Cultural and Religious Polarization in Modern Conflicts: Implications for Mediation 

Abstract: 

Cultural and religious diversity does not inherently produce violent conflict. It is rather when identities are weaponized and coupled with collective grievances that conflict is most likely to occur. This article asks what causes cultural and religious polarization in contemporary conflicts and how such polarization can be understood in relation to conflict mediation. It seeks to target the social identity, collective victimhood and political mobilization theories, sacred values, intergroup animosity and distrust, and the mediation theories adapted to peace processes, in order to understand how polarization and division of identity in conflict are created and nurtured. There are several factors that can contribute to polarization, including politicized identity, historical grievances, perceived threats, socio-economic injustices, as well as social and political belonging and victimhood. These can complicate the trust-building and compromise-based negotiating process and transform political interests into concerns of identity, dignity, and the collective safety. This article suggests that, in the case of mediation for polarized conflicts, one must resolve the core issues of the conflict and the fragmentation of the population. Therefore, mediation that is successful has to deal with the complex structural conditions of polarization. This can be achieved through the establishment of recognition, trust, and inclusivity through dialogue, and addressing various conditions of injustice.

Keywords: cultural polarization, social identity, intergroup conflict 

Introduction:

Cultural and religious diversity has always been present among human societies. There have always been multiple communities living together with differing belief systems, traditions, and languages. However, the presence of religious diversity does not explain why some societies co-exist peacefully while others experience violent conflict (Köbrich & Hoffmann, 2023). Contemporary views on conflict and identity suggests that cultural and religious diversity becomes significant when it extends into the political sphere or collective grievances and is used to create divisions between the groups of people who are considered insiders and outsiders of a given society.

This transformation is best exemplified through increased social divisions. As social divisions deepen, differences that have the potential to peacefully coexist become increasingly perceived through lenses of “us” and “them”. In these cases, social conflict may indirectly take on cultural or religious dimensions, while grievances can be seen through the historical and lived narratives of the social group. These divisions and social conflicts may be articulated through politics and religion, which can provide meaningful frameworks within which people can articulate their grievances, social conflicts and concerns. Under these conditions, religions and ethnic identities may provide the boundaries and frameworks for articulating conflicts without necessarily constituting their underlying causes (Fox, 2000).

Conflicts that are culturally and religiously polarized cannot be understood as simply conflicts of competing material interests. When politically articulated cultural demands become intertwined with deeply embedded or sacred values, compromise may be understood not simply as a concession, but as a threat to principles central to the identity of the group (Atran & Ginges, 2012). Distrust of each other may severely limit dialogue, while leaders willing to negotiate may be subjected to intense internal pressure not to reach a compromise with the opposing group.

This article, therefore, seeks to answer the following: what causes the phenomenon of cultural and religious polarization in contemporary conflicts, and how can this polarization be understood in relation to conflict mediation? This article argues that cultural and religious polarization should not automatically be understood as a cause of violent conflict. 

Main Corpus:

Varying ethnic and religious identities do not always lead to hostility. Research on ethnic polarization and civil conflict shows that diversity alone does not explain violence, as the political exclusion and mobilization of group identities are also important factors (Cederman et al., 2010). This is a meaningful distinction for considering cultural and religious polarization as diverse identities, beliefs, and traditions can coexist without necessarily creating divisions between groups. However, polarization happens when these diverse identities and beliefs increasingly and deeply structure social and political domains and organize opposing groups. As these distinctions sharpen, perceived threats between groups may produce greater social distance and more negative attitudes toward opposing groups (Renström et al., 2021). Political questions of space, social, and economic resources may correlate with cultural or religious affiliations, which means that the importance of identity is always changing. The political relevance of ethnic identities may therefore vary considerably depending on their relationship to state power and mobilization (Cederman et al., 2010).

Cultural and religious identities are especially tied to conflict when there is a noticeable shift in identities with political and social change. Concerns about inequality and discrimination and issues of political and social insecurity are no longer seen as issues against an individual. They are more and more seen as issues that threaten the entire group (Cederman et al., 2010).

Experiences of discrimination, political exclusion, and violence may also become incorporated into collective narratives of victimhood. These narratives can shape how communities interpret events and their relationships with other groups. When present developments appear to reinforce established memories of injustice or victimization, historical experiences can continue to influence intergroup relations and perceptions of the conflict (Lynch & Joyce, 2018).

Political mobilization can further intensify this process. Research on ethnic and religious identity demonstrates that group identities can provide powerful foundations for collective political action, but their effects depend substantially on context. Research has found, for example, that stronger religious identification can be associated with increased political participation among some communities while discouraging political participation among others (Kopko, 2012; Ocampo et al., 2018). Treating entire religious or cultural communities as politically uniform therefore risks overlooking divisions within them and the circumstances that determine when identity becomes politically salient.

More than dislike or friction, polarization manifests as a transformation of perception. When political, religious, or cultural preferences are increasingly organized around opposing group identities, the distinction between “us” and “them” becomes more prominent. Members of an opposing group may be viewed as less than individuals with different interests and more as representatives of a group whose intentions are viewed with suspicion (Iyengar et al., 2019). In this way polarization can reinforce factionalism and make distrust of the opposing group appear justified or natural (Iyengar et al., 2019).

In more severe conflicts, this distinction can develop into moral exclusion or dehumanization. When individuals perceive members of other groups as undeserving of the same degree of moral consideration as members of their own group, discrimination and harm against those groups may become easier to justify (Opotow, 1990).

In order to describe a situation, the way in which language is expressed matters. If there are ways to describe ethnic, cultural, or religious groups in a manner that makes them appear dangerous or as disloyal, uncooperative members of a fragmented society, this can widen existing societal fractures (Dangerous Speech Project, n.d.). Ultimately, the likelihood of peaceful coexistence becomes further diminished. 

For many social groups, memory of past victimization or violence can also be a unifying feature of collective memory. It can shape relationships long after the actual victimization occurred (Schori-Eyal et al., 2014). Although memory of the past can help social groups understand and empathize with one another, it can also affect the way present events are perceived.

Historical injustices can also make it easier to understand why a group feels threatened. Depending on the history of different social groups, it is also possible that conflicting accounts of who is the victim, who is to blame, and whom the right to claim ownership truly belongs to shape the psyche of each social group. As a result, conflict is no longer understood solely through current events. Past and present become connected, and contemporary political disputes can acquire the symbolic weight of earlier injustices. This can make compromise particularly difficult when concessions are understood not only in terms of their immediate consequences but also through memories of previous losses (Schori-Eyal et al., 2014).

If cultural or religious identity divisions are exploited for political gain, international relations may become even more fractious. Political mobilization can intensify identity-based divisions when organizations compete to represent the interests of an ethnic or cultural group. Research suggests that competition within ethno-political movements can encourage organizations to make increasingly radical political demands in order to distinguish themselves from rivals and strengthen their position within the movement. Such radicalization can, in turn, increase the risk that political disputes escalate into armed conflict (Vogt et al., 2021). 

Once attitudes become more fixated on this issue, the implications of the compromise also become more complex. The act of political compromise is interpreted within the group as abandoning a sacred value, a principle, or a part of collective identity. Under these conditions, conventional attempts to encourage compromise through material incentives may prove ineffective and can even increase opposition to an agreement (Ginges et al., 2007).  

Because some level of separation can be understood in all conflicts, the more pronounced the separation, the more complex the problems related to mediation. Conflicts that touch on cultural or religious identity tend to make parties lose the perception of conflicts as just interest-based. Mediators must therefore work with an environment of distrust, historical grievances, and internal pressures within each group that can make compromise difficult. 

The conflict in Northern Ireland offers an example of how cultural and religious identities can be intertwined with political and national divisions. The Catholic and Protestant identities were historically aligned to the larger political identities of nationalism and unionism, being further alienated by this conflict (Muldoon et al., 2007). This conflict can therefore not be explained as just a conflict between two religious communities. Religious identification was linked with national identity, political affiliation, constitutional status, and the notion of belonging. The conflict even pioneered the creation of opposing narratives of victimhood, where several communities perceived and conceptualized their positions, while also understanding the counter narrative, via the experiences and memories of violence and loss inflicted upon them (Lynch & Joyce, 2018). These narratives reinforced divisions by connecting political disagreements with the memories of past violence and injustices. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 illustrates how addressing such a conflict required more than an agreement on an immediate political dispute (Belfast Agreement, 1998). The case therefore illustrates that, in addressing a polarized conflict, both the polical demands of the warring parties and the relationships that are most important to them must be addressed.

When different communities have been highly polarized for years, particularly when violence forms part of their shared history, establishing mutual trust becomes considerably more difficult. Under such circumstances, the actions and intentions of the opposing group may increasingly be interpreted through existing perceptions of hostility and responsibility (Çelebi et al., 2014). Initiatives intended to reduce tensions may likewise struggle to achieve their purpose when the parties fundamentally distrust one another. The resulting lack of cooperation can reinforce existing distrust and restrict opportunities for meaningful dialogue and reconciliation (Kappmeier et al., 2021).

Parties to a polarized conflict may seek recognition alongside other meaningful outcomes. Following experiences of discrimination, displacement, violence, or exclusion, demands for the recognition of collective suffering and injustice may become particularly significant (Bar-Tal et al., 2009). This becomes more challenging when communities maintain conflicting historical narratives and competing claims to victimhood, particularly when each group perceives its own suffering as insufficiently recognized (De Guissmé & Licata, 2017). Mediation must consequently create opportunities for acknowledgment and recognition while allowing space for competing interpretations of the past (Ben-Josef Hirsch, 2021).

The last point is that mediation requires the parties to recognize both the mediator and the process as legitimate. The perceived impartiality and credibility of the mediator can therefore be particularly important to the acceptance and effectiveness of the mediation process (Smith, 1994). Formal impartiality, therefore, may not be enough. Mediators must establish credibility with the communities involved and demonstrate that the process provides meaningful recognition and participation to each side.

