Many of our most persistent and intense violent conflicts have an evident worldview dimension; the parties, or significant subgroups within them, make meaning and orient to the world very differently. What is less evident to many is that each of the common approaches to mediation of these conflicts is itself grounded in a particular worldview with embedded assumptions about why and how parties experience conflict, the building blocks available to construct a resolution of it, and the proper design goals and methods for assembling those building blocks.

Latin American and Caribbean countries are embroiled in a crisis of armed violence: home to a mere eight per cent of the world’s population but 29 per cent of its homicides, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The lion’s share of these deaths is linked to armed organisations ranging from gangs to drug traffickers, paramilitaries, and insurgents, most of which have not traditionally fallen within the purview of peacemaking and peacebuilding.

Mediating conflicts involving non-state armed groups proscribed by the United Nations Security Council presents difficult and distinct challenges. These groups are overwhelmingly listed for their association with Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (ISIS).

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.

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.

War and technology have always been two sides of the same coin, each advancing the other inadvertently or intentionally. But contemporary conflicts are no longer limited to guns, tanks, and fighter jets, and have expanded into a new dimension – cyberspace. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has clearly demonstrated this expansion of the battlefield and how cyber operations have become a crucial part of warfare.

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.

December 2023: In Afghanistan, the Taliban are limiting women and girls’ access to education, work, and public life. Israel’s siege and bombing of Gaza is the first war in history where children comprise over 40 per cent of casualties. In Sudan, millions have fled their homes and sexual and gender-based violence is rampant. The juxtaposition of this human devastation with the luxurious backdrops of Jeddah or Doha, where ceasefire or hostage negotiations are taking place, is jarring.

In May 1899, diplomats flocked to The Hague to participate in the first of two peace conferences. The Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner enlisted Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, in her efforts to commit states to disarmament and conflict settlement by publishing a letter she had received from him. Dunant wrote that he would ‘like to see the Hague Congress set up a Permanent Mediation Bureau recognized by all the States in the world … and to which they would be obliged always to have recourse in order to smooth out complications’.