That is such a great question. It's probably a good dissertation topic.
I think on a very tactical level, if we think about South Sudan, the peace agreement established a ceasefire monitoring mechanism that is there and is working. It has some significant challenges in terms of the timeliness of its reports. That has not been getting faster; it has in fact been getting slower. This is less of a technical problem and more of a political problem, in terms of the regional governments and their willingness to make the reports available.
The second issue is that when those reports come, they tend to be very broad in nature: “All forces should desist from fighting.” That's as opposed to being very specific: “This number of forces should move this far from this location in a way that's verifiable.”
I think that mechanism could also be strengthened by adding in very specific monitoring around particular issues. There could be more monitoring around vulnerability of groups to recruitment, such as child soldiers. There could be more effective monitoring around gender-based violence. One mechanism is to work with what's there.
In terms of the overall transformation of that relationship, we know that's the key. We know that a healthy state-society relationship makes countries resilient to shocks, whether they're natural or conflict. We know this. We also know that a lot of governments are either unable or unwilling to make that change.
The countries we're talking about are in very difficult neighbourhoods, so the willingness of neighbouring leaders to push for a transformative change is not there.