The world’s geopolitics is changing once again, and every time it does, there is a temptation to believe that politics, war and peacemaking will be totally transformed. When the Cold War ended, many policymakers and practitioners assumed they were experiencing a complete break with the conflict and international relations of earlier decades. They began to talk and plan as if conflict were starting again from scratch with no continuities of any kind and nothing worth inheriting from existing political insight and professional expertise.
Post-Cold War conflicts were seen as ‘new wars’, as if there had never been vicious civil wars, invasions, armed groups or counter-insurgencies before the 1990s. Solutions to address them had to be created. Rather bizarrely, the newly victorious liberal world order set about ‘inventing’ peacemaking, preventive diplomacy, private diplomacy and mediation, all of which had a long history already.
The world is changing dramatically again but the challenge for 2020s mediators is to grasp these changes with a sense of nuance. A new distribution of global power and new types of warfare will indeed require innovations in mediation and lead mediators into new fields of work. But, at the same time, there is valuable knowledge and expertise from the past which 2020s mediators can use to shape a relevant practice and an appropriate ambition for the world and wars of the 2020s. Not all conflicts are new. Nor is it necessary to innovate mediation practice from scratch. To help this necessary course correction, this article looks at certain changes in geopolitics, diplomacy and warfare and what they may mean for the 2020s mediator.
Geopolitical change
There is indeed a major shift in global power and international relations in the 2020s: the end of liberal global hegemony and the return to a geopolitically contested world. China and India have returned to their rightful place as major powers. Russia and NATO are in open conflict over Ukraine. Important progress by African states in shaping greater continental order via the African Union (AU) is under intense pressure again from new coups and conflicts. The Pacific is once more a potential battleground, with flashpoints in the Koreas and Taiwan and geostrategic rivalry between new Western alliances and China. Russia is on the march across Africa, determined to disrupt African alliances with the liberal West. Nuclear war is less unthinkable than it has been at any time since the Cold War. Disarmament regimes are crumbling and agreements on new weapons are not forthcoming.
In the struggle for power and influence in the multipolar world of the 2020s, geopolitics is once more dangerously inimical and military budgets are skyrocketing. The contest is as much economic as ideological. Economic de-coupling and home-shoring are major policies in Washington, Beijing, Brussels and Moscow as hopes collapse for great power peacebuilding through liberal trade. The prospect of a Third World War has joined the list of existential risks threatening the survival of our world and our species, alongside climate change, pandemics, and the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) slipping beyond our control. All this suggests a return to mediation between great powers around disarmament, the risk of ‘big wars’, and actual proxy wars.
Authoritarianism and hardline conservatism are once again serious ideological challengers to liberal democracy. They hold sway in Russia, India and China, and in the New Right politics of the USA, Europe and Latin America, in many Islamic countries and in small states like Hungary, Georgia, Uganda and Rwanda. A key part of expanding conservatism and authoritarianism is a political shift in civil society which is no longer simply or majority liberal. Frequently seen as the progressive bedrock of tracks two and three for liberal peacemakers, civil society is now often authoritarian itself. The liberal mediator’s goal of inclusive multistakeholder peacebuilding will fade from view if many governments in conflict are one-party states with no real civil society and a preference for patriarchy.
Existential climate change has finally arrived as a geopolitical priority. Climate justice is producing new tensions between original emission states, new emitters and low emission states. States are competing to pivot to renewable energy and a winning position in the new green economy. A similar scramble to win the race for AI dominance is in play between great powers. Protectionism is rising fast in key commodities and technologies, and access to microchip production has become a security priority. Mediation in highly contested trade negotiations, often back-channelled outside the World Trade Organization, will be a growth area.
In religious politics, the struggle between liberals and conservatives is fierce again. Pope Francis’s worldwide synodal consultation feels threatening to Catholic conservatives who are on the rise, just as evangelical conservatism increases in many Protestant churches. Ten conservative African Archbishops have refused to recognise the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury because of his blessing of same-sex relationships, and the Orthodox Church in Russia and Georgia has firmly aligned with authoritarian leaders. The Taliban have defeated the West in Afghanistan and are implementing their authoritarian misogyny. The religious gerontocracy in Iran has held firm against liberal revolt. Many other Muslim countries, like Pakistan and Indonesia, still struggle over different understandings of an Islamic state, while millions of Muslims are creating liberal forms of Islamic life in the West. Hindu nationalism is dominant and aggressive in Indian politics. Buddhist authoritarians are brutal in Myanmar and Cambodia, and ultra-conservative Jewish settler groups have a controlling grip in the Israeli government. The need for inter-religious mediation is rising.
