A broad international consensus on the benefits of inclusion – evident, for example, in the twin resolutions on ‘sustaining peace’ adopted by the UN General Assembly and Security Council in April 2016 – belies considerable confusion as to who is to be included in what, and how. Mediators have long prioritised the inclusion of conflict parties necessary to stop the killing. The benefits of also involving broader constituencies whose participation might contribute to any resulting agreement’s legitimacy and durability are now broadly accepted (see Accord 29). Such inclusion is frequently resisted by the conflict parties themselves, yet pressure for processes that embrace plurality, diversity and participation by distinct communities affected by conflict, as well as professional and business actors whose support of a peace effort may prove critical, is consistent.
Both types of inclusion are important for moving from the short-term needs of violence reduction and humanitarian access to longer-term processes of implementation and peacebuilding.
Engaging violent parties that are proscribed as terrorists or primarily identified as criminal organisations is complicated both by the dynamics of conflict and violence in which they are involved, and by the national and international laws and enforcement mechanisms established in response. Indeed, writing in 2020, Magnus Lundgren and Isak Svensson found that a ‘surprising decline’ of track one international mediation (i.e. involving conflict parties’ leadership) could be explained by the rise in number of Islamist armed actors, coupled with the more frequent recourse to the listing of armed groups as terrorist since 2001.
With a focus on the challenge of engaging Islamist groups sanctioned by the UN for their association with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, Jerome Drevon assesses how legal obstacles to mediation are compounded by the groups’ identities, strategies and resistance to the international order. While humanitarian and private mediators especially have found creative ways to engage, he suggests potential innovation in more flexible UN sanctions regimes, including by developing criteria for de-listing of groups that show signs of willingness to engage in political processes.
Between 2015 and 2021, according to the UN’s Global Study on Homicide 2023, organised crime was responsible for as many deaths as all armed conflicts combined. Strategies to respond to this widespread violence have rarely extended to formal mediation, yet engagements of different kinds with criminal organisations have always taken place. Rafael Gude, Adrian Bergmann, and Alexandra Abello Colak in their article address the challenge presented by the blurring of lines between criminal and political violence and examine the evolving practice in negotiating with criminal actors in the Americas, arguing for its potential in effectively reducing violence.
President Gustavo Petro’s ambitious strategy of ‘total peace’ in Colombia includes parallel engagements with non-state armed groups and criminal structures of widely different reach. It is being closely watched across a region where many states are suffering from high levels of criminal violence and where there is a resurgence of interest in mano dura (‘iron fist’) tactics. After a dramatic explosion of gang violence in Ecuador in early 2024, for example, President Daniel Noboa ordered the armed forces to restore order and declared a 60-day state of emergency. A violent response led the president to take an unprecedented step in the combat of organised crime and declare ‘an internal armed conflict'.
Broadening the frame of analysis, Jeff Seul steps back to assess the challenges of mediating collisions of worldview in violent conflicts. Recognising that most violent conflicts have a worldview dimension, he argues that mediators will need to recognise that expectations that parties will change or compromise their core values will be frustrated. The challenge then is how to help reach a realistic and sustainable outcome that works across multiple worldviews. While the diversification of mediators and approaches may help increase awareness and acceptance of ‘moral pluralism’, Seul also cautions that mediators need to develop a nuanced awareness of their own worldviews, and therefore the biases with which they engage. In an interview addressing work he has led within the Cordoba Peace Institute, Abbas Aroua draws attention to the revitalisation of Islamic peace resources as one means of engaging across divides.
Efforts towards processes more inclusive of unarmed actors have proceeded unevenly. Mediators and their mandating institutions have adopted specific strategies to enable the meaningful participation of women, and, more recently, young people too, in the face of consistent, if varied, resistance. Esra Çuhadar analyses the differences in the type – implicit, explicit, and coercive – and depth of resistance women have faced as well as the distinct innovations within and around a peace process to counter resistance. An interview with Habiba Sarabi, a former member of the government negotiating delegation in Afghanistan, recalls how deliberate strategies to increase the participation and influence of women met with resistance from the Taliban and were then overtaken by the downwards trajectory of the process. Any incentive the Taliban might have had to moderate their positions on the rights of women and girls in the context of negotiation was overridden by their military victory.
In her analysis of the gap between the aspiration and reality of inclusion in African peacemaking, Chido Mutangadura documents a pioneering institutional commitment to inclusion at the regional and sub-regional level – rooted in formal commitments to the women, peace, and security agenda and then, more recently, the youth, peace, and security agenda – and the efforts of practitioners and peacebuilders to push for more inclusive strategies and multi-track mediation. More needs to be done to draw on the innovative practice that women and young people have brought to the continent’s peacemaking, and to encourage mediators and their advisers to access and implement the best practice available to them.
Mutangadura’s analysis is complemented by Kholood Khair’s account of the costs of exclusion of Sudan’s pro-democracy civil society movements from the political processes that followed the revolution they led in 2019. Resistance Committees in the vanguard of Sudan’s political mobilisation have pursued a ‘maximalist’ approach to political change, which has challenged international stakeholders more comfortable with conventional negotiation formats among identified party leaders. Khair argues that mediation must adapt to be able to incorporate powerful if amorphous positions from the ‘street’. The experience resonates with other contexts where innovative means of mobilisation and expression have driven change but those at the forefront of the protests still find themselves excluded from the ensuing political processes – often to their detriment.
The section closes with two further examples of inclusive practice, in some respects at opposite ends of the peacemaking spectrum. Sharif Abukhar Ahmed describes how an insider network in Hirshabelle State and Galmudug State in Somalia, supported by the Berghof Foundation, has had positive results in fostering more inclusive, local processes to address threats to communities posed by the escalating impacts of climate change. The push for inclusion came from women, young people and minorities wanting to play a greater role in resolving and preventing conflicts than had been possible under the traditional legal framework.
In the case of the ongoing negotiations between the government of Colombia and the ELN, as Donka Atanassova and Philipp Lustenberger describe, the parties have responded to long-standing demands from distinct social sectors for inclusion by creating of a diverse ‘National Participation Committee’. They have also set in train a process of consultation with members of the public to discuss how they want to participate and contribute to the broad transformations envisaged as the eventual outcome of the peace process.
Together, the articles in this section underline the centrality of the different forms of inclusion of both armed actors directly responsible for violence and unarmed actors demanding agency and a voice in determining the scope of peace. Efforts toward achieving both need to overcome different forms of stigma, obstacle and resistance and require commitment, creativity and courage.
