WHO SHOULD MEDIATE INTRACTABLE CONFLICTS?

To ask who should mediate implies that there is a long line of potential candidates that are capable of stepping into the role and willing to do so. Historically, it has been more often the case that conflicts were allowed to burn on without outside interference as long as they did not destabilize large regions or threaten the interests of major powers.

The 2005 Human Security Report, working from data derived from the UN Department of Political Affairs (DPA), notes that UN preven­tive diplomacy initiatives rose from one to six between 1990 and 2002, while UN mediation, facilitation, and good offices efforts rose from four to 15 over the same period (Mack 2005, p. 153). Fifteen years ago, it was rare for a non-official organization to become involved in mediation; today, there are many examples of NGOs playing principal roles in preparing for or assisting talks: the Carter Center in the 1999 agreement between Uganda and Sudan, the Community of Sant’Egidio in the Mozambique settlement, the Henri Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Conflict Management Initiative in Aceh. At the same time, powerful states have been active in mediating protracted conflicts, as the USA has done in the Middle East and smaller states—Norway in Sri Lanka, for instance—have entered into the field as well.

The involvement of different kinds of institutions—states, international organiza­tions, NGOs—in peacemaking in intractable conflicts raises the question of whether one set of institutions is best suited for mediating in long-term conflict. In other words, in situations where the parties are thoroughly entrenched in their positions, can only the most powerful actors, using their sticks and carrots, move the parties to negotiation? Or is reaching peace in these circumstances a result of moral authority of the international community, available only through the UN, African Union, and other intergovernmental organizations? Or are individual peacemakers and respected non-official organizations the best suited to making peace in intractable conflicts?

In comparing the activities of organizations that could mediate intractable conflicts, a distinction that is often made is in their ability, or lack thereof, to employ the tools of power in mediation to persuade parties to a conflict to talk rather than fight. In this regard, governments, especially large governments, have quite a lot of power, international organizations have less, and the general perception is that non-official organizations have next to none. However, in trying to address multilayered intractable conflicts, the response may also need to be multilayered. Official organizations, such as the UN or a powerful state, can offer incentives and disincentives—like aid, trade, threats of sanctions or military action—to make the parties to the conflict more amenable to negotiation. However, there are also contributions that non-official organizations can make to bolster the official process, especially by building support for peace in the larger community.

The level of violence may dictate when one set of institutions is more appropriate than others. When violence is low, parties may be open to interventions by a wide range of mediators. At this stage, one of the main challenges is to establish direct communica­tion between the parties.

When the threat of violence is high or increasing, mediators’ leverage is limited because the parties continue to believe that they can gain more from continued fighting than they can through negotiation. Intractable conflicts are often caught at this stage, and mediators who exercise reward and coercive power will likely have to be brought into the formal negotiating process—exercising what is sometimes called “mediation with muscle.” Absent of these externally induced incentives, parties will have little incentive to stay at the table and may, in fact, be willing to escalate the conflict in the hope of achieving their objectives.

Generally, these mediators with muscles are powerful states, and are engaged in mediation in pursuit of a national or foreign policy interest. The result is often a bias toward one of the conflict parties, which introduces a set of complications into the mediator-conflict party equation. The “bias-sometimes-helps” thesis is an important and widely understood ele­ment in the international mediation literature (Touval & Zartman 2007). But the proposition rests on the core assumption that bias helps only if the third party enjoys some freedom of maneuver during the actual negotiation process.

This raises the interesting if rather sensitive subject of the suitability of large, unruly, open democratic systems to play a primary mediating role in places where there are diaspora or political linkages that outweigh the need for a balanced effort to mediate in the national interest. It is also true that in other intractable conflict cases—for instance, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Sudan— serving administrations have been very con­scious of the impact of their intermediary efforts on relations with particular domestic constituencies. The presence or absence of such domestic pressures may also help to explain why countries—Norway, for example—that do not have large immi­grant populations or diaspora communities sometimes may enjoy certain comparative advantages in playing intermediary roles, especially when less intrusive kinds of bargaining strategies are warranted.

Determining who should mediate depends on many factors, including the parties' pref­erence, availability of appropriate candidates, the willingness of the mediator's home institution or the international community to support the effort. It is important to recognize that poor or weak tradecraft by third-party interveners has the potential to exacerbate the problem and further deepen an intractable conflict. To the extent that some intractable conflicts are not of high priority for some mediators (and the countries they represent), a tepid or halfhearted negotiated intervention may be only marginally better than none.

Prolonged conflicts need mediation by a set of skilled mediators from diverse institutions working in concert. They may also require a multiple track mediation strategy that is directed at both elites and various factions and groups within civil society, that is, a series of simultaneous mediated interventions by gov­ernmental and non-governmental mediators that engage different groups in the conflict (UN 2008). A prolonged conflict is unlikely to be fully settled unless the wider public is brought along; when this is ignored, the leaders and mediators run the risk of losing popular support for the process.

It is important to recognize that a compet­itive dimension has emerged as the field of mediation has developed. The problem of how to reap the benefits of composite, layered, or sequenced peacemaking while, at the same time, to avoid the negative side effects of “multiparty mediation” is a serious one.