Introduction

When the government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) signed the Helsinki peace agreement in 2005, as many as thirty years had passed since the armed conflict in Aceh started. Likewise in Sri Lanka, the civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had been raging for more than two and a half decades when the government declared victory in 2009. The prolonging of these two conflicts is striking, and still they are merely two out of a number of civil wars that have lasted for several decades, causing widespread human suffering with numerous casualties and socio-economic losses.

As many of today's armed conflicts tend to be long lasting, they often have a noteworthy track record of peace attempts. At an international glance, efforts to reach a negotiated settlement to armed conflicts have increased in the last decades and nowadays engage a variety of both state and non-state actors (see Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall 2005; Wallensteen 2007). In Aceh, however, it was not until the beginning of the 2000s – more than two decades after the armed conflict started – that the conflict gained international attention while carrying out peace attempts. Also in Sri Lanka, the peace attempts made in the 2000s reached a new dimension of internationalization (Goodhand and Klem 2005, 88).