Mediation Entry and Dynamics: Why Conflicts Attract None, One, or Many Mediators - and How They Interact
Marc Werner, 2025 - present
Efforts to end armed conflicts have recently gained a lot of public attention. States, non-governmental organizations, regional or international organizations, or prominent individuals often position themselves as mediators, seeking to help conflict parties find peaceful solutions. Mediation—which can be defined as an assisted form of negotiations by the help of a third-party—is not a new phenomenon. Following the end of the Cold War, an empirical and practice-oriented scholarship emerged to increase our knowledge on the role of mediators in ending armed conflict. Despite a wealth of knowledge, I see two aspects of mediation that remainunexplored.
The first open question is when conflicts attract mediation. Existing literature has mostly focused on the effectiveness of mediation: what kinds of mediators (e.g., neutral or biased) and what strategies (e.g., leverage versus no leverage) are most likely to lead to a peace agreement. Yet not all conflicts are equally likely to see mediation in the first place. Some conflicts attract multiple mediators, while others have none at all. Why is that? Scholarship on the onset of mediation has mostly regarded the presence of a mediator as a one-off event. From insights into the practice of mediation we know that the question of including a mediator in peace negotiations is a process in and of itself. How can we understand this process of mediation onset, especially when multiple mediators are involved? In other words, what factors can explain why some conflict succeed in including one or multiple mediators while other do not?
The second open question concerns what happens once a conflict sees the inclusion of a mediator. Conflicts rarely see just one mediator. While we commonly picture mediation processes as two conflict parties and a single mediator shaking hands over a successful agreement, mediation processes in practice involve a multitude of actors working with conflict parties. Existing literature on multiparty mediation has focused on when a coalition of mediators cooperate to increase their effectiveness. However, in recent years, multiple mediators often engage in a conflict without striving to create a single, unified process. Instead, parallel—and at times rivalling—mediation processes have emerged. Prominent cases like Syria have become textbook examples of how such processes can fail. But multiple mediators do not necessarily lead to rivalry, and nor is a unified coalition always required for successful mediation. Different kinds of mediators may engage at different times, each bringing their distinct profiles and resources to help parties resolve their conflict. Yet, we know little about how multiple mediators interact: which kinds of mediators engage, when, and to what effect? And how can their different roles complement one another?
Together, these aspects – the onset of mediation and the interaction of multiple mediators in peace processes – guide my research which I seek to leverage a mixed-methods research design.