The challenges of polarization do not suggest eliminating identity from mediation. Cultural and religious identities may be significant to the parties involved and may create openings for dialogue and reconciliation. Therefore, mediation that recognizes the importance of identity and of cultural and religious plurality, and the fact that communities are not necessarily homogeneous and that divergent identities are not necessarily contradictory, is likely to be more effective.

Contextualization of conflict and its development is the starting point of sensitive mediation. Understanding historical grievances and their instigators as well as the inequitable distribution of political power, systemic discrimination, relations of power and the varying community articulations of the conflict is all important. Mediators should also identify relevant political, religious, and community actors while recognizing divisions within the groups themselves. A community described as “religious,” “ethnic,” or “cultural” rarely speaks with a single voice. Differences of generation, gender, political affiliation, social position, and interpretation may produce significant variation within apparently unified groups.

Summary:

The analysis demonstrates that cultural and religious diversity does not inherently produce violent conflict. The more notable and more likely source of conflict is the polarized fusion of cultural and/or religious pluralism with identity subsuming politics and the creation of oppositional politics. Historical complexities, perceived and real threats, inequalities and political friction can deepen social divisions to the point that competing claims to political, spatial and resource domination are seen as competing claims to dignity, safety, and survival. 

Conclusion:

Mediation can attempt to solve these issues, but likely won’t be enough given the context of the situation. To address these issues, mediation must be on these two polarized levels. The first concerns the actual issues of the polarized conflict: the politics of representation, security, land, rights and resources, and the politics of institutional arrangement. The second concerns the relationship of the polarized communities and identities. Even if there are some actual and feasible compromises, these will not bring peace and resolution to the conflict if there is polarization sustained by an identity of distrust, competing and polarized perceptions of history, and a sustained, intractable fear of the other side. The mediation should occur within the polarized community as well as the structural components that reinforce the polarization. It is important to recognize differences between relationships and structures, because neither dimension can fully compensate for the absence of the other. With communities in which there is an absence of trust, institutional arrangements are read as confirming and working in line with fears and historical grievances. In addition, unequal or inadequate representation, discrimination, or unstable politics can sustain distrust that mediation seeks to address. The case of Northern Ireland is an example of the relevance of both dimensions. The Belfast Agreement combined constitutional and power-sharing arrangements with commitments to equality, mutual respect, and the recognition of British and Irish identities (Belfast Agreement, 1998). This does not mean that institutional arrangements alone resolve polarized relationships, nor that relationship-building alone resolves structural inequities. Rather, sustainable mediation calls for the consideration of the relationship between the two.

The presence of various communities and religious actors may help reconciliation efforts, but these should not substitute for or lessen the broader engagement and representation efforts. It is not the intention of mediation to remove cultural or religious differences, nor is it required that communities abandon identities that create a sense of belonging, purpose and continuity to successfully resolve conflict. The goal is to design the political and social framework within which those identities are perceived as non-threatening to one another. Having placed together recognition, dialogue, and trust-building alongside substantive negotiation and the kind of institutional reform that fits the context, mediation can help transform relationships where difference has been a cause of division into those in which difference can coexist with compromise and a resolution.

Potential solution:

Mediation can provide space for parties to articulate experiences of injustice, insecurity, and loss. Recognition does not require a mediator to determine which collective narrative is correct. Instead, it allows parties to understand why particular events, symbols, or demands carry significance for the other side. At the same time, mediators should avoid cultural essentialism. Treating individuals primarily as representatives of a fixed religion or culture risks reproducing precisely the rigid boundaries that polarization creates. Recognition should therefore acknowledge both collective identities and diversity within them.

However, dialogue is not sufficient for resolving conflicts supported by structural factors. The Northern Ireland case shows why recognition needs to accompany political and institutional arrangements. The Belfast Agreement did not require the communities involved to abandon their British, Irish, unionist, or nationalist identities. Instead, it implemented political arrangements through power-sharing and the principle of consent, while also recognizing the right of individuals to identify as British, Irish, or both (Belfast Agreement, 1998). This is relevant to the broader argument of this article because one of the aims of mediation is not necessarily to diminish the role of identity. Rather, it is possible to encourage the formation of political arrangements in which multiple identities do not require multiple and mutually exclusive political results. In a polarized conflict, this approach could enable parties to address some substantive issues, without a community feeling like it needs to compromise its identity.

If discrimination, polarized power relations, economic inequality, territorial disputes, or the lack of appropriate mechanisms for the protection of minority rights perpetuate polarization, then the addressing of these factors is also necessary for the settlement. For mediation to be sustainable, there must be a combination of building relationships and institutional changes.  The Northern Ireland case demonstrates why these dimensions cannot easily be separated. Mediation is therefore most effective when these factors are understood as interrelated rather than treated as distinct issues. 

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Bridging Conflict Through Dialogue: The Role of Mediation and Non-Violent Communication in Dispute Resolution – Lessons from the Ukraine-Russia Crisis

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT *

This article examines the relationship between nonviolent communication and mediation, and tests both against the war between Russia and Ukraine. After tracing the development of nonviolent communication from the work of Marshall Rosenberg and its roots in humanistic psychology and in Gandhian thought, the author sets out its four principles of observation, feelings, needs and requests, and considers how each may be applied at successive stages of a mediation. A section on limitations follows, addressing the time required to acquire the skills, the risk that the method is perceived as manipulative, its inadequacy where power is severely unequal, and the cultural variation in norms of emotional expression. The author then draws a parallel with the Jain principle of ahimsa. The final section applies the analysis to the negotiations conducted in Belarus and Turkey during 2022, and concludes that while such methods can humanise adversaries and clarify underlying needs, they cannot by themselves address strategic objectives or asymmetries of power, and must be combined with political, diplomatic and security instruments.

Editorial note: the account of the negotiations and the assessment of the parties reflect the author’s own perspective. This journal’s editorial position is neutral as between the parties concerned. *

KEYWORDS *

Nonviolent communication, Rosenberg, mediation, needs and positions, empathy, ahimsa, Jainism, Russia, Ukraine, power asymmetry, humanitarian corridors, Istanbul talks

INTRODUCTION

Human civilisations cannot exist without conflicts. Peace and stability depend upon the methods used to handle these conflicts. In recent years, the Russia-Ukraine crisis has attracted the attention of everyone in the world. Its resolution has been attempted with the participation of several countries and international organisations. In this scenario, mediation and nonviolent communication have been used in efforts to address the crisis.

Mediation, a structured approach to resolving conflicts, and nonviolent communication, a strategy for promoting empathy and understanding, provide practical strategies to tackle the root causes of conflicts and develop long-lasting peace. Nonviolent communication is a communication style created by Marshall Rosenberg that focuses on empathy, compassion, and comprehending human needs. Its objective is to promote constructive exchanges by emphasising transparent and courteous communication, which proves especially efficacious in conflict resolution scenarios, such as mediation. Mediation, a systematic method of resolving conflicts, greatly benefits from the principles of nonviolent communication as it promotes the open expression of disputants and active listening to others. Integrating these principles into mediation techniques improves the calibre of interaction between conflicting parties. It bolsters the mediator’s endeavours in directing them towards a situation wherein they can communicate. The significance of this approach in mediation is increasingly acknowledged as societies confront intricate interpersonal and organisational problems. Both fields aim to promote comprehension and collaboration, amplifying the impact of their junction.

This paper reflects on the possible application of nonviolent communication in conflicts, analysing the Russia-Ukraine crisis. It examines the synergy between nonviolent communication and mediation and considers the implementation of these principles for transforming mediation procedures and the possibility of achieving better and lasting conflict settlements.

MAIN CORPUS

History of nonviolent communication

Rosenberg, a psychologist, drew inspiration from the works of Carl Rogers and Mahatma Gandhi. He founded nonviolent communication in the 1960s. Rosenberg aimed to develop a communication approach prioritising empathy and connection rather than conflict and pressure. The formative years of his upbringing in racially segregated Detroit throughout the 1940s and 1950s, marked by exposure to violence and discrimination, influenced his understanding of the need for empathetic communication.

Rosenberg’s work was also influenced by the humanistic psychology movement, which emphasised the capacity of individuals to develop and achieve their full potential. Rogers’ client-centred therapy, which emphasises sympathetic listening and unconditional positive regard, formed the basis for numerous ideas in nonviolent communication. Rosenberg combined these concepts with Gandhi’s nonviolent teachings, which promoted peaceful resistance and communication as methods for resolving conflicts.

Rosenberg developed a systematic method of communication and documented it in his publication, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. This book described the principles and offered a manual of communication skills with greater effectiveness and empathy. The approach has achieved acclaim and has been embraced in several domains, such as education, business, and conflict resolution. Its impact is expanding as training programmes and workshops are carried out in more than 60 countries. It has also been applied in combat zones for dispute resolution and for promoting mutual comprehension among opposing factions. This evolution mirrors a transition towards communication and conflict resolution methods that prioritise empathy and collaboration.

Principles

Nonviolent communication is based on four fundamental principles: observation, emotions, needs, and requests. These are concepts for promoting empathy and comprehension in communication.

The first principle, observation, highlights the significance of differentiating between the act of observing and one’s subjective feelings about it. Observations are to be conveyed objectively, without judgment or evaluation. The clarity of communication aids in the prevention of misconceptions and minimises defensiveness during interactions. Instead of making a general statement like “You are always late,” a more specific observation may be made by saying, “I observed that you arrived 15 minutes after our scheduled time on three occasions this week.” One sees neutrality in the observation. The fact is communicated without any judgment. There is no accusation in the observation. Hence, resistance is absent in the reaction from the other person.

The second principle, emotions, is acknowledging and expressing one’s feelings without attributing fault to others. The approach promotes personal responsibility for one’s emotions through the use of “I feel” expressions, such as expressing frustration as “I feel frustrated,” instead of attributing anger to others with statements like “You make me angry.” This decreases the chances of conflict by highlighting personal experience rather than attributing blame. Understanding and expressing emotions is important for fostering empathic communication. It helps both individuals to make an emotional connection.

