This passionately argued book is an important contribution to policy debates on how ceasefires alter the course of civil wars. It also lays out an agenda to extend the microlevel research program on violence to conflict termination and postconflict situations. Drawing her primary empirical material from the civil war that followed the 2011 Syrian uprising, Marika Sosnowski argues that ceasefires may stop active fighting but hardly pause, much less end, the struggle among involved parties to gain control of resources and construct political order. Many policy makers view ceasefires as an unalloyed good that facilitates formal negotiations; however, incumbent state actors, rebels, and their international allies can use ceasefires strategically in ways that strengthen their positions but undermine formal settlements—in effect, using ostensibly neutral, well-meaning international institutions in service of their particular aims. To explicate these mechanisms, Sosnowski borrows the concept of “wartime order” from the rebel governance literature: whereas extant work on ceasefires takes the simple presence or absence of active fighting as the measure of ceasefires’ success, the wartime order lens brings into view patterns of political domination at the local level, allowing scholars to see how governance varies over time and space within a single conflict.
Redefining Ceasefires: Wartime Order and Statebuilding in Syria convincingly shows that policy makers designing ceasefires must take account of their effects at the ground level, not just at the negotiating table, and that doing so requires deep knowledge of the affected actors and localities. This is especially the case when conflict prevention organizations reassess the “formulaic approach to ceasefires” (165) that privileges formal procedures at the cost of investigating local, informal struggles that have enormous consequences for both civilians and the course of the conflict itself. This point may seem obvious in view of the total failure of ceasefires in Syria that Sosnowski details. Indeed, it raises questions about the extent to which policy makers are genuinely ignorant of local machinations enabled by ceasefires versus being resigned to using the only tool available to them. Having worked as a practitioner in a conflict prevention organization, I fully appreciate how “stopping the shooting” to get parties to talk remains a lodestar, even among analysts sufficiently immersed in the local details to foresee some ceasefires’ detrimental effects. Sosnowski puts this nagging feeling front and center for policy makers, and I share the hope that it will filter into how they design and enforce ceasefires.
Another virtue of the book is that, even though it is structured around the Syrian case, it draws out generalizable insights and proposes hypotheses that can be evaluated in other contexts. One chapter provides a thorough review of legal and social-scientific treatments of ceasefires generally and then places them in the theoretical context of both the microlevel turn in civil war scholarship and anthropological and policy approaches to the same topics. Another chapter develops a typology of ceasefires, drawing on specific incidents in the Syrian case supplemented by an impressive range of global cases. The detailed study of Syria is divided into a chapter on prewar patterns of governance and three thematically focused chapters on how ceasefires affect rebel governance, citizenship and property, and state sovereignty and the actions of foreign states, respectively.
The book’s main theoretical move—its focus on the local effects of ceasefires—opens to scholarly inquiry dynamics that have been previously overlooked but play a critical role in the wartime and postwar construction of political order: these dynamics include continuities with prewar forms of local governance and what parties actually do on the ground while their leaders sit at the negotiating table. To do this, Sosnowski weaves together theoretical and empirical insights from political scientists, anthropologists, and applied conflict research specialists. More than simply applying theory from an adjacent field, Redefining Ceasefires provides a synthesis, incorporating political scientists’ broad view of the set of actors actually constructing political order and anthropologists’ emphasis on links between violent actors and local populations (p. 27). This synthetic approach, although demanding in terms of the fine-grained data and local insight required to execute it, stands to massively improve scholarly understanding of how ceasefires affect wartime governance.
Any work setting as broad an agenda as the present one is bound to leave some questions unanswered. One that sticks out to me is the causal role of ceasefires. Throughout the book, Sosnowski describes ceasefires as having an effect on governance on the ground, characterizing them at one point as “the manufacturing and imposition of an embryonic type of wartime order on complex political systems” (p. 138). And although the book’s focused comparisons examine local case studies before and after ceasefires, they do not explicitly use the standard tools of qualitative analysis, like counterfactuals or causal process tracing, to substantiate that causal role. One wonders whether the shifts in patterns of governance like the increased role for local notables (chapter 5) are the results of ceasefire implementation or simply of other wartime dynamics, such as battlefield victories or increased foreign support for one side. Discussion of some “near-miss” cases—situations similar to those where ceasefires occurred that for some reason did not see a formal agreement—might have provided clarity. For example, the section on the 2015 al-Waʿr ceasefire could have been paired with an incident featuring a similar military configuration elsewhere in Syria in which there was no agreement, thereby showing the causal work done by the hypothesized mechanisms, legal legitimacy and the presence of UN staff (86).
I also wonder how specific the findings are to the international context in which the Syrian conflict unfolds. The book ably describes the role of foreign states in advancing and undermining specific ceasefires within the Syrian case, but it does not explicitly theorize the role of international players. More generally, how does a multipolar world order or the geostrategic importance of the country undergoing conflict play into local wartime orders? The Syrian case offers a particularly bleak picture of ceasefires in part because the incumbent and rebels alike had a menu of foreign patrons from which to choose (and play off against one another). But cases of international mediation in the 1990s held up as successes, such as Bosnia and Northern Ireland, were subject to less competition by foreign patrons—and took place in the post–Cold War, unipolar moment. Although hardly contemporary paragons of stability and inclusion, these latter polities have been spared the depth of destruction and prolonged suffering seen in Syria and other contemporary conflicts like the one in Yemen. International actors and configurations could theoretically be integrated into the book’s variable capturing the balance of power between incumbent authorities and rebels, but this variable would have to account for switching among patrons, as well as the thorny cases where the foreign patron acts independently of, and not necessarily in the interest of, the incumbent authority (e.g., the 2017 de-escalation zones agreement to which the Syrian regime was not a formal signatory [144]).
These questions are a testament to the innovative nature of the book’s approach to ceasefires. It effectively captures the dynamics that have prolonged the suffering of Syrians, often in the name of ending it, and lays out a program for future inquiry into the dynamics of wartime order generated through the use and abuse of ceasefires. In a geopolitical context characterized by competition among multiple world powers, the analytical lens and tools proposed in Redefining Ceasefires will be a vital guide for scholars and policy makers alike.