Diplomatic change
Above these tectonic political shifts, the diplomatic arena is changing too. A new range of important ‘middle powers’ has emerged in the last 30 years. Countries like Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Singapore, Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Algeria, and Kenya have increasing influence that is manifest in new diplomatic confidence and international effectiveness. New small group diplomacy (minilateral and plurilateral) is emerging. Liberal groupings like the G7, the Munich Security Council and Davos are challenged by an expanding BRICS bloc (originally Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Raisina Dialogue and the Baoa Forum. The G20 is a contested grouping as China, Russia and India strike their own positions against Western members. The G77 is still strong when it agrees to be so. The AU has political weight, and the Alliance of Small Island States has proved itself a powerful asymmetric force in climate politics.
Western states tend to lament the collapse of multilateralism. What they really mean is the collapse of their own dominance within multilateralism and the relative international consensus in their favour that prevailed between 1990 and the UN-sanctioned invasion of Libya in 2011. For China and Russia, the Libyan intervention confirmed that Western interventions are instigated in bad faith, more intent on regime change than the UN doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians.
Changes in war and warfare
Accompanying these geopolitical and diplomatic trends, politics and technology are changing warfare. AI-based advances in military technology are adding new domains to the traditional ones of land, sea, air and psychological operations. Today, all major military doctrines are focused on cyber space, outer space and intimate digital information space as intense new domains of war in which they need to win.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Azerbaijan’s 2023 invasion and ethnic cleansing of all Armenians from Nagorny Karabakh show that inter-state wars will remain central to mediation. So too will coups and civil wars as shown by Sahelian conflicts and the internationalised civil wars that continue in Central African Republic (CAR), Syria and Yemen. All have intense regional dimensions that are manifest in coalitions, alliances and over-spill. This means that 2020s mediators must brace themselves for a complex international chessboard around every conflict. The terrible new war between Hamas and Israel shows how this 100-year conflict remains resistant to mediation.
Classic struggles of state repression and civic uprising persist in places like Venezuela, Myanmar and Iran. Protests have been intense in China, France and Israel, while the US still tries to come to terms with an alleged coup attempt on Capitol Hill in January 2021.
Economic warfare has always been a part of war in strategies of blockade, pillage or scorched earth. But economic warfare today is truly global and weaponised in sanctions by all sides. Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian wheat and fertiliser raised food import prices rises, reduced local yields and brought hunger to people thousands of miles away from the war zone. Europe’s de-coupling from Russian energy brought inflationary suffering to citizens all over Europe and Russia. These are continental-scale blockades not seen since the two World Wars, and bigger still.
Many commentators are unduly optimistic that climate change will not cause war but function only as ‘conflict multipliers’. I disagree and think this overly optimistic. Climate crisis will cause armed conflict and organised violence in the 2020s, and climate injustices will be argued as just cause for war. States will contest natural resources, migration and unjust adaptation with neighbouring states. Resistance movements will rise up to challenge governments on the speed and fairness of their climate action. There will be much work for mediators specialised in climate action.
Finally, a caveat on changing warfare. In every generation, there is a danger that the geopolitical focal conflict of the moment, which is Ukraine today, comes to dominate the imagination and practice of international policy. This stereotypes the challenges of war and peace, and skews funding, policy and good practice. Mediators and peacebuilders must resist such stereotyping by insisting that all war today is not identical to Ukraine but is a more diverse array of conflicts and struggles that require distinct and nuanced engagement.
Three new challenges for 2020s mediators
The return to enmity and ideological contest between great powers, and within international society at large, combined with the big shifts in warfare and climate, mean that 2020s mediators need to change some of their focus and methods in three main ways.
