Why agreements fail when societies are not emotionally prepared to live inside them.

Peace agreements describe what leaders sign. Peace preparation describes what people must be ready to live.

The first is negotiated in conference rooms. The second is built in homes, schools, mosques, synagogues, refugee camps, WhatsApp groups, and local town halls.

In a recent essay, I argued that peace agreements often fail because we ask them to do emotional work they cannot do. They redraw maps and redesign institutions, but they do not empty the overflowing “emotional jugs” people bring into every round of conflict and every “historic” ceremony.

If agreements cannot do that work, what can?

What would a genuine peace preparation process look like—not as a slogan, but as concrete tasks and responsibilities?

This is an attempt to answer that question.

Negotiation is not preparation

When leaders talk about “preparing the ground for peace,” they usually mean preparing the political ground: lining up coalition partners, managing expectations, weakening spoilers, and building international support.

All of that matters. None of it is enough.

Negotiations focus on borders, security arrangements, refugees, settlements, prisoners, economic corridors, reconstruction funds, verification, and enforcement.

Peace preparation faces different questions:

What are people most afraid of losing if peace comes?

What are people most afraid of losing if peace comes?

Which stories about “us” and “them” will feel threatened by compromise?

Which stories about “us” and “them” will feel threatened by compromise?

How much unresolved fear, grief, humiliation, and trauma are the societies being asked to carry into this agreement?

How much unresolved fear, grief, humiliation, and trauma are the societies being asked to carry into this agreement?

Research on post‑conflict societies suggests that political settlements alone rarely create durable reconciliation. Studies of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Colombia, and South Africa indicate that reductions in intergroup threat perception, trauma transmission, and social dehumanization are often as important to long‑term stability as constitutional or security arrangements. Left to themselves, societies often process trauma through political polarization, collective blame, and hardened narratives. Peace preparation attempts to create healthier pathways before those patterns become entrenched.

Until these questions and these emotional dynamics are treated as seriously as ceasefire lines and demilitarized zones, peace agreements will keep being asked to carry more than they can bear.

Three tracks of peace preparation

Peace preparation is not a single program or conference. It is a set of parallel tracks that can run before, during, and after negotiations.

Think of three of them.

Track 1: Healing and emotional safety

The first track is about grief, trauma, and the human nervous system. It asks:

How do we help people who have lived with rockets, raids, sirens, tunnels, and terror feel safe enough to imagine any future at all?

How do we help people who have lived with rockets, raids, sirens, tunnels, and terror feel safe enough to imagine any future at all?

Where can rage and sorrow be voiced before they are recruited as political fuel?

Where can rage and sorrow be voiced before they are recruited as political fuel?

In PAIRS, we teach the Emotional Jug: the idea that each person carries an invisible container filled with fear, humiliation, rage, shame, and loss. When the jug is never safely emptied, it eventually overflows, and people respond to present events through the full weight of their history.

Communities do this too.

A peace preparation process would include:

Community‑level spaces for grief and listening Mixed and separate groups where people can talk about what they have lost—children, homes, limbs, years—without being told to “move on” for the sake of the process.

Community‑level spaces for grief and listening Mixed and separate groups where people can talk........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)