The term ‘mediation’ has often been adopted as synonymous with or as part of peacemaking. This, however, is also problematic for several reasons. Firstly, peacemaking usually denotes diplomatic efforts to manage or resolve conflicts through peaceful means. Mediation can be more than peace-making in the sense that it encompasses not only diplomatic measures and diplomatic actors, but also more unofficial or semi-official measures conducted by non-governmental organisations and civic society actors.
Secondly, peacemaking itself is conceptually and operationally ambiguous. It is significant, for example, that in An Agenda for Peace (1992) drafted by the then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, which forms the conceptual bedrock of contemporary UN conflict management, the terms ‘peace-enforcement’ and even the
‘use of military force’ are located under the heading ‘peace-making’41, although the first preliminary drafts of the Agenda written at the expert level had separated peacemaking from coercive means like peace-enforcement. Therefore, this conceptual confusion appears to be a mistake, resulting from dozens of drafting rounds and political haggling, not a purposeful move by the UN to justify the use of peace-enforcement as a leverage of mediation processes.
The framework of UN peace mediation has been epitomised by confusion in another respect too, namely in terms of the applicability of mediation in different phases of a conflict cycle. Is peace mediation applicable in all phases of a conflict, including conflict prevention, resolution and peacebuilding? In An Agenda for Peace, peacemaking is
41 UN Doc. A/47/277 - S/24111, 17 June 1992.
understood to refer to only one, and narrow, phase between preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping. This restrictive interpretation is also reflected in the UN Capstone Doctrine, in which peacemaking falls between conflict prevention and post-conflict peacebuilding.42 According to the Capstone Doctrine, peacemaking is understood to include ‘measures to address conflicts in progress and usually involves diplomatic action to bring hostile parties to a negotiated agreement’.43 Mediation appears to be wider than peacemaking in two ways. Firstly, mediation can involve not only diplomatic means undertaken by official actors such as state representatives and good offices by the Secretary-General, but also measures undertaken by unofficial actors like non-governmental organisations, as already mentioned above. Secondly, mediation could be used as a method throughout a conflict cycle, while peacemaking usually refers to the intermediate phase between conflict prevention and peacekeeping or peacebuilding.
As noted in the previous section, the MSU has implicitly applied a comprehensive notion of mediation in its actual practices. The first systematic and explicit attempt to transform the conception of UN peace mediation to a holistic direction at the normative level was made through the joint Finnish and Turkish initiative. The first draft of a General Assembly resolution on mediation finalised at the beginning of 2011 incorporated a comprehensive conception of mediation and, in its operational paragraphs, invited member states to optimise the use of mediation throughout the conflict cycle. During the negotiations between the UN member states on the draft resolution, which took half a year to complete, the comprehensive conception of mediation was weakened to some degree.
Nevertheless, the final resolution passed by the General Assembly does reflect the comprehensive notion of mediation, albeit in an incoherent way. It recognises the role of mediation ‘in the peaceful settlement of disputes, conflict prevention and resolution’44 and, in a separate paragraph, stresses the ‘importance of mediation activities in peacebuilding and recovery processes, in particular in preventing post-conflict countries from relapsing into conflict’.45 Hence, the
42 United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines, p. 19.
43 United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines, p. 17.
44 UN Doc. A/RES/65/283 (2011), 28 July 2011, p. 3.
45 UN Doc. A/RES/65/283 (2011), 28 July 2011, p. 2.
resolution practically implicates that mediation constitutes a method that could and should be applied throughout the conflict cycle: not only in prevention and resolution, but also in peacebuilding.
One of the greatest conceptual and normative innovations of the General Assembly resolution is that it widens the concept of mediation from a narrow segment of peacemaking between prevention and peacekeeping - that is, the restrictive conception used in the previous UN documents such as An Agenda for Peace (1992) and the Capstone Doctrine (2008) - to encompass peacebuilding as well. In future, that holistic conception should be formulated in more explicit, systematic and simple terms and preferably in a single sentence, while in the General Assembly resolution it is bracketed in different paragraphs.
The comprehensive notion of mediation is not a trivial curiosity, but it constitutes the basis upon which the future of UN peace mediation will most probably be constructed. Thus far, peacebuilding has been largely an overlooked and missed aspect in the development and operations of mediation and vice versa, which is counter-intuitive from the functional viewpoint. According to empirical data, between one-quarter and one-third of all peace agreements ending civil wars fail within five years and lead to the relapse of conflict. Moreover, the humanitarian costs of the collapse of peace agreements and relapse of wars are stupendously high. For example, the downfall of only two peace agreements, namely the 1991 Bicesse Accords for Angola and the 1993 Arusha Accords for Rwanda, was followed by the killing of two million people, which amounts to approximately one-third of all civil war victims during the 1990s.46 These empirical data point to three interrelated conclusions: First, the potential of the relapse of conflicts remains high even after the signing of peace agreements. Two, the relapse of conflicts typically implicates humanitarian emergency. And three, international society should apply all available means, including mediation, to prevent such relapses. Mediation is urgently needed even after the signing of peace agreements.
The application of mediation as part of peacebuilding undoubtedly constitutes a complex task, and one which is hard to justify to donor countries, because it usually takes place in the absence of an imminent, direct and visible threat of violence, although the
46 C T Call, ‘Ending Wars, Building States’, in Building States to Build Peace, C T Call and V Wyeth (eds), Lynne Rienner, London, 2008, pp. 1–2.
numerical evidence points to the omnipresent danger of the relapse of conflict and the looming humanitarian emergency. The lack of this visible need for mediation complicates the fund-raising for post-conflict mediation, a problem which is aggravated by the fact that the MSU is already a resource-starved unit that can hardly cope with even acute and already actualised conflict situations, let alone potential ones. Therefore, post-conflict mediation should be adopted not only in the MSU but also in the UN peacebuilding architecture, including the PBC (Peacebuilding Commission), the PBF (Peacebuilding Fund) and the PBSO (Peacebuilding Support Office), which have better financial means than the MSU to conduct that task. This, in turn, requires that states convince the PBSO to take up mediation as one of its principal methods of peacebuilding. Individual countries like Finland could also allocate funding and second national experts such as JPOs (Junior Professional Officers) to the PBSO to deal with post-conflict mediation.