Key Findings
- Since March 2020, conflict parties have declared 25 ceasefires, across 17 countries. Ceasefires have been declared by some conflict parties in Afghanistan, Angola, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Libya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Philippines, Syria, South Sudan, Sudan, Thailand, Ukraine and Yemen.
- After an initial period of ceasefires declared following the United Nations Secretary General’s call for a global ceasefire in March 2020, conflict and peace processes are increasingly returning to ‘normal’, as any Covid-19 concerns become part of the totality of context, rather than a new external shock. The initial scarcity of information about the course of the pandemic and the nature of the virus is being replaced by actors’ increased ability to take the pandemic into account.
- Most of the ceasefires declared since the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, have been unilateral declarations of ceasefire, in conflicts where buy-in from a wide range ofactors would be necessary to tangibly reduce violence. Only 6 of the 25 ceasefires were multi-lateral or bi-lateral, and many ceasefire declarations were limited in terms of territorial and/or temporal scope. There has been a prevalence of tentative ceasefire declarations explicitly conditional on other conflict parties not using the Covid-19 crisis to advance military or political goals.
- Despite often being reported as ‘humanitarian ceasefires’ or ‘Covid-19 ceasefires’, only approximately half of the ceasefires declared since the start of the pandemic have included references to Covid-19 or acknowledgements of humanitarian need, and even fewer have contained clear mechanisms for supporting humanitarian actors in tackling the pandemic.