The third principle, needs, revolves around finding out the needs that underlie one’s feelings. All human behaviours aim to fulfil needs, such as security, affection, independence, and social interaction. By expressing these needs, individuals can overcome superficial conflicts and tackle the real causes of conflict. For instance, when an individual is frustrated due to their opinions being disregarded, the need may be for acknowledgement or respect.

The fourth principle, requests, requires formulating explicit, affirmative and practicable requests derived from the recognised needs. Unlike demands, which can bring about resistance, requests are invitations for cooperation. They are precise and amenable to negotiation, facilitating a mutually satisfactory result. Instead of stating, “You need to listen to me,” the approach would be to ask, “Would you be open to dedicating five minutes of your time to attentively hear my concerns without interruptions?” Engaging in discussions of this nature encourages teamwork and diminishes the chances of further conflict.

Together, these principles establish a means of communication that emphasises the importance of understanding, transparency and reciprocal regard. The method promotes a less aggressive discussion and is more favourable to understanding and resolving issues by emphasising observations, feelings, needs and requests.

Mediation and its role in conflict resolution

Mediation involves an impartial intermediary, called a mediator, assisting the parties in conflict and facilitating a dialogue between them to attempt to resolve their conflict. Mediation is not the same as litigation or arbitration inasmuch as it allows the parties in conflict the power to independently make their own decisions rather than imposing an adjudicated resolution upon them. The mediator’s function is to facilitate communication between the parties in conflict and to enable them to delve into their fundamental interests and requirements. Mediation, a practice with ancient origins, can be traced back thousands of years and is found in diverse cultures such as ancient Greece and China as well as in India. Mediation has become an important element of conflict resolution in various fields, such as family law, business, and international relations. Mediation is favoured due to its informal and voluntary nature, cost-efficiency, and expedited process compared to litigation.

Mediation is preferred because it can handle a conflict’s substantive issues and relational concerns. Substantive issues are the issues of disagreement, while relational concerns refer to the emotional and psychological interactions between the parties. Mediation also provides a means for the parties to address relational issues, which leads to the promotion of enduring and satisfying results. Communication is treated as of utmost importance in mediation. Effective communication facilitates understanding opposing views, builds trust, and identifies shared interests.

Interplay of nonviolent communication and mediation

The principles of nonviolent communication resonate with the objectives of mediation, as both emphasise empathy, attentive listening, and regard for the needs of others. Incorporating these principles into mediation procedures provides advantages in resolving substantive and relational issues in conflict. The emphasis on empathy, clarity and mutual understanding aligns with the objectives of mediation, rendering it an effective tool for mediators. Mediators can better their capacity to foster productive discourse and assist parties in moving beyond positional negotiation to delve into their fundamental wants and interests. One significant meeting point is prioritising, comprehending and expressing needs. During numerous disagreements, the involved parties often prioritise their positions, which refer to their desired outcomes, rather than their needs, which pertain to the underlying reasons for their desires. The method promotes recognising and articulating one’s needs, transforming the dialogue from making demands to discussing interests. This change is of utmost importance in mediation, as it expands the range of potential for innovative and mutually advantageous resolutions.

Another crucial aspect is the significance of empathy. The approach suggests that empathy involves not just comprehending someone else’s emotions and requirements but also articulating that comprehension to increase rapport. Empathy plays a crucial role in mediation by removing obstacles, diminishing antagonism and fostering a collaborative environment. When participants perceive that their concerns have been acknowledged and comprehended, they are more inclined to participate in the process and strive towards resolution actively. The method offers mediators a tool for effectively handling emotions during the mediation procedure. Conflicts involve intense emotions, and how these emotions are managed significantly influences the result of mediation. This methodology enables mediators to effectively assist parties in constructively expressing their feelings without being accusatory or critical of the other party. This helps prevent the situation from becoming more intense and enables the fundamental problems to be dealt with more efficiently.

The combination improves the mediator’s capacity to establish a nurturing and considerate atmosphere where parties can communicate honestly, examine their needs and strive for a resolution that satisfies everyone involved.

Applications in the mediation process

In mediation, the actual implementation requires incorporating the fundamental concepts of observation, feelings, needs, and requests into the mediation process. Integration can occur at several points, from the initial encounter with the parties to the ultimate agreement.

In the early phases of mediation, the approach can be employed to create a secure and courteous atmosphere. The mediator can exemplify it by using impartial language, refraining from judging and prioritising observations above judgments. For instance, a mediator could state, “I observed the presence of tension in our previous session,” instead of saying, “You displayed hostility last time.” This method minimises defensiveness and establishes a favourable atmosphere for the mediation process. The approach can facilitate the mediation process by enabling parties to articulate their feelings and needs more clearly. The mediator can promote the use of “I feel” phrases and assist parties in recognising the underlying needs behind their stances. When one side displays irritation, the mediator may enquire about the unfulfilled need causing displeasure. This form of inquiry facilitates the progression from assigning fault to attaining a more profound comprehension of one’s own and the other party’s needs.

The approach is also beneficial in expediting the negotiation stage of mediation. By prioritising needs over positions, the mediator can assist parties in examining a broader spectrum of potential solutions for resolving their conflict. For instance, if both parties need security, the mediator could investigate several methods to fulfil that need, such as utilising financial agreements, contractual assurances or continuous communication. This degree of flexibility enhances the probability of discovering a resolution that satisfies both sides’ needs.

During the concluding phase of mediation, the approach can be employed to guarantee that the agreement is unambiguous, precise and capable of being put into effect. The mediator can assist parties in formulating their agreements as affirmative requests rather than ultimatums. Instead of explicitly stating that “Party A will not do X,” the agreement could be modified to express that “Party A agrees to undertake action Y to resolve the concern.” By employing positive framing, the likelihood of future conflict is diminished and the cooperative aspect of the agreement is strengthened.

Limitations

The approach has numerous advantages in mediation but also a few constraints. One of the main obstacles is the significant amount of time and effort needed to acquire and master these skills. For mediators and parties, it signifies a fundamental change in their cognitive approach and active participation in communication. Shifting in such situations can be particularly challenging, especially when faced with high stress levels or intense emotions, as this is when ingrained patterns and protective reactions are most prone to resurface. Another problem arises from the possibility that the method may be seen as manipulative if not employed with genuine sincerity. Suppose individuals feel that it is being used to manipulate or exert control over them rather than as a sincere attempt to establish a connection and foster understanding. In that case, they may develop resistance or scepticism. This can impede the efficacy of the mediation process.

Addressing deeply ingrained disputes or disparities of power is also difficult using this approach. When there is a substantial power imbalance or resource disparity between two parties, as seen in the evaluation of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, it may not be enough to tackle the root causes of the problems effectively. Other measures, such as legal assistance or advocacy, may be required to guarantee a just and impartial resolution. The approach requires profound self-awareness and emotional intelligence from the mediator and the individuals engaged in the process. Without possessing these attributes, it might be challenging to use it effectively, especially when confronted with intense emotions or intricate interpersonal dynamics. For instance, if a party encounters difficulty recognising or articulating their feelings and requirements, the mediation process may become stagnant or ineffective in generating significant outcomes.

Cultural differences might pose difficulties when implementing this approach in mediation. Diverse cultures possess distinct norms and expectations regarding communication, emotional expression and conflict resolution. Cultural norms about respect and appropriateness can vary, resulting in potential misunderstandings or resistance when interacting with individuals from various cultures. Mediators must demonstrate cultural sensitivity and adjust their use of the method accordingly.

Nonviolent communication and ahimsa in Jainism

The principles of nonviolent communication and ahimsa, a fundamental tenet of Jainism, exhibit a deep harmony that forms the basis of successful mediation. Both philosophies prioritise preventing physical, emotional or verbal violence and advocate cultivating understanding, empathy and harmonious coexistence. During the mediation process, these principles serve as a framework to ensure a resolution that considers the needs of all parties involved and reduces conflict to a minimum. Ahimsa, a Sanskrit term meaning non-harm or non-violence, is the foundation of Jain philosophy. It means one should not harm any living being through actions, words, or thoughts. Jainism propagates ahimsa not merely as the absence of violence but as a positive commitment to compassion and kindness. This tenet applies to all living organisms, making it a universal moral guideline beyond religious limitations. Incorporating ahimsa and nonviolent communication into mediation methods can significantly improve the mediation process. Ahimsa principles, as used in mediation, stress the significance of upholding respect and empathy for all participants, irrespective of the nature of the conflict. Mediators can facilitate the transition from opposing stances to focusing on shared interests and needs by cultivating a nonviolent atmosphere.

The influence of ahimsa in mediation also encompasses the function of the mediator. A mediator led by ahimsa demonstrates impartiality, patience and dedication to the well-being of all parties involved. Ahimsa promotes confidence and transparency, crucial elements of an effective mediation procedure, more so in the mediation of international armed conflicts. The mediator’s adherence to non-violence encourages the parties to adopt a similar attitude, thereby reducing hostility and promoting a cooperative atmosphere. Implementing nonviolent communication in mediation, guided by the principle of ahimsa, also improves the efficiency of the mediation process by promoting introspection among the involved parties. Applying ahimsa in mediation promotes a long-term resolution by focusing on healing and reconciliation rather than mere resolution.

The Ukraine-Russia conflict: background

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has a long and complex background. The most recent escalation commenced in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and then engaged in conflict in eastern Ukraine. In 2022, the conflict intensified when Russia militarily invaded Ukraine, launching an assault that resulted in extensive destruction and a dire humanitarian disaster. The dispute encompasses geopolitical dynamics and profound cultural and historical tensions. The issue is deeply rooted in historical grievances, geopolitical rivalries, and territorial disputes. The war is a manifestation of a collision between the national identities of Russia and Ukraine. Russia aims to impose its dominance over Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, while Ukraine endeavours to connect itself with Western Europe and the wider international community. This has generated a difficult and intricate struggle that cannot be resolved using ordinary resolution mechanisms.

The response by several countries of the world to the crisis has demonstrated a range of reactions, with Western nations implementing sanctions against Russia and extending military and economic assistance to Ukraine. India and China have adopted positions of non-alignment. The dispute has also highlighted the difficulties conventional diplomatic endeavours face, leading to a heightened curiosity regarding other approaches to resolving conflicts, such as mediation and nonviolent communication.

