Conflict Resolution in the Age of Disengagement

The international system is undergoing a visible transformation. For three decades after the Cold War, global governance was anchored in a liberal institutional framework: democracy promotion, multilateral peacekeeping, formal peace agreements, and externally monitored state-building. Civil war resolution was treated as a collective security priority. International engagement—whether by the United States or through the United Nations—was understood as both normatively desirable and strategically necessary.

That model is now under strain.

Multilateral peacekeeping missions have experienced a substantial pullback in personnel deployments. Today UN peacekeeping personnel is 40 percent lower than a decade ago, even as global conflict intensity remains high. As the UN’s largest peacekeeping funders, the United States (accounting for more than 26 percent of its funding) and China (accounting for nearly 24 percent), increasingly fail to honor their monetary commitments. As a consequence, the UN announced at the end of 2025 that it would reduce its peacekeeping troops and police by another 25 percent.

Major powers are also increasingly privileging sovereignty and strategic competition over democracy promotion. This realignment by major donors not only creates real budgetary consequences but also signals diminishing confidence in the role and utility of the multilateral architecture.

What Does This Mean for Conflict Resolution?

For decades, the dominant assumption in both scholarship and policy was clear: durable conflict resolution required formal peace settlements backed by credible third-party enforcement.

Research on peace agreement design and external enforcement strongly supports this view. Power-sharing provisions, demobilization frameworks, monitoring mechanisms, and third-party guarantees were understood as the institutional scaffolding necessary for lasting settlements. Resolving local conflicts was seen as strategically important and as requiring international involvement.

If major powers withdraw from deep involvement in the internal affairs of countries dealing with internal instability or conflict, and if international institutions lose credibility because member states appear divided or unwilling to uphold their commitments, then the traditional toolkit of liberal conflict resolution becomes harder to deploy. This may increase the risk of more frequent civil wars, greater instability, and a lower probability of conflict resolution. If credible commitments depend on third parties, and third parties are retreating, then stability should become rarer.

Peace Does Not Always Wear a Blue Helmet

The idea that credible commitments depend on third parties, however, is a narrower understanding of how wars end than the empirical record supports.

In fact, the majority of civil wars do not conclude with comprehensive, internationally brokered peace agreements. Many end informally: violence declines, frontlines stabilize, and armed actors persist without signing a formal settlement. These endings are often dismissed as incomplete or fragile. Yet the data tell a more complicated story. Nearly half of informal civil war terminations do not experience renewed civil war. And a third of all informal terminations endure long-term, often involving stable, albeit informal, territorial arrangement. Even where conflict eventually recurs, the intervening period of peace frequently lasts a decade or more.

These patterns challenge the assumption that formality is synonymous with stability.

Formal agreements are often treated as the gold standard because they make commitments visible and enforceable; violations can be monitored, and at least in principle, punished. But the durability of a settlement does not hinge on whether it is written down. It hinges on whether it is credible.

Stability emerges not from signed contracts alone, but from incentives that make restraint preferable to renewed war. And these incentives can exist and persist as the international system changes.

Rethinking the Liberal Toolkit

States have proven more willing to tolerate informal arrangements than policy discourse suggests. One reason is methodological rather than conceptual. Conflicts that faded out without formal agreement were often categorized by scholars as non-endings and collapsed into a residual category. They were treated as passive outcomes rather than strategic choices.

Yet many of these informal outcomes involve de facto federalism, de facto statehood short of secession, and complex domestic governance arrangements. Rules exist, even if they remain uncodified through international treaties or peace agreements. States selectively tolerate armed actors. Rebels selectively accept bounded autonomy rather than maximalist goals. Recognizing these cases as deliberate strategic bargains returns agency to the actors to arrive at deals and develop enforcement mechanisms, often without third parties.

While this does not diminish the importance of peacekeeping, mediation, or institutional design, it does suggest that formal, externally enforced agreements are not the only pathway to stability. External guarantors are not always required if the balance of power itself sustains compliance.

Not a Post-Liberal Order Anomaly

The prevalence of conflicts that end through informal coexistence is not a product of liberal decline. It is not a pathology of the present moment. It is a recurring feature of civil conflict termination across very different international eras. The character of interventions evolved substantially over time: After the Cold War, there was strong confidence in the liberal peace thesis, characterized by attempts to transform fragile states into liberal democracies. After 9/11, intervention became more securitized. The emphasis shifted from transformation to forceful reconstruction.

The current phase reflects declining faith in the transformative potential of liberal intervention, shifting the burden of intervention to global South militaries. While the nature of intervention changed across these periods, the basic strategic logic of domestic actors remains unchanged.

Peace Building Without the Paperwork

Even as key international players like the United States withdraw from international engagement and international institutions face funding and credibility issues, conflict resolution can exist outside of the liberal toolkit. These empirical patterns generate three key insights for international security in a changing international landscape.

First, conflict resolution does not require formal settlement, mediation, or external enforcement as universally as we once assumed. Self-enforcing equilibria can emerge.

Second, international disengagement does not automatically imply global chaos. And the erosion of liberal enforcement capacity does not mechanically produce universal instability.

Third, peace is just as possible—but it may look different. It may lack formal peace agreements, internationally supervised transitions, and the in-our-image post-conflict state-building, democratic reforms, and inclusion. It may instead involve more territorial autonomy without recognition, power-sharing without paperwork, and governance without formal settlement.

While liberal peacebuilding and formal conflict resolution remain normatively, and even practically superior when feasible, we must recognize that in an era of disengagement, stability does not disappear just because the liberal toolkit weakens.

Peace is not identical to institutionalization. Order can emerge from strategic restraint as well as signed accords. As the international order changes, conflict resolution isn’t disappearing—it’s adapting.

Wendy Wagner is a PhD candidate at UC San Diego, an incoming postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at UT Austin, and a former IGCC Dissertation Fellow (2024–2025).

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