Getting peace right: Why justice needs to be baked into ceasefire agreements – including Ukraine’s |
Efforts to end the war in Ukraine have grabbed global attention, fueled by debates over U.S. President Donald Trump’s 28-point plan – which many analysts see as favoring Russia – and European attempts to craft a counterproposal.
We’ve been here before. Failed attempts to end the conflict date back to the beginning, soon after Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, peace discussions started up again within days, and they have continued in fits and starts since.
Prospects for a lasting peace remain dubious. One reason, I believe, is that the proposals pay little attention to the relationship between peace and justice – a flaw shared by previous plans.
Is peace worth having if it’s unjust? Is justice worth pursuing if it prolongs war? Those are questions as troubling as they are old. “Peace is the effect of justice,” as St. Thomas Aquinas argued in the 13th century. Ceasefires built on coercion or exhaustion inevitably fail because they do not resolve the conflict’s causes.
Aquinas is a major figure in the just war tradition, the focus of my research. This area of ethics helps weigh when war is justified – and also how it should end.
Today, the insight that peace and justice are inseparable grounds what international law terms “transitional justice.” By focusing on victims and assuring accountability for past wrongs, this approach seeks to disrupt recurring cycles of violence.
Past agreements and proposals aimed at ending the conflict in Ukraine failed because in the rush to stop the fighting, they ignored questions of justice. The literature on transitional justice, by contrast, encourages negotiators to attend to four interdependent principles: truth, justice, reparations and safeguards against future recurrence.
Truth is essential for peace. As St. Augustine, one of the earliest Christian just-war thinkers, put it in the fourth century, “false justice” arises when the pursuit of truth is abandoned.
Durable peace agreements require all sides to cooperate with international efforts........