Mediation efforts in the Ukraine-Russia conflict

In February 2022, the war between Ukraine and Russia intensified greatly, resulting in an invasion by Russian forces. Several countries and organisations expressed their apprehension of a humanitarian catastrophe and danger to worldwide security on account of the conflict. The attempt at diplomatic resolution of the crisis was initiated promptly, with the scheduling of numerous rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Nevertheless, these conversations were intricate and impacted by long-standing historical resentments, security apprehensions, and opposing political objectives.

By March 2022, the conflict had escalated, resulting in substantial casualties and the forced relocation of residents. The need for a diplomatic resolution became of utmost importance, prompting the commencement of negotiations on 7 March 2022. These conversations aimed to achieve a cessation of hostilities and a lasting resolution of the conflict. The participation of international mediators and the implementation of communication principles played a role in the negotiating process despite numerous obstacles.

Diverse global entities have endeavoured to facilitate the resolution of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, yielding varying outcomes. The Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, facilitated in part by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, sought to reduce tensions but failed to establish enduring peace. Mediation has been seen as a possible means of relieving tension and finding a settlement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Several states, such as Turkey and Israel, and organisations such as the Vatican, have attempted to facilitate negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Mediation efforts have been difficult due to the deeply rooted nature of the conflict and the power imbalance between the parties involved.

India’s stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict is notable. Although India has not officially engaged in mediating the issue, it has consistently promoted conversation and diplomacy to resolve it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s engagements with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have underscored the significance of peaceful dialogue. India’s hesitation to take on a direct mediation role can be ascribed to various causes, including its historical connections with Russia and its strategic concerns in preserving neutrality.

The ongoing conflict has posed significant challenges to mediation efforts, primarily due to the power imbalance between the parties involved and the prevailing deep mistrust. Notwithstanding these difficulties, mediation remains an essential instrument for addressing the conflict.

The potential role of nonviolent communication in the conflict

Implementing nonviolent communication in the context of the Ukraine-Russia conflict can help bridge the communication divide between the parties. The approach promotes directing attention towards the fundamental needs and emotions that lead to disagreement rather than the superficial expressions preceding negotiations. Through cultivating empathy and promoting mutual understanding, it can potentially help reduce tensions and establish a favourable atmosphere for effective communication. Its effectiveness in the Russia-Ukraine crisis depends upon the mutual readiness of the parties to participate in the process and the mediator’s expertise in enabling communication using these principles.

The negotiation process between Ukraine and Russia was marked by meetings held in Belarus, Turkey, and other locations. International actors mediated or hosted these negotiations. The initial focus was on establishing humanitarian corridors to allow the safe evacuation of civilians and the delivery of essential supplies to besieged areas.

Communication principles of this kind may be employed in such talks to bridge the significant gap between delegations. Mediators can encourage both parties to express their concerns and demands in a manner that reduces hostility and promotes mutual understanding. In the negotiations held in Turkey in March 2022, the Ukrainian delegation emphasised the need for immediate ceasefire arrangements to prevent further civilian casualties, while the Russian side focused on security concerns related to NATO enlargement. Framing demands in a way that acknowledges the other side’s stated concerns contributed to temporary understandings on humanitarian corridors.

Despite the use of such methods and of mediation, the process was hindered by deep mistrust and the asymmetry of power between the two parties. The negotiations of late March 2022 in Istanbul marked a turning point, where a more substantive discussion took place regarding the potential for a neutral Ukraine and the security guarantees required by both sides. However, the lack of a clear framework for implementing these guarantees led to the collapse of this particular round of talks.

Lessons learned

The ongoing crisis between Russia and Ukraine provides valuable insights into utilising mediation and nonviolent communication in international disputes. The situation highlights the significance of understanding the fundamental reasons for the conflict, such as historical resentments, national identities, and geopolitical objectives. Mediation and nonviolent communication can be potent instruments for tackling these basic concerns. Still, they necessitate a sophisticated understanding of the conflict’s context and the needs and interests of the parties.

Furthermore, the crisis underscores the difficulties of mediating with a substantial power imbalance between the conflicting parties. When faced with such situations, the mediator must be able to equitably consider the concerns of the less powerful party while also ensuring that the more powerful party perceives their interests as being acknowledged.

The Russia-Ukraine crisis is a clear example of the constraints of nonviolent communication when it comes to significant international disputes. Although it can successfully foster empathy and understanding, it is inadequate to tackle the intricate power dynamics and strategic goals that fuel these conflicts. To obtain a durable resolution, it is necessary to integrate it with other tactics such as mediation, diplomacy, and conflict management. The conflict highlights the necessity of a multilateral dispute resolution strategy. The participation of various global stakeholders, including nation-states, international organisations, and non-state entities, is crucial in establishing a complete and enduring resolution. Mediation and nonviolent communication are vital to this multilateral approach. Still, they must be incorporated into a comprehensive plan that tackles the conflict’s political, economic, and security aspects.

The concepts of nonviolent communication have extensive relevance in international disputes. By emphasising the emotional and psychological aspects of conflict, they can contribute to humanising the people involved and establish a basis for trust. In future conflicts, including such approaches in mediation procedures could assist in addressing the apparent problems and the underlying needs and values that fuel the conflict.

The lessons from the Ukraine-Russia crisis underscore the possibilities and obstacles associated with implementing these tactics in global conflicts. As the world strives to resolve disputes peacefully, integrating mediation and nonviolent communication will become increasingly crucial. The need for a comprehensive and enforceable peace agreement that addresses the core concerns of both parties is crucial for any future negotiations. The lessons learned can inform future diplomatic efforts, emphasising the importance of combining these communication methods with robust political solutions to achieve lasting peace.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument reaches a conclusion that qualifies its own starting point. Nonviolent communication is presented as a method whose contribution to mediation is real and specific: it separates observation from evaluation, locates responsibility for feelings with the person who has them, moves parties from positions to needs, and converts demands into requests. Tested against the case chosen, however, the author finds those contributions insufficient. Where one party has invaded another, where the parties are severely unequal in capability, and where each side’s stated needs, security guarantees on one and sovereignty and territorial integrity on the other, are experienced as incompatible, a method designed to improve the quality of exchange cannot supply what is missing. The author’s conclusion is therefore not that the approach fails but that its domain is narrower than its advocates sometimes suggest, and that it belongs within a settlement architecture rather than in place of one.

CONCLUSION

The incorporation of nonviolent communication into mediation signifies a notable progression in the realm of conflict resolution. By placing empathy, understanding and the articulation of needs as top priorities, it improves the mediation process, resulting in more efficient and long-lasting outcomes. The increasing global need for successful conflict resolution has led to the recognition of the valuable tools these principles provide for mediators working in various contexts, ranging from personal disagreements to intricate international conflicts. In the future, numerous possibilities exist to incorporate these principles into mediation techniques more effectively. Training programmes for mediators should integrate additional strategies of this kind to enhance their ability to mediate sympathetic and needs-oriented discussions.

The growing acknowledgement of the significance of emotional intelligence and empathy in leadership and conflict resolution indicates that this approach can influence mediation and wider societal communication and conflict management methods. With its increasing use, there is a potential for a transition towards more empathetic and cooperative methods of conflict resolution, both in interpersonal connections and within broader systems. It provides a robust foundation for improving mediation methods. By promoting empathy, clarity and mutual respect, mediation informed by these principles can potentially convert disagreements into chances for establishing a connection and personal development. As the field of conciliation progresses, incorporating these principles will be essential in influencing fairer and more peaceful outcomes for everyone involved.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s honesty about the limits of the method is its most valuable feature, and the reason for those limits can be stated more precisely, because doing so identifies where the approach does belong in this kind of conflict.

Nonviolent communication was developed for encounters between individuals who will continue to deal with one another and who each speak for themselves. Interstate negotiation satisfies neither condition. A delegation does not have feelings; it has instructions, and its members answer to a capital that is not in the room, in some cases to a public that must be persuaded, and to an institutional interest in the outcome. Asking a negotiator to speak of what they feel is asking them to exceed their mandate. That is not a defect of the method but a description of its domain, and the distinction the field draws is between the interpersonal level, where the method operates directly, and the representative level, where its influence is indirect at best.

Where it does operate at that level is worth naming, because it is not nothing. The unofficial channels this journal has examined elsewhere, the dialogues among former officials, scholars and civil society figures that precede and accompany formal negotiation, are precisely where the participants speak for themselves and where the capacities the article describes have effect. Mediators also use them in their own conduct rather than requiring them of the parties: reformulating what one side has said so that the other can receive it, distinguishing the account of an event from the judgment attached to it, and identifying the concern beneath a stated demand. That is the realistic claim for the method here.

Two observations follow from the article’s own case material. The talks of March 2022 came closer to a framework than is often remembered, and what obstructed them was not the quality of communication but the absence of anyone able and willing to guarantee what was being discussed: Ukraine sought security assurances of a kind that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum had already failed to provide, and no state was prepared to underwrite new ones. Guarantees, not empathy, were the missing element, and that is a lesson about settlement architecture. And the negotiations that have produced results in this war, on grain, on prisoners, on nuclear safety at occupied facilities, were technical, narrow, mediated by parties acceptable to both sides, and conducted without either recognising the other’s political claims. They are the working model for what is achievable while the political question remains open.

Finally, the parallel with ahimsa deserves a qualification that strengthens rather than weakens it. In the Jain tradition ahimsa is a discipline binding on the practitioner, an obligation about one’s own conduct, and it makes no claim about what an adversary will do in return. Read that way it corresponds exactly to what a mediator can offer: to conduct oneself without harm, to refuse to add to the violence, and to remain available. Read as a strategy for changing an adversary’s behaviour, it invites the objection the article’s own case supplies. The stronger version is also the more demanding one, since it asks the practitioner to hold the discipline where it produces no visible result, which is the condition in which most work of this kind is actually done.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

The Role of Mediation in Post-Conflict Transitional Justice in Achieving Truth, Accountability, and Reparations

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

The manuscript reproduced its discussion of the Colombian process twice in consecutive passages; the duplication has been removed. Two references in the bibliography do not correspond to the propositions for which they are cited in the text, and readers are advised to check them at source.

