The United Nations Secretary-General has called these ‘dangerous times’, stressing the importance of building trust across actors and agendas, including where the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and cyberspace are concerned. The latter is particularly important given our dependency on ICTs, their vulnerability to exploitation, and growing evidence of their use by parties directly and indirectly involved in all kinds of conflicts.

Digital technologies play an increasingly significant role in armed conflict. In response, conflict parties and mediators have begun integrating digital technologies into negotiation processes. A number of ‘social media peace agreements’ have been brokered, as well as a number of clauses covering digital technologies in broader peace agreements. These early agreements demonstrate the utility and possibility of negotiating restraint in the online space.

A volume on innovations in mediation would be amiss without a section addressing the potential and risks of digital technologies. Technology and innovation are entwined, both because technological advances are the result of innovative industry, and because technological advances very often catalyse the need for innovation in processes and practices. Digital technologies in turn are now inextricable from mediation, being intrinsic too to how wars are being fought and peace needs to be made.

The conflict in Yemen has garnered international attention primarily for its regional dimensions and the humanitarian crisis it has caused. The early UN-led peace efforts, in successive rounds of shuttle diplomacy and mediation, focused almost exclusively on reaching agreements on the political and military arrangements needed to stop the conflict and start a political process. The economic dimensions, by contrast, were largely overlooked.

In the ‘golden age’ of mediation, immediately after the end of the Cold War, peace agreements aimed to provide definitive answers to the questions which led societies down the road to violence and civil war. ‘Comprehensive peace agreements’ sought not only to stop the immediate fighting but to revise the fundamental nature of the state and society to make the resurgence of violence impossible.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 precipitated a devasting war and Europe’s most profound security crisis since the Second World War. It also triggered a major shock to the global economy, with dramatic rises in the prices of energy, food and fertilisers. The determined response by Ukraine and its Western backers created military dynamics that rendered a negotiated solution a distant prospect. Yet in the first few months of the war an ambitious mediation facilitated by the UN and Türkiye produced parallel agreements known as the ‘Black Sea Grain Initiative’.

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.