[The word surrender.]

This is once again false; most peace deals contain no re-entry clauses.

No re-entry clauses violate sovereignty. If you've agreed to a no re-entry clause, your decision-making is restricted by it. And it affects that most sacred of sovereign powers, the right to declare war.

The tricky part is where you get alliances like Nueva Vida and Ragnarok who didn't agree to a no re-entry clause, and so their sovereignty remains intact.

So surely a defeated alliance, still at war, has also lost its sovereignty. They don't even have the power to exist in peace. They don't have that privilege. They require the permission of the victorious alliance. I use "permission" to mean that they are reliant on the victor deciding that they will deign to return that element of their sovereignty.

Peace with a "no re-entry" clause is surely far more sovereign. But then again, it's black and white? Or are we not going to discuss the EU?

[The word surrender.]

For Ragnarok, Surrender meant that we no longer had the ability to continue and thus are at the will of the victor. Admitting defeat meant you lost, which is fine with us because we know you can't win them all. There is honor in losing knowing you gave it your all, there is none in surrendering. PoW's in this game surrender, the rest just accept defeat. It was a difference worth fighting for to us.

Wars don't stop in this instance. You can accept defeat and keep fighting. I'm sure FAN will tell you what that looks like.

The cessation of hostilities occurs when the defeated alliance is presented with a way out. You "no longer had the ability to continue" and you were given the option to stop. You could not have brought that about yourself. You had no control over your affairs. You were "at the will of the victor". In a sense, they allowed you to have peace. You had no ability to win it for yourself.

@OP

You make the point about surrender being about sovereignty, yet we all know how CN works. The only time, by your definition, that an alliance has surrendered is in the cases where a Viceroy was imposed. A surrender in CN has never meant a relinquishing of sovereignty except in a very minimal number of incidents. All you have done is refuse to write "surrender" in the terms. I understand your point, but I think that you misinterpret how the word has been used in CN. Usage is the final arbiter of meaning and in CN, 'surrender' has always been used (perhaps lazily, but that makes no difference) as a synonym for an admission of defeat. All you've succeeded in doing is changing the language, not the meaning.

Rok refused to surrender because, as stated in the quote above, their is no honour in surrendering. That may be so, but to make a fuss about that on Planet Bob is to undermine the end of all previous wars. I say it again: Usage is the final arbiter of meaning. Alliances have surrendered with no damage to their honour because in CN, the word 'surrender' does not mean that they are humiliatingly disallowed their own sovereignty (again, I except the few cases of Viceroys) but instead simply that they were beaten. Rok were beaten too, just like alliances before them and alliances after them. Furthermore, this is certainly not the most honourable defeat (I mean that in a literal sense- I do not intend that to be read as a snarky way of calling them dishonourable) and to single it out for special linguistic specificity seems unnecessary. FAN surrendered. Why? Because they were beaten. Was it dishonourable? Certainly not. Does the wording of their surrender thread have anything to do with that? Not at all.

In fact, turning your own defeat into a PR stunt seems far more dishonourable and ignoble than simply accepting it.