First, the reach and depth of mediation is likely to change. Western mediators who are perceived as carrying liberal values into a mediation will not be as acceptable in the 2020s. Normative assumptions about democracy, women’s inclusion and civil society will find no place in many peace processes, even rhetorically. The backlash against such norms is real and well organised in many parts of the world. No-go areas have expanded and are likely to confine the liberal peacemaker to conflicts in the Western sphere of influence.
Mediators who work best beyond the Western core will be those who travel with little ideological baggage. These are mediators who are more interested in simply supporting parties to reach a mutually acceptable agreement, and so often required to be content with helping to achieve political order rather than social justice. They must be interest-based fixers who are much less concerned with societal needs, inclusion, institutional reform and an idealised vision of post-conflict societies. They will seek support in authoritarian civil society (religious or secular) and respect the status quo rather than change it. But personality and art will still count for such pragmatic mediators. They must still be gifted at bringing people together, earning trust and problemsolving. Not anyone can do it, even when order rather than justice is the goal.
The easterly and southerly swing in diplomatic power and influence means any global UN mediator must get out beyond the Western diplomatic core and de-occidentalise their network. The geographical and cultural diversity of today’s major and middle powers, and their diplomatic groupings, means it will never be enough to work on the world from the West or the East, the North or the South. Good UN mediators will need to be truly worldly. Somehow, they must also carry a basic level of global norms with them wherever they go and represent them even when they cannot secure them.
A second change in mediation is the ubiquity of geopolitics. As in previous eras of empire and Cold War, every national and local conflict now has a geopolitical dimension as all great powers compete everywhere for global influence. The chess board in each mediation will get bigger. Early 21st century mediators could mediate effectively in fairly small political bubbles in Liberia, CAR, Colombia, Aceh in Indonesia, and Sri Lanka because great powers were essentially disinterested. A small Group of Friends or equivalent could fund and leverage the process relatively effectively.
Today, conflicts that do not fall easily within one Great Power’s direct sphere of influence will be surrounded by a circle of enemies and not a group of friends. China will be building its Belt and Road Initiative there, Russia will be disrupting the West there, and the West will be pushing its own geostrategic interests, while managing its own US vs Europe competition over trade and the transition to the green economy. Not even little conflicts will escape big eyes. Anywhere could become a global flashpoint.
The third and biggest change will be the creation of new fields of mediation. Climate crisis is a major new field for mediation and climate mediation is going to be big. New climate action policies, like anticipation, mitigation, adaptation, human mobility, just transition, and loss and damage, will nowhere be delivered smoothly or without conflict. For billions of people, climate crisis will produce conflict in fights over resources, mobility, adaptation and maladaptation. This means a new field of climate rights and laws will need to be discovered and negotiated at local, national and global level.
Conflict’s extension into new human spaces and new areas of human competition also gives new scope for mediation to expand – most obviously into outer space, cyber space and urban space, meaning space mediation, cyber mediation and urban mediation will be increasingly important. All three spaces, two profoundly physical and the other virtual, are already sites of violent conflict. Mediators have a role to play in processes to agree new norms and laws for states and businesses in outer space. There is almost endless misinformation, disinformation and hate in virtual spaces against which they must work for truth and more humane behaviour. And there is a lot to do in cities around fair planning, gangs, and climate adaptation.
The exponential increase in economic warfare means economic mediation will also become a significant focus for 2020 mediators. The Black Sea Grain Initiative, which for a year enabled the continuing flow of Ukrainian grain exports around the world, is already a textbook case of this kind of mediation in economic warfare (see article by Teresa Whitfield). We can expect blockades, sanctions and extreme protectionism to escalate as a major mediation challenge.
Finally, of course, disarmament mediation must continue to find its place again in the alarmingly belligerent geopolitics of the 2020s. Processes to regulate nuclear weapons must be resuscitated, and new processes stepped up to define and regulate the rapidly developing array of new tech weapons. AI-based weapons and targeting systems present genuinely new ethical, operational and legal challenges around autonomy, responsibility, mass and speed. Today’s disarmament mediator must become expert in this field if humanity’s latest technology of global annihilation is to be correctly understood and rigorously limited by international agreement.
Each one of these new fields of mediation contains threats to peace and risks of war. This makes them important unchartered territory for mediators of the 2020s to explore.
