This is an alarming moment for international peace and security, and a sobering one for the international peacemaking community. It is all too easy to point to failure, divisions, and the rapid advance of global threats, and see only centrifugal forces driving us further apart, and further away from effective mediation to support conflict parties and other impacted communities in efforts to arrive at negotiated solutions and political settlements.

Yet the urgency of the human suffering caused by the acceleration and persistence of armed conflict allows no room for despair, no possibility of turning away. Rather, as the articles across this Accord volume demonstrate, the history and practice of adaptation and innovation in mediation offer lessons to be learned and applied, but also ideas of what can be done, and done better, even at this difficult time. The following recommendations are introduced in this spirit.

10 ways to adapt and innovate mediation policy and practice

Mediation strategy and process

1. Prioritise mediation and the pursuit of political solutions as primary objectives in strategies to tackle armed conflict.

Why prioritise mediation?

Negotiating political solutions to prevent and resolve armed conflict is always hard and often contentious. Supporting negotiations may not be an easy policy choice at a moment when war is on the rise amidst polarised geopolitics. But the human costs of disregarding or deferring attempts to reach political solutions are unacceptable. Most conflicts are internationalised, and the roles of external states and organisations matter.

Peacemaking is cost effective, but it needs sufficient and consistent financing. As wars in Ukraine and the Middle East drain budgets, funding for mediation is declining and the gap between needs and resources widening. Inconsistent or restricted funding limits opportunities and undermines activities essential for effective mediation, including the taking of calculated risks, long-term engagements to build relationships, and efforts to establish connections between different initiatives.

How to prioritise mediation – states and multilateral organisations should:

• Commit to the peaceful settlement of disputes as the priority in a conflict theatre, and not just one among a number of potential policy ambitions.
• Exert political courage and capital to back peace processes, and provide sufficient resources.
• Be prepared to take calculated political risks, and exercise patience and imagination to create and sustain appropriate space for dialogue.
• States should guarantee greater and more reliable financing for mediation capacity – for the UN, regional organisations, their own envoys and teams, and private and local mediators, women and men – and set a minimum percentage of GDP to bolster falling levels of funding on peace and conflict prevention in fragile contexts.

2. Pursue mediation and political solutions below and beyond the state – the state should not be the only locus for conflict resolution.

Why mediate below and beyond the state?

Internal and internationalised conflicts are fragmented and interwoven with transnational threats such as the climate emergency and organised crime. Peacemaking cannot default to the state as the locus of every political solution, but must look below and beyond it. 

How to mediate below and beyond the state –mediators should:

• Develop nuanced, gendered and localised analysis of the social, political and economic conditions and actors that generate violence and might help to reduce it.
• Support climate-informed mediation at different levels – local, national and regional – as the impacts of the climate emergency in conflict contexts accelerate, and new climate policies, investments, rights and laws themselves fuel conflict.
• Facilitate ‘intra-party’ dialogue among fragmented groups – conflict parties, opposition groups, women’s organisations and others with different perspectives – to help build coherent positions and prepare for and engage in negotiations.
• Prepare for more negotiations around blockades, sanctions and extreme protectionism, as these escalate in and around both inter- and intra-state conflict.
• Recognise the impacts of organised crime on conflict and peacemaking, acknowledging the complex interplay of criminal and political agendas and developing strategies to address them where circumstances allow.

3. Redefine ‘success’ in mediation as achieving specific or localised gains that make people safer, reduce violence and support momentum towards sustainable peace.

Why redefine success in mediation?

Fragmented conflict and geopolitical contestation mean that peace processes focused on achieving a comprehensive peace agreement will be the exception.

Mediators will need to be pragmatic, recognising the limits but also the value of what it is possible to achieve, and adjust not only their expectations but also their training and preparation accordingly. Not all challenges have fixes, but it is possible to recognise major needs and opportunities and identify priorities for smart engagement and investment.

How to redefine success in mediation – policymakers and mediators should:

• Embrace opportunities for incremental or local mediation processes, ceasefire agreements and monitoring mechanisms that temper violence and save or improve civilian lives.
• Recognise that seemingly small successes can make important contributions to change, such as the establishment of participatory mechanisms to broaden contributions to peace, or the mediation of behaviours relating to the use of digital technologies.
• Support the positive evolution of iterative and non-linear peace processes – including by investing in the reorientation of training to prepare mediators and their teams for today’s realities, and developing approaches to iterative process design that can build progress over time.
• Support conflict parties to develop adaptive frameworks to answer the questions facing society in a progressively inclusive manner, and in the process ensure that international development assistance and financial aid are integrated into peace processes equitably.
• Different mediation initiatives may be able to increase their cumulative impact as part of what Christine Bell terms ‘multimediation,’ including by experimenting with ways to enhance complementarity.