ABSTRACT

Post-conflict societies face the profound challenge of reconstructing political order while addressing legacies of mass violence, systematic human rights violations, and social fracture. This article examines the role of mediation within transitional justice frameworks, arguing that mediation is not merely a procedural mechanism but a transformative political and social process that can, when properly designed and supported, reconcile the tension between peace and accountability. Drawing on scholarly literature and case studies from Rwanda, Colombia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa, the article analyses how mediation contributes to truth-seeking, reparations design, institutional reform, and the prosecution of perpetrators. It further interrogates the normative dilemmas that mediation poses, particularly the trade-offs between amnesty and accountability.

KEYWORDS

Transitional justice, mediation, political order, accountability, reconciliation

INTRODUCTION

The literature on transitional justice has grown substantially since the 1990s, driven by the proliferation of transitional processes across Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia (Kritz 1995; Huntington 1991). Yet the specific role of mediation within these frameworks remains undertheorised. Legal scholarship has tended to focus on the architecture of international criminal law, while peace studies has centred on the dynamics of ceasefires and power-sharing arrangements. This article seeks to contribute to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation that situates mediation at the intersection of law, politics, and social repair.

This article proceeds as follows. Section two provides a conceptual framework situating mediation within transitional justice theory. Section three examines mediation’s contribution to the principal pillars of transitional justice: accountability, truth, reparations, and institutional reform. Section four analyses the normative dilemmas that arise from mediating between peace and justice imperatives. Section five draws on comparative case studies to identify patterns of success and failure. Section six concludes with design principles for effective mediation in transitional contexts.

MAIN CORPUS

Post-conflict transitional justice

The cessation of armed hostilities does not, by itself, generate justice. In the aftermath of mass atrocities, civil war, or authoritarian repression, societies are confronted with a dual imperative: they must construct conditions for sustainable peace while simultaneously reckoning with the past. Transitional justice refers to the set of judicial and non-judicial processes and mechanisms through which societies respond to a legacy of large-scale past abuses (International Center for Transitional Justice 2009). Mediation intersects with each of these mechanisms, functioning as both a procedural enabler and a normative framework for managing competing claims over memory, responsibility, and redress.

Conceptual framework: understanding mediation and transitional justice

Mediation in international conflict resolution is typically understood as facilitated negotiation, a process in which a third party assists disputants to reach a mutually acceptable agreement without imposing a binding decision (Bercovitch and Jackson 2001). In post-conflict transitional contexts, however, mediation takes on additional dimensions. It is not only a conflict management tool but also a mechanism for reconstructing social norms, distributing symbolic and material redress, and producing authoritative accounts of the past.

Transitional justice, meanwhile, has evolved from a narrow preoccupation with criminal prosecution toward a more holistic conception encompassing restorative, reparative, and institutional dimensions (Roht-Arriaza and Mariezcurrena 2006). The four pillars identified in the report of the Secretary-General of 2004, namely prosecution, truth, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence, provide a useful taxonomy for assessing mediation’s contributions (United Nations 2004). Each pillar involves negotiation: over the scope of amnesty, the mandate of truth commissions, the form and quantum of reparations, and the pace and content of institutional reforms. Mediation provides structured process for these negotiations.

What is conspicuously absent from this otherwise rich body of work is sustained attention to mediation as a distinct object of analysis. The word mediation appears frequently in the transitional justice literature, but typically as shorthand for the broader category of third-party facilitation, without serious engagement with the theoretical frameworks, professional norms, or practical techniques that the mediation field has developed. Conversely, the mediation literature, with notable exceptions such as Bercovitch and Jackson (2001), Wallensteen (2015), and Cobb (2013), has engaged only sporadically with the distinctive features of post-conflict contexts: the legal obligations that constrain party autonomy, the asymmetric relationships between mediators and parties, the inclusion imperatives imposed by international norms, and the systemic challenge posed by the simultaneous pursuit of peace and accountability.

Pillars of transitional justice

Criminal accountability. One of the most contested areas in which mediation intersects with transitional justice concerns criminal accountability for atrocity crimes. The Rome Statute of 1998 obliges signatory states to prosecute or extradite those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, a framework that significantly constrains the room for mediators to offer blanket amnesties. Yet the practical dynamics of peace negotiations often create pressure to provide immunity incentives to powerful armed actors.

The Colombian peace process between 2012 and 2016, between the government and the FARC-EP guerrilla organisation, offers a paradigmatic illustration of how mediation can navigate this tension. Under the mediation of Cuba and Norway, the parties negotiated the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a sui generis accountability mechanism that conditions reduced sentences on truth-telling and reparations (Uprimny 2017). It represents a mediated compromise that attempts to satisfy both the demands of international criminal law and the pragmatic imperatives of securing FARC participation in a settlement. Whether it succeeds in producing meaningful accountability remains contested, but it demonstrates the creative potential of mediation to generate innovative institutional forms.

Truth and memory. Truth commissions are perhaps the clearest institutional expression of mediation’s role in transitional justice. They function as structured spaces for the negotiated production of authoritative historical accounts, balancing individual testimony against institutional narrative, and personal suffering against collective memory. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995 under the chairmanship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is widely regarded as the paradigmatic case. By offering amnesty conditional on full disclosure of politically motivated crimes, it mediated between the African National Congress’s preference for truth over trials and the apartheid security establishment’s demand for legal protection (Tutu 1999).

Hayner (2011) documents more than forty truth commissions established since 1974, finding that their effectiveness is significantly shaped by the degree of political independence they enjoy, the breadth of their investigative mandates, and their access to state archives. Mediation contributes to all three dimensions: in the design phase, mediators negotiate commission mandates with parties; during operation, commissioners themselves mediate between survivors, perpetrators, and the state; and in the follow-up phase, mediators may assist governments in implementing commission recommendations.

Reparations. Reparations, encompassing restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition, require extensive negotiation over eligibility, form, quantum, and administration. Mediation facilitates these negotiations by creating structured dialogue between victim groups, who may have competing claims, perpetrator states or armed groups, who may deny liability, and international donors, whose financial contributions may be conditional on specific arrangements. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has developed extensive jurisprudence on reparations that serves as a normative framework for such negotiations, though mediators must often translate these legal standards into politically viable compromises.

Sierra Leone’s experience with the Special Court and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission illustrates the challenges of mediating reparations in resource-poor contexts. Despite the court’s significant prosecutorial achievements, reparations for survivors remained woefully underfunded, partly because the parallel operation of two accountability mechanisms created confusion over institutional responsibilities and partly because the mediation of donor contributions did not adequately prioritise reparative dimensions (Schabas 2004). This case underscores the importance of integrated mediation that addresses accountability and reparations simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Institutional reform. Guarantees of non-recurrence, the fourth pillar of transitional justice, require the reform of institutions that enabled or perpetrated past abuses, including the military, police, judiciary, and civil service. Security sector reform and the disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration of combatants are the most politically sensitive aspects of post-conflict institutional reform, and mediation plays a central role in facilitating them. Parties to a conflict have powerful incentives to resist institutional reform that diminishes their control over coercive resources, and international mediators must deploy a combination of incentives, guarantees, and procedural safeguards to overcome this resistance.

Rwanda’s post-genocide experience offers an instructive, if cautionary, case. The Gacaca community courts, a mediated hybrid of customary law and formal justice, processed more than 1.9 million cases between 2002 and 2012, providing both accountability and truth at a scale that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda could not achieve (Rettig 2008). However, critics argue that the courts, operating under a dominant government, provided insufficient protection for the rights of accused persons and were used instrumentally to consolidate political power rather than to produce genuine reconciliation. The lesson is that mediated institutional reforms must be insulated from political capture if they are to generate legitimate and durable outcomes.

Normative dilemmas: the peace and justice dilemma

The core normative tension in post-conflict transitional justice is the so-called peace and justice dilemma. This refers to the perceived incompatibility between the demands of peace negotiations, which may require offering amnesty or impunity to powerful actors in order to secure their participation in a settlement, and the demands of international criminal law, which obliges states to prosecute those responsible for crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes (Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003).

Scholars remain deeply divided on this question. Some argue that accountability is constitutive of peace, because impunity perpetuates cycles of violence (Sikkink 2011). Others maintain that premature prosecutions may destabilise fragile transitions by threatening actors whose cooperation is necessary for security sector reform and democratic consolidation (Huntington 1991). Mediation operates precisely at this fault line. A skilled mediator must manage the expectations of victims who demand justice, perpetrators who seek immunity, international actors who impose legal obligations, and domestic political elites who may prioritise stability over accountability. The quality of mediation in transitional settings is therefore measured not only by whether it produces a peace agreement but by whether that agreement adequately incorporates justice mechanisms that can survive the post-agreement period.

The result is a disciplinary gap that is not merely academic in its consequences: mediators operating in post-conflict settings routinely face dilemmas for which neither the transitional justice literature nor the mediation literature provides adequate guidance.

Amnesty and the limits of compromise

The granting of amnesty is the most divisive normative question in transitional justice mediation. International humanitarian law and customary international law impose obligations to prosecute the most serious international crimes, but peace negotiations frequently produce amnesty arrangements that shield perpetrators from accountability. The Lomé Peace Agreement of 1999, which mediated an end to Sierra Leone’s civil war, included a blanket amnesty for rebel forces including those responsible for systematic amputations, sexual violence, and the recruitment of child soldiers. The Special Representative of the United Nations signed the agreement but appended a reservation stating that the amnesty would not apply to crimes under international humanitarian law, a reservation that proved practically ineffective but normatively significant.

