, or territories—that gradually make a broader settlement possible,” says Week Simon Chesterman.
At the same time, structural changes play a significant role: some characteristics of modern conflicts complicate their resolution regardless of diplomatic skill, as parties often have different allies and their own reasons to endure a stalemate rather than face defeat or agreement. Moreover, armed movements fragment, so there often isn’t a single authoritative counterparty able to ensure adherence to the agreement, and modern financial and logistical networks make it easier for a weakened side to restore sufficient capacity to continue the struggle with less intensity, rather than being forced toward a decisive outcome.
“The real weakness of diplomacy lies in agreeing to measures that reduce violence but do not strengthen legitimacy or limit capabilities, and then treating these measures as if they are a final settlement. A short truce timed with a holiday or prisoner exchange, or a memorandum leaving unresolved major disputes regarding implementation, may seem like progress, yet fully preserve both conditions that lead to conflict recurrence. This is a political choice made under time pressure and domestic political constraints, not an inevitability, and it is fair to call this a diplomatic failure when a pause in hostilities is publicly described as if it were the end of the war,” notes David Siroky to Week.
Meanwhile, Dan Reiter is uncertain whether diplomacy today is necessarily more complex than in the past.
“The problem now is that the war in Ukraine and the war with Iran involve major powers, and international mediators have little leverage over major powers, as Russia demonstrated in the 2010s by effectively ignoring OSCE actions. Major powers end their wars only when they want to—like the Soviet Union, leaving Afghanistan in 1988, or the USA, ending its involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973. Therefore, I do not think contemporary conflicts have become fundamentally more difficult to resolve,” he says.
The gap between the ceasefire and the actual end of the conflict: the example of the war in Ukraine
The Ukrainian experience after 2014 shows that a ceasefire does not mean the simultaneous end of the conflict, and in the case of Russia, it is merely awaiting the next opportunity to strike with even greater force.
“A ceasefire doesn’t always create lasting political agreements. This was certainly the case in the Israeli-Arab wars and the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In the context of Ukraine, I think the most likely way to ensure a lasting truce would be for Russia to decide that continuing the conflict is too costly. This would motivate it to agree to a ceasefire, and after signing the relevant agreement, it would have no motivation to violate it,” says Den Reiter to Tyzhden.
In a global dataset analyzed by David Siroky, it is stated that after a ceasefire, conflict resumes in almost 70% of cases, compared to approximately 51% for negotiated peace agreements and government victories.
“The reason is not that a ceasefire involves compromise. Peace agreements also involve compromise, and if statistically properly separated from ceasefires, they prove to be as stable as decisive military victories. The reason ceasefires more often fail is that they generally leave unresolved the core dispute over territory, security guarantees, and political power, while leaving the military structures of both sides largely unchanged,” believes David Siroky.
He adds that a ceasefire in Ukraine without lasting political settlement—meaning without reliable security guarantees, an agreed settlement structure regarding disputed territories, and some mechanism that would limit the ability or willingness of either side to resume large-scale hostilities—could very well create conditions for a new cycle, rather than ending the war.
“This does not mean that a truce has no value. It can immediately save lives and create space for negotiations. However, politicians and the public should not confuse the reduction in the intensity of hostilities with the end of the war. These are different achievements, and my data suggests that they have very different durations,” says David Siroky.
