In Search of the Golden Formula: Trends in Peace Mediation Research and Practice

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how the research on, and the practice of, peace mediation has evolved in the past 25 years, with a particular focus on the hypothesised factors that explain mediation ‘success’ and argues for an explicit re-centring of the political in peacemaking. The analysis highlights how research on peacemaking has seen a growth of quantitative studies, while at the same time the practice field of peace mediation has been characterised by a process of professionalisation. We argue that in parallel to these two trends, there has been a shift away from focusing on exogeneous factors, such as those pertaining to the conflict context, to explain ‘success’ or ‘failure’ towards those endogenous to the peace process. A rapidly growing literature on elements of peace process design ranging from inclusivity, mediator characteristics, mediation styles, as well as the substance of negotiated agreements has both informed and been informed by developments in the practitioner community of mediation. These mutually reinforcing trends, while enriching the field, risk portraying mediation as a technical and de-politicised exercise and create inflated expectations of the role and capacity of mediators. We illustrate these trends with a discussion of the case of UN peacemaking in Yemen.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The notions of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in mediation are themselves contested; see e.g., Kleiboer (1996).

2. See also the Special Issue of Ethnopolitics ‘Revisiting the Ripeness Debate’ (2022): https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/reno20/21/2.

3. These are the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Negotiation, International Peacekeeping, Civil Wars, International Affairs, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Cooperation and Conflict and Security Dialogue. 18 articles published in Civil Wars were included in the sample. Of the 10 journals analysed, Civil Wars was the journal with the fourth most articles on mediation.

4. For the two journals - International Organization and International Negotiation - whose websites did not allow for a ‘search in abstract’ function, we searched for the terms in titles. The sample includes four review articles.

5. We also excluded articles where mediation is not the focus of analysis.

6. For the latter, we asked the code question, Does the article focus predominantly on factors endogenous or exogeneous to the mediation process as explanations for mediation outcomes?

7. The distinction between endogenous and exogeneous orientations is not always clear cut. To ensure inter-coder reliability, one researcher first coded all the articles, while indicating those that were unclear. The other researcher then blindly coded 20 per cent of the total sample across the selected journals, as well as those marked unclear. The two sets were largely in agreement, and for a few difficult cases, the coders came to an agreement after together examining the individual articles. In a few cases, constituting 8.4 per cent of the sample, the article focuses equally on endogenous and exogeneous factors. In 2.1 per cent of the cases, the focus was found to be on neither. We coded these studies as such – ‘both’ or ‘neither’ – in the Supplementary Material to the article, but exclude them in the analysis that compares the relative growths of the two bodies of research.

8. See, for example, Mitchell’s (2000) Making Peace: Northern Ireland Peace Accord; Holbrooke’s (1999) To End a War; Merikallio and Ruokanen’s (2015) The Mediator: A Biography of Martti Ahtisaari.

9. The most highly-ranked journals in the field, Journal of Peace Research and Journal of Conflict Resolution, publish predominantly research using quantitative methods, whereas for example the lower-ranked International Negotiation is more open to qualitative research and constitutes a larger part of our sample.

10. Studying the period between 1946 and 2010, Diehl et al. (2021) find that mediation has by far been the most frequent conflict management approach in international-civil militarised conflicts.

11. It is worth noting that these activities are sometimes termed ‘facilitation’, rather than ‘mediation’. While some mediators adopt formal distinctions between these activities (see e.g., https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home/foreign-policy/human-rights/peace/switzerland-s-good-offices/facilitation-and-mediation.html), in practice, these semantic choices are sometimes made in response to political sensitivities or preferences of the conflict parties.

12. We may be seeing a reversal in this trend in recent years, however, with an increase of military and security spending at the expense of donor funding for peace processes. The annual budget of UN MSU struggled to achieve its envisioned 40 million USD for 2022, with only 9.3 million being pledged as of December 2022 (https://dppa.un.org/en/funding). Regional organisations report a similar experience, with the OSCE lacking the necessary political backing and resources to expand its conflict management capacities (Lanz 2021 in Greminger et al. 2021).

13. As of December 2022. https://mediationsupportnet.ethz.ch/member-organizations/.

14. An example of the latter is the Yemen-based Sana’a Center’s offer of an in-depth course on Yemen: https://sanaacenter.org/event/the-eighth-yemen-exchange.

15. Notable exceptions to this include Verjee (2020) and Lanz (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under [Grant number 100017_197543].

Notes on contributors

Jacqui Cho

Jacqui Cho is a PhD fellow with the swisspeace Mediation Programme and a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on peace mediation, DDR, and African politics. She holds an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Cambridge and has worked with various UN bodies in East Africa and New York.

Dana M. Landau

Dana M. Landau is a senior researcher with the swisspeace Mediation Programme and lecturer at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on mediation, peacebuilding, minority rights, and nationalism, and has appeared in International Affairs, Security Dialogue, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Nationalities Papers. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations.