Conflict resolution is the founding promise of peace and conflict studies. It assumes that a conflict can be brought to an end so that the issues that caused it no longer exist. In this article, I argue that this promise is an illusion. My central claim is that no conflict has been terminally resolved. What peace agreements, court judgments, amnesty and military victories achieve is the end of an episode, not the end of the conflict. The incompatibility that produced the conflict survives in a changed form: as latent grievance, as collective memory, as structural inequality, or as a new organisation pursuing an old cause. I support this claim through qualitative documentary analysis of global and Nigerian cases, along with over a decade of my published arguments and lectures. The global cases are the Korean peninsula, Cyprus, Israel–Palestine, Northern Ireland, Sudan and South Sudan, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia–Ukraine. The Nigerian cases include the Biafra question, the Jos–Plateau crisis, electoral violence, the Niger Delta, the Boko Haram insurgency, and the Bakassi Peninsula. In every case, a declared end was followed by recurrence, relapse, or a transformed struggle over the same underlying issues. Drawing on social conflict theory, Galtung’s peace theory and Lederach’s conflict transformation framework, I present a resolution illusion cycle and a Conflict Continuity Management Matrix. I conclude that peace practice should abandon the language of final settlement and adopt continuous management and transformation of conflict, supported by long-term funding, early conflict warning and response systems, and inclusive local institutions. For Africa, this means designing peace architecture for permanent engagement rather than for exit.