International private or non-governmental mediators have been a significant source of innovation in mediation practice. They are distinct from local or ‘insider’ mediators operating from within a society in conflict, but may frequently engage, support or partner with them.
Peacemaking is challenging; the complexity of the issues, managing heightened expectations and recalcitrant parties, and an increasingly crowded and fractious mediation field complicate the endeavour. In responding to Sudan’s conflicts, and supporting South Sudanese and Ethiopian peace processes, regional and international facilitators have explored new approaches: they have promoted strategic and ad hoc partnerships, established mediation panels, combined multiple formats of engagement, and pooled leverage and expertise. Yet humility is required.
By mid-2019, the UN’s efforts to advance a peace process in Libya were stuck. As Special Representative of the Secretary-General and head of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), Ghassan Salamé had tried to work ‘from the inside out’. This meant prioritising engagement with a broad swathe of Libyans in preparation for an inclusive national conference to be held in April 2019. But an assault on the capital Tripoli by the renegade General Khalifa Haftar just days before it was to take place returned Libya to open conflict and left the UN plan in tatters.
Two factors contributed to China’s longstanding dormancy in the field of conflict mediation. First, until the early 2000s, China’s global presence, especially in conflict countries, had been limited. The second was its principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, strongly defended not least to hold firm against potential foreign intervention in its own affairs, such as the ethnic unrest in Xinjiang and Tibet.
The pause in Israel’s war on Gaza between 24–30 November 2023, along with each side’s release of a limited number of hostages and prisoners, could not have taken place without Qatar’s mediation efforts in what United States President Joe Biden acknowledged as a ‘critical partnership’.
Data on peace agreements and mediation efforts provides important insights into changing trends in international involvement in peacemaking. Across the mediation field, data shows diversification of third parties involved in peace processes and, in places, potential for congestion. Both these trends are contributing to an increasingly fragmented mediation space.
Public participation is a central element of the peace process in Colombia. For decades, many social sectors, in a country with immense geographic and social diversity, have demanded active inclusion. President Gustavo Petro’s government has adopted a holistic approach to peace, termed ‘Paz Total’ ('total peace'). This embraces the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), talks with all remaining non-state armed groups and urban criminal structures, as well as the reform of social, drug and security policies.
Since the collapse of the military government in 1991, Somalia has experienced a wide range of clashes and disputes. Somali society is organised according to numerous major and minor clans, as well as sub-clans, which have a complex web of relationships with each other. Competition over water, grazing land, and other natural resources can often lead to disputes, between clans or within an individual clan, particularly for pastoralist communities.
Sudan’s pro-democracy activists have faced oppression, systematic targeting, massacres and coups. From mid-April 2023, they have faced the impacts of a national war between their main oppressors, Generals Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ‘Hemedti’ of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF), respectively. This long-anticipated rupture in the security forces was precipitated by the failure to reconcile the irreconcilable – the ambitions of the generals, their civilian junior partners and foreign backers – following the coup in 2021.
Africa’s approach to mediation has become more inclusive over the past two decades. Impetus for this shift has come from within Africa: driven by the practice and activism of civil society, women and young people demanding to be heard; anchored in the evolution of continental norms such as the move from ‘non-interference’ to ‘non-indifference’ and the promotion of ‘African solutions’; and embodied in the African Union’s (AU) ‘roadmap’ for inclusive and sustainable development, Agenda 2063, and the 2019 Continental Framework on Youth, Peace and Security.