Inclusion and representation

Transitions negotiated exclusively between armed elites tend to produce settlements that reflect elite interests rather than the needs of affected populations, particularly women, minorities, and economically marginalised groups. The gendered dimensions of transitional justice and mediation have received growing scholarly attention. Women experience conflict in differentiated ways, including exposure to sexual violence and reproductive coercion, yet remain systematically underrepresented in formal peace negotiations. This exclusion shapes the design of post-conflict justice frameworks, often resulting in mechanisms that inadequately address gender-based harms and fail to incorporate gender-sensitive reparative approaches (O’Rourke 2013).

Design principles for effective mediation in transitional justice

Drawing on the foregoing analysis, several design principles emerge for mediators operating in post-conflict transitional contexts.

First, mediators could pursue integrated rather than sequential approaches to the pillars of transitional justice, ensuring that accountability, truth, reparations, and institutional reform are addressed in a coordinated and mutually reinforcing manner. Piecemeal approaches that deal with one pillar at a time risk producing agreements that optimise for one dimension at the expense of others.

Second, mediators could build inclusive processes from the outset, not as an afterthought. Women, youth, civil society organisations, and marginalised communities should be structurally incorporated into negotiating processes rather than consulted in parallel tracks that have limited influence over outcomes. This requires mediators to actively challenge the tendency of powerful parties to restrict participation to those with military capacity.

Third, mediators could engage proactively with international legal frameworks rather than treating them as external constraints. The obligations of international criminal law and international humanitarian law define the normative space within which mediation operates and provide important leverage over parties who might otherwise demand sweeping impunity. Mediators who understand this framework can use it creatively to design accountability mechanisms, such as the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace, that satisfy both legal obligations and political imperatives.

Fourth, mediators could invest in capacity-building for post-agreement implementation. Many transitional justice processes fail not at the negotiation stage but at the implementation stage, when political will erodes, resources prove insufficient, or institutional capacity is inadequate. Mediators can contribute to implementation resilience by building monitoring mechanisms, securing multi-year international funding commitments, and establishing clear performance benchmarks against which progress can be assessed.

SUMMARY *

The article’s contribution is to identify a gap between two literatures and to show that the gap has practical consequences. Transitional justice scholarship treats mediation as an unexamined precondition of the mechanisms it studies; mediation scholarship treats the legal obligations that constrain transitional settlements as background. The practitioner who must design a truth commission mandate, negotiate the scope of an amnesty, or sequence security sector reform against prosecutions therefore works without guidance from either. The four cases assembled here identify the variable that distinguishes the more from the less successful, and it is not the ambition of the design but its insulation: the mechanism that survives is the one whose independence from the parties who created it was secured in the agreement rather than assumed afterwards.

CONCLUSION

Mediation in post-conflict transitional justice is an indispensable but deeply contested practice. It operates at the intersection of competing moral imperatives, peace and accountability, stability and justice, elite negotiation and popular participation, and must navigate these tensions without clear templates or guaranteed outcomes. The cases examined in this article demonstrate that mediation can generate innovative institutional forms capable of bridging these imperatives, as in the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace or the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but also that poor design, elite capture, or inadequate international support can produce processes that reproduce impunity under the guise of transitional justice.

The design principles set out above offer a partial but grounded answer to the question of what conditions make mediation effective: integration across the four pillars of transitional justice, inclusive process design that reaches beyond armed elites, proactive engagement with international legal frameworks, and sustained investment in post-agreement implementation. These principles do not resolve every normative dilemma that mediators face, nor do they substitute for the political will that remains the precondition of any durable settlement. What they provide is a more precise specification of the variables, such as third-party conduct, process architecture, and institutional design.

In the many active and nascent transitional processes unfolding across the world today, in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Ukraine, mediation choices will shape whether millions of survivors receive acknowledgement, redress, and the assurance that the past will not be repeated. The stakes of getting those choices right are too high to leave the question unanswered.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s framing of the peace and justice dilemma is the point at which the field has moved furthest since the debate it describes, and reporting that movement strengthens the argument.

The empirical question has largely been settled against the position that prosecutions destabilise transitions. The comparative work, notably Sikkink’s and the large-N studies that followed, finds that states which pursued accountability did not experience worse subsequent outcomes and in several respects experienced better ones, with lower recurrence of repression and stronger rule of law. That does not dispose of the dilemma, because the difficulty is not whether prosecutions are compatible with peace in general but whether a particular armed actor will sign an agreement that exposes him personally to trial. The reframing that has proved useful in practice is therefore about sequencing rather than about choosing: nothing in the obligation to prosecute specifies when, and a settlement that defers prosecutions while preserving them, through suspended proceedings, extended limitation periods, or the conditionality the Colombian mechanism employs, satisfies the legal requirement without demanding the concession at the moment it cannot be given.

The article’s treatment of amnesty can be sharpened by the distinction that now governs. Blanket amnesty for international crimes is incompatible with the obligations the author cites and has been so held by regional courts, the Sierra Leonean Special Court among them. Conditional amnesty, granted individually on proof of full disclosure and subject to revocation, is a different instrument, and it is what the South African commission operated and what the Colombian jurisdiction elaborated. Whether the second satisfies the obligation to prosecute is genuinely contested; that it is not the same thing as the first is not.

Two additions on the practical proposals. The integration principle is right and the harder question is which pillar leads, since the sequence has consequences: reparations delivered early build the constituency that later sustains the other mechanisms, while prosecutions pursued first frequently exhaust the political capital available for anything else. And on inclusion, the evidence has become specific enough to be actionable: agreements with women’s substantive participation are significantly more likely to be implemented and to endure, and the mechanism identified is not representation as such but the broader range of issues that reach the table when the participants are not exclusively those who carried weapons.

Finally, one observation about the case the article treats as cautionary. The difficulty with the Gacaca courts was not that they were a hybrid, nor that they were community-based, but that they were established and supervised by one party to the conflict, and no procedural safeguard survives that. The transferable principle is the one the article states and could state more forcefully: what determines whether a transitional mechanism produces justice or its appearance is not its design but who controls it, and that question is settled in the agreement or it is not settled at all.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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Snyder, J., and L. Vinjamuri (2003). Trials and Errors: Principle and Pragmatism in Strategies of International Justice. International Security, 28(3), 5 to 44.

Tutu, D. (1999). No Future without Forgiveness. Doubleday, New York.

United Nations, Secretary-General (2004). The Rule of Law and Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-Conflict Societies, S/2004/616.

Uprimny, R. (2017). Transitional Justice and Peace Processes in Colombia. In Beyond the Binary: Securing Peace and Promoting Justice after Conflict. Dejusticia, Bogotá.

Wallensteen, P. (2015). Understanding Conflict Resolution (4th edition). Sage, London.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998, Preamble and Articles 17 and 53.

Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace, Colombia, 24 November 2016, in particular the Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition.

Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995, South Africa.

Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front, Lomé, 7 July 1999, and the Statute of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, 2002, Article 10.

Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Barrios Altos v. Peru, 2001, and Gelman v. Uruguay, 2011, on the incompatibility of blanket amnesties with the American Convention.

United Nations Commission on Human Rights (2005). Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity, E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1.

Olsen, T. D., Payne, L. A., & Reiter, A. G. (2010). Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy. United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington D.C.

Krause, J., Krause, W., & Bränfors, P. (2018). Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and the Durability of Peace. International Interactions, 44(6), 985 to 1016.

A Treaty Built to be Broken: An Assessment of the 28-Point “Plan for Peace”

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article analyses a document leaked in November 2025 and assesses the conduct of the governments involved. That assessment reflects the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral as between the parties. The document analysed was a draft that was not agreed by all parties named in it, and negotiations have continued since; readers should treat the analysis as an assessment of that text at that date rather than of any subsequent version.

ABSTRACT

The leaked Plan for Peace of 20 November 2025 exposes a structurally incoherent and diplomatically unbalanced framework that privileges Russian strategic aims while burdening Ukraine with extensive concessions, ambiguous obligations, and structurally unsound guarantees. Presented as a 28-point memorandum, the plan purports to confirm Ukrainian sovereignty, stabilize European security, and establish a durable ceasefire, yet its vague terminology, exclusion of Ukraine and Europe from negotiations, and repeated intrusion upon NATO and EU prerogatives fundamentally undermine its legitimacy. The document’s treatment of sovereignty, security guarantees, territorial arrangements, and constitutional constraints reveals a pattern of asymmetry; Ukraine is asked to curtail its military capacity, abandon NATO aspirations, accept de facto Russian territorial gains, and submit to externally imposed domestic reforms, while Russia faces minimal substantive obligations beyond symbolic legislative gestures and loosely framed commitments to non-aggression. Simultaneously, the United States positions itself as guarantor, mediator, and beneficiary, often in a manner contradictory to its own domestic and international policy, reflecting the continued erosion of its reliability as an international partner. Embedded within the plan is a broader architecture of strategic vagueness, institutional overreach, and diplomatic exclusion that invites misinterpretation and incentivizes future conflict. Taken as a whole, the proposal functions less as a viable peace settlement than as a blueprint for geopolitical instability, embedding future points of contestation and reinforcing the very conditions it purports to resolve.

KEYWORDS

Ukraine, Russia, United States, Europe, European Union, NATO, diplomacy, mediation, Plan for Peace, Russo-Ukrainian War, conflict resolution, conflict escalation

INTRODUCTION

On November 20, 2025, a proposed peace deal to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine was leaked by Axios, revealing the diplomatic dynamic between Russia and the United States in their joint approach to Ukraine, Europe, and international norms (Ravid and Lawler 2025). Widely criticized as a capitulation to Russian interests, the plan has been described as fundamentally flawed, both in substance and structure. Ukraine and Europe were excluded from the process, leaving the proposals fundamentally one-sided (Harmash et al. 2025). It could be argued that this plan was intended as a first draft of sorts, intended to be shared with Ukraine as a starting point for negotiations. This benefit of doubt was undermined when Reuters announced the following day that an anonymous source claimed the White House has threatened to revoke weapons and intelligence in order to strong-arm them into agreeing, a claim further reinforced by an address by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, sharing that Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner (Balmforth 2025; Novikov and Hatton 2025). Here we will examine the provisions laid out in the 28-point plan, reviewing the verbiage therein, diplomatic implications, and potential ramifications for the future of the conflict.

