The Era of Private Peacemakers

A New Dialogic Approach to Mediation

Marko Lehti

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319912004
• eBook ISBN: 9783319912011
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The field of peacemaking is in turbulent change. There are more peacemaking actors than before but fewer success stories, and an increasing number of violent conflicts tend to resist negotiated agreements. Tools and practices created for traditional inter- and intra-state conflicts have become ineffective and revision of old mediation practices is called for. This book examines how the private peacemaking organisations have faced this challenge. In the 21st century, private peacemakers have become a central part of peace diplomacy and have appeared as flexible actors whose innovative thinking paves the way for reconsidering and reinventing old practices of mediation. Instead of emphasizing the act of resolution, a new emphasis is given to the transformation of violence into a peace system, the complexity of conflict and the inadequateness of rational management. Furthermore, this shift has brought civic society actors from the field of reconciliation to the field of peace mediation.This new pragmatic approach under development can be called dialogic mediation.

© The Author(s) 2019

Marko LehtiThe Era of Private PeacemakersRethinking Peace and Conflict Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91201-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Marko Lehti¹

(1)

Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

Marko Lehti

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

With wars having changed from inter-state to intra-state, and with an increasing number of refugees brought about by the many ongoing wars, there is an urgent need to work towards a better understanding of conflicts and, in particular, their possible transformation. During the past two decades, the majority of conflicts have ended in a negotiated agreement, in contrast to the Cold War years when most wars ended by military victory. However, at present an increasing number of violent conflicts escape the efforts of the international community to find a peace agreement. Even where agreement has been negotiated, peace is often fragile, and the negotiated agreement does not necessarily guarantee sustainable peace, since the threat of re-escalation of violence is often omnipresent.

During past two decades, peace mediation has widely been regarded as the most essential, effective and also cheapest tool for preventing, managing and resolving armed conflicts. In 1997, Jacob Bercovitch regarded it to be “the closest thing we have to an effective technique for dealing with conflicts in the twenty-first century” and he added a couple of years later that mediation offers “a good practical method of managing conflicts and helping to establish some sort of regional or international order.”¹ In comparison to recently highly criticized (liberal) peace-building, as well as to development and humanitarian aid sectors, peace mediation has enjoyed and preserved a particularly good reputation during the past two decades.

The term ‘mediation’ was launched into the sphere of peace diplomacy in 1948 when the United Nations appointed Swedish Folke Bernadotte as the ‘United Nations Mediator in Palestine’ and, since then, peace mediation has belonged to the toolbox of international peace diplomacy. In the mid-1990s, the world witnessed a peace mediation boom, as the number of mediation cases skyrocketed in comparison to the last decades of the Cold War. As a consequence of this new mediation-friendly environment, since the mid-1990s conflicts have increasingly ended in a negotiated agreement.² Among all civil wars, which are declining in their numbers (i.e., there has been a drop of 40% from 1991 to 2003), an impact of the growing peace mediation activity has been observed.³ Despite drastic quantitative change, there was then no equivalent qualitative change, even in the face of attempts to adjust mediation practices and guidelines in order to resolve a new kind of asymmetric conflict as pure inter-state conflicts became rare. Actual approaches to peace mediation have remained rather state-centric and are premised on rationalistic, interest-based and materially oriented approaches.

The development during the past decade holds a paradox since the amount of peace mediation actors have been steadily increasing among several new official actors, such as small states and international organizations, but although an increasing amount of nongovernmental actors have adopted peace mediation into their agenda, there has been less agreement achieved in track one peace negotiations. For example, in 2015, altogether 35 armed conflicts were reported: 13 in Africa, 12 in Asia, 6 in the Middle East, 3 in Europe and 1 in the Americas. Only four peace negotiations were concluded by signing a peace agreement: those in Central African Republic, Sudan (Darfur), Mali, and South Sudan, where violence broke out again in 2016.⁴ In the following year, negotiations in Colombia were successfully concluded with peace agreement, but Columbia has remained as one of few success stories of track one mediation during the past few years. Furthermore, while the number of armed conflicts has been on the decline since the end of the Cold War according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), 2014 saw the highest death toll of the post-Cold War period.⁵

This change has not yet received thorough scientific explanation but particular reasons can be found from the change in the nature of violent conflicts. In the era of new world disorder, the internationalization of armed conflicts is on the rise, and intrastate conflicts are more often entangled in great power rivalry and power–political interests, which further hinders the resolution of conflicts. Therefore in recent years, the space of international peace mediation has become more limited, as the power–political rationale has become dominant. It seems that liberal internationalism has been contested from several angles, and states are less willing to invest in soft forms of peace diplomacy. Syria is a good example of an intrastate conflict that has become entangled in great power struggles with the USA, Turkey, Russia, Iran and Saudi-Arabia in a complex way, with alliances and power interests in a state of dynamic change. Moreover, even if struggle over identities were characteristic to intrastate wars in the 1990s and the 2000s, for example, Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson agues that the main reason that conflicts resist a peaceful solution is that the many of the current conflicts are entangled more deeply with religious identities compared with earlier conflicts.⁶ As, for example, Syrian conflict shows, it may also be that various forms of identification are entangled with each other in a complex manner. In addition, the influencing, destabilizing and strengthening of identities have increasingly become part of the struggle and identities appear simultaneously to be very localized as well as universal, fragmented and resilient. It is evident that modern peace mediation practice has remained rather unable to tackle identity-related issues.