Mediation partnerships and principles

4. Commit to partnerships between diverse mediators in order to support peace processes effectively, balance skills and interests, avoid competition and maximise collective impact.

Why commit to mediation partnerships?

Mediation is increasingly crowded, involving more diverse mediators and other external actors with different interests and influence. Internationalised civil wars in which regional states may be fuelling or sustaining conflicts are particularly challenging. Collaboration is not easy amid different mediators’ sometimes contrasting ambitions and approaches. But working in partnership is essential for effective peace processes.

There is no single partnership model. In different circumstances, groups of friends, international contact groups, high-level panels, guarantors, and other forms of partnership – from the UN to regional organisations, states, and private, non-state and local mediators – have all been engaged in support of conflict parties or a peace process, with a range of impacts.

How to commit to mediation partnerships – mediators should:

• Adapt the configuration of partnerships to respond to the needs of conflict parties and the process, recalling the importance of national ownership and focusing on leadership, structures inclusive (enough) of the different interests involved, sufficient consensus on direction of travel, and mediation approaches tailored to the context.
• Use leadership to build conceptual clarity on how a process can move forward. Examples include:
  • in the post-referendum negotiations in Sudan, the African Union’s High-Level Implementation Panel helped the parties articulate a common vision of ‘two viable states at peace with each other’
  • under the lead of Germany and the UN, in 2020 the Berlin International Conference for Libya consolidated disparate states and organisations with interests or engagement in the Libyan crisis around an agreed trajectory for peace, including a ceasefire, arms embargo and return to a UN-led political process
• Explore ways to include external actors in negotiation frameworks to advance the resolution of internationalised civil wars, with a first priority being to secure agreement on curtailing military assistance and the withdrawal of foreign forces.
• Partnerships between official and unofficial mediators can foster creative ideas and combine different sources of legitimacy, capacities and relationships with conflict parties, local communities and other influential constituencies. Such ‘hybrid’  partnerships may be formally constructed in an International Contact Group (as in Mindanao), or developed more organically, as in strategic support to the UN, regional organisations or state mediators by private mediation organisations and NGOs
• Where multiple NGO mediators are engaged in a conflict context they should explore mechanisms to enable exchange of information and approaches (with due regard to requirements of confidentiality); if a lead mediator is present, clarity in the assignation of supporting tracks and processes can help. Careful mapping of mediation efforts at a country level may inform coordination of roles and actions.
• Governments of states that conduct or fund mediation have a responsibility to encourage coordination and complementarity in their own initiatives and those they support.

5. Build consensus among diverse mediators around core peacemaking values and principles – but acknowledge that there will often be different worldviews that need to be managed carefully.

Why build consensus?

Stark divisions between the West, Russia and China, and a shift of global power and influence towards the South and East, contribute to a competitive environment for peacemaking. While the fragile consensus behind the liberal vision of peacemaking has broken down, values that prioritise peace over violence will always need to underpin mediation.

Mediators need greater self-awareness and the fluency and capacity to work within and across distinct worldviews – recognising unconscious bias and supporting conflict parties to reach mutually acceptable agreements that may not always align with their own ambitions.

How to build consensus – states, multilateral organisations and other mediators should:

• Reaffirm consensus where possible – on sovereignty, consent, and national ownership, as well as foundational documents such as the UN Charter, the Constitutive Act of the African Union and the Helsinki Accords, and agreed norms of international humanitarian and human rights law.
• Lead or support efforts to reach agreement on a baseline of ambitions and principles for a peace process.
• Support initiatives to build trust among mediators, even when they have different goals, such as joint analysis and engagements, and exchanges of information, perspectives and resources (for example technical expertise, staff swaps and study visits).
• States in particular should avoid actions that lead to accusations of double standards, and assiduously uphold the universal values and legal framework they demand of others in foreign policy interventions, including mediation.

6. Defend impartiality as a mediation ‘fundamental’– accepting that this may need to be balanced among diverse mediators in a peace process.

Why defend impartiality?

Amidst rising polarisation and the erosion of long-held norms of diplomatic exchange, the impartiality required for mediators to work with all conflict parties is difficult to safeguard but nonetheless essential. It is particularly complex when multiple mediators are involved, bringing different views on engaging with some conflict parties.

Regional and global powers may have political or economic interests at stake, and leverage and relationships to draw upon. In some situations, individual mediators will not be perceived as impartial: their involvement can be helpfully complemented by that of other mediators with a distinct set of relationships with the conflict parties.

