INTRODUCTION
In all societies, irrespective of their location or level of organization, there is a need to deal with and manage conflicts. Although conflicts have many potential benefits, they can also be destructive and entail high costs for all concerned.
Hence, there is a need to manage conflicts to ensure they do not become destructive and costly. Conflicts can, of course, be managed violently, where the parties pursue their differences through violence and coercion, but we are mostly interested in non-violent ways of managing conflicts. The available methods of peaceful settlement of international conflicts are numerous and varied. They are listed in Article 33 of the United Nations (UN) Charter, which requests the “parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, inquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their choice.”The UN Charter recognizes in essence the existence of three basic methods for the peaceful management of international conflicts. These are: (a) direct negotiation among the conflicting parties; (b) various forms of mediation, good offices, and conciliation; and (c) binding methods of third-party intervention (e.g. arbitration and adjudication). Each of these methods has its own characteristics, strengths, and disadvantages, and each may be suited to different conflicts. Here, I wish to explore mediation, understand its unique features, show how it works, appreciate who can undertake mediation activities and the problems mediators typically encounter, and assess how mediation can contribute to resolving conflicts and preventing their escalation in the new international environment.
Mediation is practiced by numerous and diverse actors, ranging from individuals through states to international and nongovernmental organizations.
When successful, mediation may “soften up” the parties, promote diplomacy, and be instrumental in achieving a cessation of hostilities, a peace agreement, or a full settlement of a conflict. Notwithstanding mediation’s importance and pervasiveness, research on its characteristics and effects has suffered from compartmentalization, with little interaction between scholars from different fields, let alone scholars employing different methodologies. I hope this chapter will help bridge some of these chasms by drawing on an extensive theoretical literature, and highlighting ideas derived from large-scale, longitudinal studies. I hope to place mediation within a broader context, and to suggest “best practices” in mediation. I will do so by examining mediation in terms of three broad issues; firstly, a discussion of definitions, features and characteristics of mediation, then a discussion of mediation performance and factors that affect it, and finally, a discussion of how to evaluate mediation outcomes. These are the three most researched areas in the field of mediation, and I propose to summarize them below.
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