“Is mediation becoming ineffective” in an increasingly complex conflict landscape and “is mediation still the most effective tool with which to solve the pressing conflicts of our time” were serious questions asked among peace mediation practitioners at the Oslo Forum (2016). The recent poor track record of mediation was recognized and also partly challenged by highlighting the fact that even there “where mediation fails to settle a conflict, mediators can still secure important, lifesaving wins.” Still, a broad consensus prevailed that “conflicts have become increasingly complex, with proliferation of actors, motives and interests at multiple levels: local, regional and international.” Simultaneously, mediation practice has preserved its focus primarily on “conflict as a struggle between armed groups”; even in current messy wars “armed groups generally comprise marginalized actors who could never achieve their ambitions in a peaceful context” and who often benefit economically from fighting. Indeed, it was crudely noted that focusing on armed groups mediation “does little to address the problems of the suffering population” but since mediation still represents the best option for third party intervention, a new, more inclusive and holistic approach to mediation is called for.⁷

Executive director of the secretariat and Convener of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, Antti Pentikäinen, highlights also how peace mediation practice has resist change while simultaneously the nature of conflicts have changed:

Peace mediation and national dialogue efforts have entered a new and complex era. The situation is particularly challenging in fragile states, where aid and development tools are not enabling rapid enough progress in legitimate governance for newly developed and weak institutions. The challenge from radical groups is particularly strong in fragile states, which reflects the broader challenges in peace mediation and national dialogue. In this era, the mediation and dialogue tools that were created for traditional inter- and intra-state conflicts have become ineffective.⁸

Thus, according to many observers and peace practitioners, mediation practices have remained too much in the past. The so-far failed efforts to achieve comprehensive peace agreements in Syria and Ukraine reflect the current challenges well. In the latter case, a ceasefire agreement (Minsk 2) has been agreed upon, but it has not ended violence in Eastern Ukraine or brought a promise of sustainable peace. In the case of Syria, the Geneva- or Astana-based official negotiations have not gone anywhere and have, most of the time, been interrupted. In addition to the challenge of radicalization in fragile states pointed out by Pentikäinen, both of the above-mentioned cases include the return of an element of proxy war, which sets further challenges for peacemakers—both official and private.

As traditional peace mediation has turned out to be ineffective and powerless to bring about sustainable peace, there is a need for new practices and innovative thinking. Executive Director of the European Institute of Peace (EIP) Martin Griffiths notes that “we need to make mediation, diplomacy and conflict prevention fit for the 21st century.”⁹ Wars are more complex than ever before, and classical state-centric forms of peace mediation have proven to be inefficient in resolving current complex conflicts. Since the old definition of mediation does not allow for a broader and more flexible view of peace mediation, there is obvious call for new definition. Indeed, this has been in construction through change of practice.

According to Emery Brusset, Cedric de Coning and Bryn Hughes, the problem with the prevailing practices of peace mediation and peacebuilding in general is that the international community’s approach to conflicts has been dominated by the myth of rational management of a peace process and the possibility of linear thinking in influences of action. According to the authors, conflicts are not complicated systems like automobiles for which “linear causal logic is well suited,” but should be regarded as “highly dynamic and complex social systems” in which linear causality is inadequate.¹⁰ Thus, conflicts escape options for comprehensive resolution; instead, what is needed is an understanding that “the role of mediators in the peace process is to plant the seeds for sustainable peace” but not to define what peace should look like in each particular case.¹¹ Therefore, as de Coning writes, there is a need to envision a new kind of adaptive peacebuilding or, if applied to the frame of this study, adaptive mediation as well as a need to rethink what this would require from the third party.¹²

Beyond the rather traditional setting of peace mediation and peacebuilding dominated by states and the United Nations (UN), the signs of a revolutionary change in practices of peace are taking shape among private peacemaking actors. The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a growing field of informal peace diplomacy executed by nongovernmental organizations. These private peacemakers, however, are often entangled with official actors, since their funding is mostly dependent on states and international organizations. They are often regarded as supporting or assisting actors to the official peace process but, the same time, their involvement in peace processes are widely agreed to be indispensable. The role of private peacemakers, however, is changing, and it seems that they have become the advocates and innovators of the paradigmatic shift in peace mediation that has taken place.

Arguably, we are currently witnessing the largest change in peace mediation practice and appro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Peace Mediation Beyond Mediation
• Part II. The Crowded Field of Private Peacemaking
• Back Matter