More and more research is being done that attempts to explain the characteristics, dynamics and consequences of ceasefires. However, in general, ceasefires still remain primarily seen as a way to stop or reduce the overt use of violence and as a preliminary and provisional step in a teleology from war towards peace. Based on the text of ceasefire agreements and the military and political power disparity between signatories at the time an agreement is signed, this chapter presents a broader way of defining and categorising ceasefires. In doing this, the assumption is the mirror image of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is politics by other means. Actors in civil wars do not only use violence as a way to annihilate their opponents but also use ceasefires to influence a range of other contested areas where actors (armed and other) hope to assert their authority i.e. “peace” or ceasefires are perhaps war by other means too.

The different dynamics created by ceasefires discussed throughout this book challenge many of the basic, frequently unstated assumptions about how ceasefires are used as part of a particular political process that supposedly moves violence towards peace. This book argued that ceasefires are often not the humanitarian, purely positive or beneficial tools they have long been considered to be. In many cases, ceasefires are not simply a “cease fire’ but rather interject into complex contestations for control of the state. As such, this final chapter presents actionable recommendations for practitioners about how ceasefires interject into much broader and more complex processes. Ceasefires are not only used as military tools to stop violence but political tools actors in civil wars use for their own statebuilding ends. These ends are invariably much broader than winning or losing militarily and need to be considered when making decisions relating to, for example, mediation, foreign aid, humanitarian access, development, reconstruction, migration and refugee intakes.

The founding father of the laws of armed conflict, Hugo Grotius assumed a ceasefire to be a temporary state of affairs that did not alter the legal state of war. He wrote that if hostilities resumed after a ceasefire is declared, there is no need for a new declaration of war to be made since the legal state of war is ‘not dead but sleeping’. While the official legal state of war may be sleeping’, Grotius’ metaphor perhaps does not imply that nothing happens. Even during sleep, much can and does occur that we are temporarily unaware of. However, ceasefires continue to be largely considered in relation to how to better bring warring parties to the negotiating table, hostilities to a halt and/or their influence on peace processes. The argument advanced in this book is that ceasefires in fact rarely only ‘cease fire’. Consequently, the book offers a more nuanced examination of two core questions: what ceasefires actually are and what areas they affect.

This chapter shows how the 2016 Cessation of Hostilities affected both military dynamics and local governance in Syrias southern Daraa governorate. Contrary to findings from the rebel governance field that tend to amplify the role armed actors play in the development of local governance structures, this chapter finds that there are a range of networked systems and actors involved in providing governance in southern Syria that were influenced in various ways by the 2016 ceasefire. While the armed groups in Daraa certainly played a large role in security provision, their influence was circumscribed by the region’s tribal leaders. Additionally, during the ceasefire, the Syrian regime reallocated its military resources away from the south, fighting between more moderate armed groups, extremist groups and specific targeting by the Syrian regime of local civic and rebel leaders increased; power dynamics between the four main local governance actors were recalibrated; and, this realignment shifted the ability of certain actors to provide humanitarian assistance, giving the people of Daraa a significant say in their own governance.

This chapter broadens our understanding around how macro and micro levels of conflict come together in the form of ceasefire agreements. It shows how the 2017 Memorandum on the creation of de-escalation areas in the Syrian Arab Republic, negotiated and agreed to by Russia, Turkey and Iran, not only relates to military dynamics but how this agreement influenced elements normally considered the sole purview of the sovereign state such as diplomacy, security and territorial control.

This chapter uses the literature on political order to take a rather radical approach to local ceasefires in Syria. By conventional definitions of a ceasefire, local ceasefires would be considered highly successful in that they completely stopped violence. However, this narrow view overlooks the broader picture in that it was the Syrian regime that created the violent conditions that preceded these local ceasefire deals in the first place. The only way out for these communities was through agreeing to the ceasefire’s terms. The specific terms of the agreements were then used to reassert the states sovereignty over citizenship and property rights. Consequently, hiding behind their supposedly successful mask, these local ceasefire deals in Syria spurned some of the more overt violence of the war and have been structurally violent in terms of their ability to re-allocate rights to property and citizenship.

Despite the longevity and the relative simplicity of the concept of a ceasefire, there has been little agreement, and much confusion, around their nomenclature. This chapter is primarily devoted to better understanding and interrogating these definitions. It moves away from the conventional view of ceasefires that focusses primarily on their success at reducing violence and battle related deaths or their ability to lead to a peace agreement, and instead traces the genealogy of the literature on conflict resolution and the state to the scholarship on the construction of order beyond the state to argue that ceasefires should not only be considered military tools but types of wartime order that have statebuilding implications.

This chapter offers context to the primary case study of this book – the Syrian civil war. It does this by elaborating more fully on two broader topics – on the one hand, a historical overview of the Syrian regime and the onset of the revolution; and on the other hand, a summary of the major ceasefires used during the civil war. These two subjects are of course inexorably interconnected. By providing an overview of some of the important aspects of Syria’s recent political and social history, we gain a better understanding and appreciation of two themes of relevance for this book: firstly, the nature of the Syrian state, in particular the structure and essence of the Assad regime; and secondly, the ramifications of this for how ceasefires have played out during the Syrian civil war.