The missing sense of peace: diplomatic approachment and virtualization during the COVID-19 lockdown

With the unprecedented COVID-lockdown in 2020, most peace diplomacy turned virtual. This represented a temporary loss of many of the usual practices and provided an opportunity to examine virtual diplomacy as well as all that was lost in the absence of physicality. Based on interviews with parties and mediators involved in the peace processes of Syria and Yemen, we analyse the affordances of virtual and physical meetings respectively. Particularly, virtual meetings condition peace diplomacy in terms of broadening accessibility, putting confidentiality at risk, allowing for higher frequency of meetings, often disrupting interaction, but also in some instances equalizing it. Physical meetings on the other hand allow for bodily presence, for spending extended periods of time together, for reconciliatory interaction and creating informal space. Most importantly, the transition to virtual meetings demonstrated the missing sense of peace, a notion we develop to capture the visceral dimension of physical meetings, conceptualized to include understanding, togetherness and trust. We argue that neither virtual nor physical diplomacy should be discarded and discuss strategies of how to work around the missing sense of peace in virtual diplomacy and the potential of hybrid solutions exploiting the potential of both formats.