Since the Cold War, peace processes have focused on reaching accords among the main conflict parties. These operated partly as contracts between the parties, partly as road maps for social change, and partly as pre-constitutional agreements that would lay the foundation for turning an elite political-military bargain into a social contract. As many articles in this volume document, UN, regional and private mediation evolved a surrounding architecture of support in the form of new peacemaking structures and organisations, and new process-oriented legal standards and guidelines, such as those on women, peace and security. The professionalisation of peace mediation as a practice in a sense built-in innovation as a practice of continually learning lessons to better address future processes.
This practice is now under pressure due to the increasing fragmentation of both intrastate conflict and geopolitical mechanisms to resolve it. Rather than ‘a conflict’ to be resolved, violent conflict in many contexts increasingly operates as an intertwined set of local, national, transnational and geopolitical conflicts that together form a complex and adaptive conflict system. Geopolitical shifts mean that many more states are now intervening in conflicts as professed third party mediators, but often with very different conceptions of mediation and of the peace it is to achieve. Peace process models premised on using mediation to achieve a ‘national peace accord’ often find the project impossible, even as the expectations for the quality of mediation process, and for the nature of the peace it should deliver, have greatly increased.
This article focuses on mediation adaptation arising in reaction to fragmentation, and in particular, on what I term ‘multimediation’, that is: a collection of mediation and dialogue innovations, taking place through ad hoc initiatives across contexts and organisations. The article speculates whether multimediation might be developed into a form of more deliberate collective and systemic innovation in situations where a holistic peace process is not possible. Could multimediation offer a principled but pragmatic response to conflict fragmentation by mounting multiple processes to unwind aspects of the conflict? I explore the possibilities of weaving better strategy around multimediation in places where peace and transition processes are literally and figuratively inconceivable.
Fragmentation: a driver of mediation adaptation
In recent times, peace and transition processes imperfectly map onto the fragmented nature of conflict and geopolitics in the most complex and protracted settings. There are several inter-related reasons.
Conflict has become more fragmented within countries. Conflict in many settings now often involves multiple armed actors rather than a state and a ‘big armed opposition’ group with satellites around. Conflict fragmentation sees armed groups coming together in agreements of alliance, and falling apart again, or splitting and further fragmenting, in ways that impact local-national conflict dynamics. The lines between official state forces and paramilitary alliances, political conflict, economic interests, and organised crime, are increasingly blurred. As a result, constructing a national peace process that can provide for holistic resolution of what are really an inter-related set of local, national, transnational and geopolitical conflicts, is almost impossible, as efforts in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Yemen, have illustrated.
International mediation interventions are also fragmented, multiple and competitive. New geopolitical dynamics see many more third-party states intervene not just as conflict actors – as they always have – but as putative ‘mediators’ of conflict termination. Diverse and competing mediation initiatives relate to underlying proxy wars and often have conflict end-goals in view. Local armed actors draw on transnational and geopolitical alliances, giving international backers new ways to turn conflict on and off even while ostensibly engaged in peace initiatives. National actors, for their part, can ‘mediator shop’ as a form of conflict-continuance. Local, national and international conflict actors are able to change partners and allies quickly – when conflict is resolved at one level, those dissatisfied with the outcome can quickly jump levels to undermine any peace agreed. This situation defies traditional peace process design. It also creates a ‘peace-in-conflict’ dynamic, whereby assertion of mediation is often a tool to ally with one side of the conflict to stabilise it, rather than an attempt to deliver social peace at the national level, as multiple Russian-negotiated localised agreements in Syria illustrate.
None of these factors are in-and-of themselves ‘new’. However, something quite new is going on in how they are unfolding together. The degree of conflict fragmentation within countries experiencing the most protracted and large-scale conflict involves the very fast fracturing, splintering, coming together and falling apart of armed actors. Massive ‘conflict reversals’ can be created almost overnight, as recent conflict in Sudan illustrates. Elsewhere, as in Libya, there are multiple ‘capital cities’, rival governments, and no authority or group with the capacity for national effective control. Geopolitical alliances are also in a particular moment of flux. Here, what is new is the way in which mediation itself is increasingly seen as an important strategic move for a state concerned to project its ambitions on a world stage. This leads to an exponentially multiplying number of putative mediation initiatives by a wide diversity of actors, as the following section of this volume discusses.
These dynamics are affecting mediation practices through a number of interconnected ‘whammies’. First, even our ability to hold onto mediation as a peacemaking practice is changing. Mediation by a range of states who focus on stabilisation can play a role in de-escalating conflict but sometimes does so by shoring up autocratic actors, rather than seeking compromise that might also address civilian needs and justice claims. Second, the always-fragile international consensus that international law governs peacemaking and can be extended to promote values such as inclusion in peace processes is breaking down. The mediation space is being used not just to influence conflict outcomes, but as a place to project visions of the global order that are not fully aligned with international legal standards. Finally, the consequences of this shape-shifting geopolitical world are undermining not just liberal peacemaking practices, but liberal practices in liberal states themselves. Conflict-driven migration flows, for example, are being used by Western states to justify moves away from human rights and other international legal standards.