How to defend impartiality

• Continuous demonstration of the impartiality of the UN Secretariat – including through the performance of its senior officials – can help reinforce the organisation’s unique and necessary convening power. The breadth of the UN’s political, humanitarian and other capacities means that, although buffeted by divisions among its member states, it retains the potential to respond creatively to complex peace and security challenges (as its role in the Black Sea Grain Initiative demonstrated) and has important peacemaking contributions to make in partnership with or in support of others.
• Ensuring impartiality – whether on the part of the UN, regional organisations, individual states, private or insider mediators – even in processes where heavy economic or political leverage is in play can enable third parties supporting negotiations to talk to all conflict parties, gain trust by engaging with them in a fair and transparent manner, and help identify areas of agreement.
• Combinations of different mediators can balance perceptions of a lack of impartiality held by a party to a conflict – as was demonstrated in the African Union-led negotiations on Tigray in Ethiopia. Partnerships assembled out of expediency or for transactional agreements must remain committed to following through and implementing the agreements reached.

Mediation approaches and tools

7. Support engagement with ‘hard-to-reach’ armed groups as a policy imperative, facilitating pathways and reducing barriers to mediation.

Why engage with hard-to-reach armed groups?

Many non-state armed groups are hard to reach – for security, legal and other reasons associated with terrorism or criminality and related stigma. But non-state armed groups control territory, impact livelihoods, disrupt the state’s monopoly on the use of force, and in some circumstances derive legitimacy from their capacity for service delivery. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that in 2023 at least 195 million people lived in areas controlled or contested by them. Engagement is therefore imperative.

Mediation with non-state armed groups takes different forms and routes, but is most frequently conducted by humanitarian organisations and non-governmental mediators – the latter sometimes serving as confidential channels for governments reluctant to engage themselves. Although many such engagements are shrouded in discretion, it is important to develop more robust knowledge of best practice to help push this critical area of peacemaking forwards.

How to engage with hard-to-reach armed groups – pathways to enabling engagement include:

• Greater flexibility in the proscription and de-listing of armed groups in UN and other sanctions regimes, offering ‘carrots’ as well as ‘sticks’, including by negotiating criteria for suspending sanctions; once achieved, timely follow-through on promised relief from sanctions across the public and private sectors is essential.
• The UN Security Council could consider extending humanitarian ‘carve-outs’ from sanctions regimes to mediation activities, building on the exception introduced through UNSC resolution 2664 in December 2022 for humanitarian assistance; where available, exemptions should in any case be applied to enable sanctioned parties and individuals to participate in talks.
• Adapting language used by governments and third parties in peace processes to reduce tensions and facilitate a path to dialogue, as in the ‘linguistic ceasefire’ coined by Sophie Haspeslagh to describe how, between 2012 and 2016, the Colombian government moved away from labelling the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as ‘terrorists’ as part of a strategy to advance peace talks.
• Developing a legal framework to safeguard dialogue with groups identified by governments as criminal – learning lessons from the ongoing pursuit of ‘total peace’ in Colombia.

8. Encourage and enable inclusion in mediation processes, emphasising its tactical and strategic value in generating momentum and achieving sustainable outcomes.

Why encourage and enable inclusion in mediation processes?

Mediators should emphasise the strategic benefits of inclusion of non-military stakeholders, and draw on the rich body of innovative practice – notably to further the meaningful participation of women in peace processes and to respond to demands by young people to be heard and included in decision making.

Strategies for inclusion need to find mechanisms to enable the participation of dissenting popular movements. These may be instrumental in driving political processes but later excluded from negotiations and decision making, or they may lack structures and procedures that lend themselves to conventional forms of representation in peace processes (as was, for example, the case of the Resistance Committees in Sudan). Failure to incorporate dissenting movements compromises prospects for sustainable peace and positive change.

Innovation in digital technologies is helping foster increased participation in peace processes by women, young people and marginalised groups, and enabling grassroots movements to define inclusion on their terms. Efforts to integrate digital tools into mediation strategies ethically and effectively need to be deepened and broadened.

How to encourage and enable inclusion in mediation processes – mediators and their teams should:

• Work with conflict parties to adapt and innovate to support modalities for the inclusion of non-military stakeholders appropriate to their own context. They can draw on rich experience, including meetings with victims by the Colombian government and the FARC during their negotiations in Havana in 2014, town hall and other forms of consultations adopted in Libya, or the different tactics, mechanisms and advisory bodies used to engage with women and civil society in Kenya, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
• Draw on prior experience in furthering the meaningful participation of women, including:
  • as mediators, in negotiating delegations and mediation teams, or in consultation mechanisms 
  • convening women peacebuilders early to engage them on critical issues
  • supporting women’s direct engagement with the warring parties, where safe and appropriate
  • ensuring that mediation teams apply gender responsive conflict analysis systematically, and that all involved receive gendered briefing material on each item on the agenda
  • including gender and inclusion advisers, men as well as women, in all mediation teams
• Ensure that digital inclusion initiatives complement but not replace in-person participation. Different segments of a community can be marginalised by the barriers and risks associated with in-person and digital participation, respectively. Hybrid processes help build trust, providing opportunities for both in-person contact to foster empathy and connections and digital contact to enable sustained participation.
• Fully integrate digital inclusion initiatives into peace processes, and not embark on them as a box-ticking exercise. They should be motivated by a desire to broaden participation and an understanding of their contribution to the peace effort, not by a wish to ‘do something digital’.

