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’.

Mediators are inherently adaptive. Their work is grounded in the world as it is and, in their support of conflict parties and others seeking to move from war to peace, necessarily imbued with hope of what the world of tomorrow might become. Yet the policy and practice of mediation have struggled to keep pace with the changing realities of conflict and global politics. The value of mediation as a tool to facilitate political solutions to violent conflict is therefore under severe pressure.