Multimediation
Fragmented geopolitical and national contexts have produced mediation adaptation, both at the level of individuals and organisations. I call the resulting phenomenon ‘multimediation’, defined as follows:
Multimediation is the accidental and deliberate use of multiple overlapping mediation processes directed towards the discrete problems and actors that make up a complex conflict system, with a view to unwinding key elements of that system, but with an uncertain final destination point in terms of ‘peace’.
Multimediation has evolved through discrete overlapping mediation innovations – not all from the peacemaking community – that respond to conflict fragmentation with different task-focused mediation initiatives. Some examples illustrate.
Localised disaggregated mediation
International mediators are now more likely to be engaged in local mediation than they were, in part because they operate in contexts where an overarching process is not possible, but also because they recognise local conflicts as part of the wider conflict dynamic. The United Nations, for example, has supported local mediation processes, as in Central African Republic or South Sudan, alongside wider attempts to produce national transitional constitutional frameworks and constitutions. Donors now regularly support mediation efforts in localised conflicts, and increasingly both regional organisations and private mediator groups support localised mediation to de-escalate emergent nation-wide conflict, before it is established, or after a peace process when conflict threatens to re-ignite.
Disaggregated ‘mediation constellations’
Mediation innovation sees new ‘mediation constellations’ (see Hugo Slim's article) established in the form of issue-specific forums of international organisations, conflict actors, and sometimes technocrats coming together to de-escalate or unwind dimensions of a fragmented conflict. States engage sometimes because key issues need urgently addressing to avoid catastrophe, and sometimes in the hope of building towards a process that might bring discrete efforts into one mediation frame. These constellations operate both in intra-state and international conflict. In Sudan, for example, prior to the outbreak of conflict in April 2023, different processes and agreements addressed the military-civilian opposition negotiation over a transitional central government and the armed group negotiations at the periphery, with attempts to connect the processes over time. In Ukraine, mediation constellations emerged around humanitarian corridor negotiations at the start of the war; to agree a deal to get grain out of the country; and to ensure that fighting around nuclear power plants does not cause nuclear catastrophe.
One-sided pre-process mediation
Multi-mediation is also generated by ‘intra-party mediation’ between actors that are understood to comprise ‘one side’ of the conflict in any loose binary description. These actors may have an enemy in common, but have quite different visions of the state they are trying to achieve as an alternative and thus may find it difficult to mount a common negotiating platform without prior inter-group dialogue and agreement. In Myanmar, for example, the civilian opposition to the February 2021 coup and ethnic armed organisations and other civic actors found themselves self-mediating with forms of international support to create a National Unity Government and a common possible federal vision of the country. In Yemen, a Saudi-created ‘Presidential Leadership Council’ (PLC) brings together many diverse non-Houthi political and military interests in anticipation of a speculative future peace process. Yet, the PLC has no shared vision for the country. Processes of internal brokering or mediation relating to PLC and the Southern Transitional Council (STC) and allies, and indeed between the PLC and the ST C, all sit against a backdrop of a Saudi Arabia and Houthi negotiation that itself is only dealing with one dimension of the conflict system, albeit a key one.
Globalised peace-conflict multimediation
Multimediation is also produced by the new competitive and overlayered global mediation-dynamic described elsewhere in this volume. International organisations, regional groupings of states, individual states, and private mediators of different hues all are engaged in conflict resolution but sometimes with different goals. Their positions may change as they mediate with, or in parallel to, each other. For example Saudi Arabia-Iran negotiations shifted several mediation dynamics in the region until the outbreak of the Hamas-Israel conflict, which is likely to shift regional dynamics again, in unpredictable ways. In Sudan, an ever-growing plethora of initiatives have been launched to try to address the 2023 conflict. Normative mediators such as the United Nations can face difficult decisions as to when and how to try to stay involved with deal-making efforts. In Syria, for example, the Russia-Türkiye-Iran Astana talks started to displace the UN’s mediation primacy and gradually normalised the three states’ military presence on the ground.
Multimediation speculative futures
What should we make of multimediation as an emergent reality, and is it possible to mould it into a more coherent and strategic response to conflict fragmentation?