9. Upskill mediators to keep pace with rapidly changing conflict issues, and to adapt peace processes, talks and agreements to prevent and resolve them.

Why upskill mediators?

Mediators need to develop and deepen their understanding of evolving issues that affect why and how conflict parties fight. This will include gendered analysis of the impacts of climate change in exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and differences and weakening coping mechanisms; the capacity of social media, misinformation and disinformation to shape and distort narratives; the emergence of cyberattacks and the prevalence of government measures to shut down digital communications; developments in artificial intelligence; and the impacts of infectious diseases such as Covid-19 on armed conflict.

Mediators need to be ready to support conflict parties in negotiating emerging issues. As Govinda Clayton et al set out their article addressing the inclusion of digital technologies in peace agreements, this will require them to understand the risks that may require mediation, and then to develop appropriate processes to address them.

How to upskill mediators:

• The speed and scope of change mean that new resources and expertise are needed both within mediation teams and through partnership with outside experts and the private sector.
• Climate experts, data scientists, digital mediation/ peacebuilding experts and epidemiologists may become common fixtures of mediation support teams, while others such as environmental agencies and actors, social media companies, software manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies can be consulted.
• Mediation teams should – as a UN practice note (2022) on the subject advises – strive to recognise where the effects of climate change represent a conflict factor and where climate action might serve as an entry point. Independent technical expertise (for example on water, land or pastoralism) can complement local knowledge, help parties develop mutually beneficial proposals, and advise on the availability of additional resources.
• Mediation teams need capacity for in-country assessment of the digital environment, digital behaviours of the conflict parties, digital risks and the development of appropriate ethical and risk frameworks, including with regard to how digital engagement will affect relationship-building and the implications of digital-related issues for the overall mediation strategy.
• Mediators will need to carefully assess how and when they involve social media platforms, telecommunications companies and other digital technology counterparts in the private sector that are an inextricable part of the new landscape of conflict. They should discuss with conflict parties and local constituencies how the peace process might benefit from help in investigating problematic digital behaviour, cyber incident response, or the removal of inauthentic networks.
• Skills in mediating economic dimensions of conflict – from global economic competition and the disruption of maritime traffic to the impact of illicit economies – will also need resourcing: they remain an area of relative weakness within the mediation community.
• Other emerging issues represent new fields for human competition and thus will be subjects of mediation themselves. They include climate financing, the regulation of emerging technologies and weapons, and exploration and the use of outer space. Such issues will require substantive knowledge distinct from, or in addition to, that required for the mediation of armed conflicts.

10. Do no harm to prospects for peace amid mediation adaptation and innovation.

Why do no harm to prospects for peace?

This is a minimum obligation for any action or engagement on conflict, including mediation, and needs extra vigilance in a time of dramatic global change.

The mediation field is rife with hazard. It is rich with diversity; engaging at multiple levels with multiple actors, many of them heavily armed and violent; committed to the pursuit of peaceful outcomes, consent and national ownership and sovereignty; informed by hard-won knowledge and skills developed over a period of decades. But it is also inherently anarchic, competitive, and in some respects opportunistic. The rapid development of new mediation skills, approaches and partnerships intensifies risks.

How to do no harm to prospects for peace – six key principles emerge from this Accord publication:

• As third parties supporting negotiations to forge peace from conflict, mediators must not put those with whom they engage, or support, in danger.
• Mediators have a collective responsibility not to worsen divisions between conflict parties, exacerbate or entrench power inequality relating to gender, identity or age, or obstruct pathways to advance inclusion.
• Mediators should engage on the basis of their comparative advantages with respect to other mediators, and coordinate with or support others in the best interests of the peace process. • While applying new skills, mediators must not lose sight of the root causes driving conflicts, of their core objectives, or of best practice built over many decades of engagement.
• Mediators should always be wary of the potential for unintended harm, and have the courage to reverse course as needed.
• International mediators must use their own resources judiciously, promote and strengthen local partners and communities, and, perhaps most fundamentally, conduct themselves in ways that increase trust and hope in the benefits of dialogue, engagement and political paths to peace.