MAIN CORPUS

Points 1 and 2: sovereignty and non-aggression

The plan starts with a proposed confirmation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, without specificity as to what parties will be confirming, or when said confirmation will take place. We are left to assume Russia will be the party to confirm sovereignty, whatever confirm means in this context is left ambiguous, and thus, without actual meaning. Ukraine’s sovereignty was already guaranteed in 1997 under the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, which established the inviolability of the nation’s shared borders, which was first violated during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, along with Russia’s militarization of the Donbas. In regard to Point 2, specifically the ambiguities of the last 30 years, no detail is offered as to what this applies to, either territorially or otherwise, serving to only muddy the waters diplomatically, setting the stage for potential future conflict when these ambiguous ambiguities are revealed to be, unsurprisingly, unsettled. Regardless, both points are undermined in following points ahead.

Point 3: expectations regarding invasion and enlargement

The term expected here leaves the doors open for future incursions by Russia, which has shown a willingness to violate numerous times over the last few decades, regardless of treaty or agreement (Neplii 2024). More importantly, the agreement has no authority on the actions of NATO as a body, much less the NATO member nations themselves who would have to ratify or affirm the validity and applicability of the agreement. This reflects a vital gap in diplomatic understanding by the US officials involved in the language of the agreement, or perhaps an explicit attempt at leveraging ambiguity for future conflict.

Point 4: dialogue between Russia and NATO

Russia is expected to open dialogue with NATO, which includes the US, while the US simultaneously acts as its own mediator for the discussions it is party to? This can easily be excused as poor wording, though such an excuse is far from excusable in the context of war agreements. This may further reflect the US’s weakening alignment with broader NATO member state sentiment, almost framing itself as a distinct party from NATO itself (Schreer 2019). The substance of the point itself holds little weight, only enforcing dialogue to no concrete ends, though the essence of cooperation and conflict de-escalation are present.

Point 5: security guarantees

Axios notes in their article covering the leaked plan that Point 5 is intended to functionally guarantee NATO-style protections to Ukraine, meaning an attack on Ukraine will invoke an Article 5 response to Russia (Ravid 2025). Although a substantial guarantee that utilitarianly incorporates Ukraine into the NATO framework, it again has no bearing on the actual behavior of NATO itself, a recurring theme throughout the proposed plan. Why this language was excluded from the plan itself is unclear. This provision also exemplifies the US’s reputational decay as an unreliable partner, given the US had already provided security guarantees as a part of the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, in which the US and Russia acknowledged Ukraine’s territorial integrity and offered assurances of support in case of attack, which Russia has since violated and the US has increasingly failed to honor, particularly during the current administration (Kimball 2022). This follows other notable bilateral agreements which the US has unilaterally violated in recent years, such as the Iran Nuclear Deal and a plethora of congressionally passed free-trade agreements with several nations. Though the details of these arrangements are beyond the scope of this paper, they serve to highlight the deterioration of the US’s long-standing reputation as a reliable partner, and bulwark of international order.

Point 6: limitation of armed forces

This point serves to reduce Ukraine’s military capacity, undermining the nation’s sovereignty in Point 1 outright, and reducing their forces by nearly one third of their current troop volume. When considering agreements between parties in conflict, it is vital to assess the potential for future conflict, and how said agreements can reduce said potential, or set the stage for escalation if a party violates the agreement. It is a balancing act between the realities of the present, grievances of the past, and most importantly, threats of the future (Goertz and Diehl 2002). While Ukraine is given a demand to limit troop volumes, Russia is not given any such demand, which acts to incentivize future aggression against a weakened opponent. This is merely one aspect of the plan that sets the stage for future conflict, which will be illustrated in future points.

Points 7 and 8: constitutional undertakings and stationing of troops

Demands on a democratic nation to amend its constitution undermines the process of civilian rule, forcing elected representatives to make decisions which the people they are obligated to represent may not favor. Though language present undermines norms of democracy, substantively it repeats the measures intended in Point 3, which already prohibits Ukraine’s entry into NATO. These proposals serve to weaken the international standing of NATO, contradicting consistent messaging by NATO leadership and member states of Ukrainian inclusion. NATO member states, such as the United Kingdom and France, had been working towards developing a coalition of peacekeeping forces to enter Ukraine when the war concludes, which this plan intends to sabotage. It also undermines the ongoing efforts to incorporate Ukraine’s military industry and infrastructure into NATO’s structure (The Associated Press 2025).

Point 9: stationing of aircraft

How an agreement between the US, Russia, and Ukraine is to dictate the stationing of fighter jets in Poland is unclear, nor is the number of jets, and what constitutes European in this context.

Point 10: the conditions of the guarantee

The order of operations in Point 10 is poorly structured, though it is clear the intent is to specify security guarantees, but fails in clarity and further pigeonholes Ukraine against any actions to reclaim territory seized by Russia. This is particularly important given the ambiguity as to which party controls what territory, as there is substantial overlap over claims, particularly in regions claimed by Russia but without troop presence (Ravid and Lawler 2025). In addition, the ambiguity of global sanctions begs the question as to what nations are subject to these agreements. While the global community has largely ostracised Russia economically, they are not beholden to the agreements in this plan. Though if we assume this statute only applies to the US, it should be clarified. In addition, why only two Russian cities are included in the final detail is unclear, in a sense implying Ukraine is permitted to strike other cities with missiles, which is certainly not intended, speaking to the deficient phrasing and structure of the overall plan. Additionally, the prioritization of US compensation in this point speaks to a lack of sincerity in how it engages with partners, tying safety to monetary gain, though simultaneously neglecting any detail as to how compensation will be agreed upon by the parties, who the parties are, and opening the door for the US to falter on its guarantee when inevitable disagreements over reimbursement arise.

Points 11 and 12: European accession and reconstruction

Ukraine’s EU eligibility is reaffirmed under these points, though it lacks substantive weight, as Ukraine was already eligible and in the process of incorporating itself into the EU as the conflict has progressed (Soloviova and Fomin 2025). This agreement also has no bearing on the actions of the EU, and given the lack of European involvement in this plan, eligibility for EU membership to a nation that is already in negotiations to join remains irrelevant. As for Point 12, various guarantees are offered for economic and infrastructure repair for Ukraine, though the ambiguous use of the term powerful and global implies additional nations participating, who are not signatories to this agreement and played no role in its formation. This again weakens the commitments as it predicates the verbiage on an unreliable variable.

Points 13 to 16: reintegration, frozen assets, and legislative undertakings

The following points all pertain to Russia’s relationship with the US and the global economy. The integration of Russia back into international commerce is entirely dependent on other nations, who again, were not involved in the creation of this framework. One hundred billion dollars of frozen funds are reserved for the rebuilding of Ukraine under US direction, while the remaining two hundred billion are reserved as capital for joint US-Russian projects aiming to prevent future conflict. Lastly, Russia agrees to sign non-aggression into law, though Russia’s reputation as an unreliable partner, with countless violations of their own laws and constitution documented under their authoritarian administration, turns this legislative promise into a mere suggestion.

Points 17 to 19: nuclear provisions

These provisions pertain to the de-escalation of nuclear tensions and management of nuclear resources. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, currently under Russian occupation, is put under neutral supervision and output is split evenly between the parties. Perhaps one of the most concise aspects of the peace plan, laying out clear, binding terms of agreement.

Point 20: education, tolerance, and ideology

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the proposed plan is in the framing of racial intolerance and Nazism, a misleading narrative perpetuated by Russia as a justification for the invasion of Ukraine, predicated on Russian national pride in regards to their victory in the Second World War (Kloo et al. 2024). The irony of the point is that both Russia, and particularly the US, has larger numbers of neo-Nazi and white nationalist movements (Dragas 2021; Lefebvre 2023). While stipulations such as these are typically seen as non-binding cross-cultural niceties, the involvement of the US poisons the waters when it comes to oversight of said initiatives, given the erasure of racial and cross-cultural education and programs under the current administration, and broader backsliding on civil rights, even targeting of specific people groups, including linguistic minorities (Stockemer 2025). This has situated the US in the broader international context as adversarial, which has resulted in weakened ties with other nations and dramatic reductions in tourism to the US, particularly as domestic ideological and ethnic conflicts continue to escalate (Chen 2025). This is to say, it is understood that the intent of these provisions are to reinforce the rhetoric and narratives that have been used as a vector of conflict to target Ukraine.

Points 21 to 23: territory and transit

Recognition of de facto occupation translates to, in essence, de jure. Perhaps this again is a byproduct of poor wording, though as discussed before, this pattern opens the door for reinterpretation, which may be the intent. The binding language regarding territorial claims provides no concessions from Russia, and demands additional concessions from Ukraine, functionally handing Russia an outcome fully aligned with their war aim (Kamil and Sudirman 2025). The only benefit offered to Ukraine in this set of points is the use of the Dnipro River.

Point 24: humanitarian matters

This point included additional components dealing with the exchange of prisoners and children, though did not specify the abduction of thousands of children by Russia during the conflict (Frantsuz et al. 2023). The establishment of a family reunification program, while promising, lacks the necessary depth and detail, a recurring theme throughout the plan. The only other thing of note is the use of the term hostages which could be interpreted to include war criminals who have been apprehended over the course of the conflict.

Point 25: elections

Ukraine’s elections were purportedly only delayed due to the ongoing conflict, which disrupted civic and political institutions necessary to establish equitable liberal functions, and has been largely seen as acceptable by the international community. The inclusion of this point echoes conspiratorial narratives targeting Ukraine and framing the nation as an authoritarian regime, amplified by Russian misinformation campaigns, which international monitors have debunked (Flakus et al. 2025).

Points 26 to 28: amnesty, monitoring, and entry into force

What constitutes parties is left vague, providing dangerously broad applications. Do individuals in the US and various European administrations also receive amnesty? If the actions were taken during the invasion but were irrelevant to the conflict, do they still count? While the questions appear facetious on face value, as the intent is easily inferred, again we are left with the potential repercussions of the substantive and structural deficits therein. Furthermore, how sanctions will be imposed, and by whom, leaves the door open for interpretive bias and misapplication, particularly given the ambiguity throughout the verbiage of the entire framework.