Perhaps. Multimediation itself is not completely new – it has evolved successfully in many contexts. Local civic actors are nearly always involved in a broad range of conflict de-escalation efforts. Dig beneath the surface of relatively successful formal processes in Nepal, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, and multiple civic mediation initiatives can be understood to have put in place an agenda for change that the formal peace process found it useful to rely on. As the formal peace process emerged and unfolded, these efforts spiralled out and connected over time to touch nearly every constituency and sector. A vital untold part of the story of mediation ‘success’, these sectoral mediation spirals helped the central peace mediation break log jams and overcome obstacles to implementation.
Multimediation can therefore perhaps be thought of as a useful ‘whole-of-conflict’ strategy for a complex conflict system. Such an approach does not negate a need for a ‘big’ peace process at some point, but perhaps puts the big process in its place as only addressing one part of the conflict system, while other processes are needed for other parts of it.
Multimediation as alternative ‘non-process process’?
At present, eclectic mediation responses to fragmentation dynamics are not understood as an alternative to the peace process. Although often supported by the mediation community, discrete initiatives tend to be seen as ‘doing one’s best’ while waiting for a proper peace process to appear. At the local level, for example, those engaged in multiple armed actor negotiations worry about how to justify to funders whether their mediation efforts might ever ‘scale up or connect out’, to a national process.
However, if no successful holistic peace process is possible in deeply fragmented contexts can multimediation be envisaged, less as ‘doing something when a peace process is not possible’, and more as a form of fragmented process for fragmented conflict?
Could the deeper systemic innovation of multimediation be its capacity to unwind complex conflict systems where a traditional peace process appears not to fit? Some modest ways of attempting to weave strategy around multimediation efforts seem worth a try.
First, at the national level it would be possible to develop better mapping and exchange of information on mediation and peace efforts in ways that do not destroy them (recognising the need for discretion around some initiatives). International country teams expend tremendous resources on ‘conflict analysis’, but much less on ‘dialogue process’ analysis. Meanwhile, external funders support overlapping and sometimes competing initiatives. Could the mediation field and its funders not do better to map dialogue processes, and connect this to some shared ‘conflict unwinding’ analysis? There are some examples of attempts to cohere initiatives: ‘track two’ forums that bring private and NGO mediation initiatives together (on Afghanistan and currently on Yemen); or in-country multi-donor trust funds that have tried to incubate ways of connecting conflict analysis to local peace intervention projects (South Sudan); and annual meetings of mediation donors and NGOs. But these efforts are not consistent and do not always deliver a coordinated approach to mediation efforts.
Second, at the global level, there is a need for innovation in how to mediate between the mediators. International organisations and countries who support peacemaking often face difficult questions of which initiative to support, or how to engage with the outcomes of a mediation that seem designed to support a military status quo or even victory. It is hard to see the world becoming more peaceful without a long, hard slog to re-centre international legal order and cooperation as the only hope for humanity. In the short term, however, thinking about how very different types of mediator could at least be corralled into some joint forums of information exchange or even dialogue, would be useful, but faces the issue of who would do it. As the AU’s attempts to cohere efforts to address the 2023 conflict in Sudan through an ‘Expanded Mechanism’, described by Barney Afako, illustrate, in contexts of extreme fragmentation of the mediators the challenges are considerable.
Third, alongside these process innovations, we may also need substance innovation. Mediation efforts have always been premised on agreements producing an institutional blueprint for government at the national and sub-national level, within the state’s boundaries. Should we now think more creatively about state structures as loose coordinating mechanisms for disparate groups with disparate national aspirations and geographies of control, rather than the national architecture to which all international financial support and legitimacy flows? Could we find more novel ways to fund coherent pockets of democratisation or ‘civicness’ and self-government, without requiring it somehow to be fit into an idealised architecture that bears very little relationship to how power is actually transacted?
Perhaps, however, the starting point is more basic. Mediators and peacebuilders could be more aware of, and exchange perspectives on, the ways in which contemporary conflict dynamics are fundamentally disrupting their discourse and practice, with a view to building a creative response. This volume, of course, is an attempt to do this. Yet, two different conversations with regard to mediation co-exist, even within single organisations, in cognitive dissonance. One focuses on how to build on mediation practices in a way that makes them better and better, so that they create a more inclusive or more ‘positive’ peace. The other focuses on how on earth to mediate any sort of principled end to conflict when a profound disruption of everything that has underpinned the practice is under way. The disruption stands to dismantle wider civic agendas, such as women, peace and security, altogether.
Before embracing multimediation as a rich tapestry of efforts to be better woven together, we need to recognise that competing war and peace goals are part of the tapestry of the current mediation context. Yet, mediation always involves trying to bridge divides between real human beings in an effort to agree a baseline common political project, even as disagreement persists as to what the project is. Therefore, the complex mixed picture of multimediation does not pose a unique challenge for the mediation community.
This article is an output from the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).