SUMMARY *

The article’s method is its contribution. Rather than assessing the draft politically, the author reads it as a legal instrument and asks of each provision what a party could later claim it meant, who is bound, and what happens if it is breached. The recurring answers are that the operative verbs are conditional, that a substantial number of provisions purport to bind organisations that were not present, and that the obligations are distributed asymmetrically in a manner that would leave one party constrained and the other largely at liberty. From this the author draws a conclusion about function rather than intent: whatever was meant, a text of this construction produces future disputes as a matter of design, because ambiguity is not a defect in an instrument whose signatories differ about what they are signing but a condition of their signing at all.

CONCLUSION

As stated before, any peace agreement must consider the past, present, and future. This plan speaks to only Russian grievances and Ukrainian concessions, leaving it dangerously one-sided. The territorial, rhetorical, and non-binding framing positions Ukraine in a vulnerable dynamic with Russia, rendering it closely dependent on future reinterpretations and policy exploitation, seemingly designed to create plausible deniability and even justification for conflict in the coming years. Those provisions that appear binding consist of arrangements that are substantively vague or fatally structured. The decision ahead of Ukraine is indeed a difficult one, and will have repercussions for democracy abroad and the Western world’s liberal order for the coming decades.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s most valuable finding is one it treats as a criticism and which is better understood as a description of how such texts are made, because that reframing determines what a reader should do with the document.

Constructive ambiguity is a standard instrument. Where two parties cannot agree on a formulation, a phrase that each can read in its own way permits a signature that would otherwise be impossible, and a number of durable settlements rest on precisely such phrases. The distinction that matters is between ambiguity on the peripheral questions, which buys time for the central bargain to consolidate, and ambiguity on the central question itself, which postpones the dispute without resolving it. Judged that way, the provisions the author identifies are of the second kind: what confirm means in relation to sovereignty, what the thirty years of ambiguities are, and whether de facto recognition is or is not de jure are not peripheral matters but the entire substance. A text of this construction has not created a settlement; it has created a document that both sides can sign and then litigate.

Two structural observations follow, and both concern who is bound. A bilateral instrument cannot impose obligations on a third party, which means the provisions purporting to commit the Atlantic alliance, the European Union, and unspecified other states are, as the author says, without effect, and would require separate instruments concluded by those bodies according to their own procedures. And a commitment to amend a constitution is not within the gift of any executive: in the Ukrainian case, alterations of territory require a national referendum, so an undertaking of that kind is a promise to attempt something rather than to deliver it. Both points are legal rather than political and neither depends on any view of the merits.

The most consequential deficiency is the one the article approaches through Point 10, and it deserves to be named directly: a security guarantee that requires a decision at the moment of crisis is not a guarantee. The distinction between automatic and discretionary commitments is the whole of deterrence, and it is precisely why the assurances given in 1994 failed to prevent what followed. Any arrangement in which the guarantor decides, after an attack, whether the conditions for its guarantee have been met leaves the guarantee where it was, and both parties will read it accordingly.

Two observations on the analysis itself. The strongest passages are those that stay with the text, and the passages that move to the domestic politics of the guarantor, on tourism, on civil rights, and on the comparative prevalence of extremist movements, are the ones a reader unsympathetic to the argument will use to set the whole aside. The point they are making, that a state which has resiled from previous undertakings will be discounted when it offers new ones, is sound and stands on the record of those undertakings alone. And the article’s implicit standard, that an agreement should be assessed by whether its terms will still mean the same thing in five years to both parties, is the right standard and is worth stating explicitly, because it is the one question a mediator asks of any draft and the one that this document, on the author’s reading, does not survive.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Balmforth, T. (2025) Exclusive: US Threatens to Cut Intel, Weapons to Press Ukraine into Peace Deal, Sources Say. Reuters, 21 November 2025.

Chen, N. (2025) The Self-Inflicted Injury to US Tourism That’s Making Some Americans Angry and Disappointed. CNN, 31 August 2025.

Dragas, O. (2021) Russism, New Nazism: Denazifying Denazifier. The Romanian Journal of Society and Politics 15(2).

Flakus, M., Koc, P., Plisiecki, H., and A. Pokropek (2025) Behind Beliefs: Collective Narcissism, Political Orientation, and Belief in Disinformation in the Time of War in Ukraine. Social Psychology 56(1).

Frantsuz, A., Stepanenko, N., and D. Shevchenko (2023) Abduction of Ukrainian Children during Full-Scale Invasion. Journal of International Legal Communication 9.

Goertz, G., and P. F. Diehl (2002) Treaties and Conflict Management in Enduring Rivalries. International Negotiation 7(3).

Harmash, O., Hunder, M., and G. Slattery (2025) Zelenskiy Ready for Honest Work on US-Backed Plan as Europeans Push Back. Reuters, 20 November 2025.

Kamil, F. M., and A. Sudirman (2025) Russia’s Goals and Priorities in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. Journal of Public Representative and Society Provision 5(1).

Kimball, D. G. (2022) Ukraine, Nuclear Weapons, and Security Assurances at a Glance. Arms Control Association.

Kloo, I., Cruickshank, I. J., and K. M. Carley (2024) A Cross-Platform Topic Analysis of the Nazi Narrative on Twitter and Telegram during the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference 18.

Lefebvre, E. (2023) Masculinity, Race, and the Rise of the White Nationalist Movement. Doctoral dissertation, University of Ottawa.

Neplii, A. (2024) A Long History of How Russia Systematically Violates Peace Agreements. United 24.

Novikov, I., and B. Hatton (2025) Zelenskyy Says Ukraine Faces a Stark Choice and Risks Losing American Support over US Peace Plan. Associated Press, 21 November 2025.

Ravid, B. (2025) Trump Peace Plan for Ukraine Includes NATO-Style Security Guarantee. Axios, 21 November 2025.

Ravid, B., and D. Lawler (2025) Trump’s Full 28-Point Ukraine-Russia Peace Plan. Axios, 20 November 2025.

Ravid, B., and D. Lawler (2025) Putin Made Maximalist Claims to Ukrainian Territory in Trump Summit. Axios, 16 August 2025.

Schreer, B. (2019) Trump, NATO and the Future of Europe’s Defence. The RUSI Journal 164(1).

Soloviova, A., and A. Fomin (2025) Ukraine and the EU: Prospects and Challenges on the Road to Integration. Acta de Historia et Politica: Saeculum XXI 9.

Stockemer, D. (2025) Is the US Moving Toward Autocracy? A Critical Assessment. Politics and Policy 53(3).

The Associated Press (2025) European Military Leaders Discuss Ukraine Peacekeeping Force. NPR, 21 March 2025.

UNIAN (2025) Poroshenko’s Decree on Non-Extension of Treaty of Friendship with Russia Officially Published.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, 5 December 1994.

Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, 1997, terminated with effect from 1 April 2019.

Constitution of Ukraine, 1996, Article 73 on the alteration of territory and Article 156 on the procedure for constitutional amendment.

Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, Articles 31, 34 and 46.

North Atlantic Treaty, 1949, Articles 5 and 10.

Minsk Protocol, 5 September 2014, and the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, 12 February 2015.

Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization, 49(3), 379 to 414, on the commitment problem.

Bell, C. (2008). On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Cybersecurity and Mediation: New Frontier in Conflict Management

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

The digital age has transformed the nature of conflict, introducing new arenas where disputes arise and are resolved. Cybersecurity incidents ranging from state-sponsored cyberattacks to corporate data breaches now threaten not only national security but also interpersonal trust, business continuity, and international relations. While traditional mediation focuses on physical disputes, territorial conflicts, and interpersonal grievances, the emerging field of cyber-conflict management presents opportunities for mediators to adapt their skills. This article examines the relationship between conflict management and cybersecurity, identifies challenges and gaps, and proposes ways in which mediation frameworks can evolve to address disputes in the cyber domain.

KEYWORDS

Cybersecurity, mediation, conflict management, cyber conflict, digital diplomacy, alternative dispute resolution

INTRODUCTION

Conflict is not a new phenomenon; however, the digital age has fundamentally altered its landscape. From phishing scams targeting individuals to state-level cyber warfare, disputes are increasingly mediated through technological platforms. The question then arises: How can mediation, a practice rooted in dialogue and nonviolent resolution, adapt to the challenges posed by cyberspace?

This article argues that cybersecurity is not only a technical issue but also a conflict management problem. By reframing cyber disputes as conflicts requiring structured resolution, mediators can extend their relevance into the digital sphere.

MAIN CORPUS

The changing nature of conflict in the digital age

Traditionally, conflict management has dealt with physical disputes like armed conflict, workplace disputes, or intercultural disagreements. In contrast, cyber conflicts differ in their anonymity, borderless nature, and rapid escalation. The anonymity of actors complicates accountability, as it is often difficult to identify who initiated a cyberattack or prove intent (Rid and Buchanan 2015). The borderless impact of these conflicts amplifies their complexity: a single cyber incident can affect individuals, organizations, and states across multiple jurisdictions, creating a web of legal and diplomatic entanglements (Kello 2017). Furthermore, the scale and speed at which cyber conflicts unfold leave little time for conventional diplomatic or legal intervention. As Lin (2012) observes, escalation in cyberspace occurs almost instantaneously, often before any formal response mechanisms can be activated.

These characteristics place cyber disputes outside the comfort zone of traditional mediation but also open a new frontier for innovation. The transnational and decentralized nature of cyberspace demands approaches that combine technical expertise with human-centered conflict resolution skills. Mediators, accustomed to navigating interpersonal and organizational disputes, can provide value by introducing dialogue, fostering trust, and facilitating collaborative problem-solving in this volatile environment.

Conflict management approaches in cybersecurity

Technical and legal frameworks have typically dominated responses to cyber incidents. Organizations invest in firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and incident response teams to protect themselves, while states develop cyber laws, international conventions, and regulatory standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation. Although these measures are vital, they primarily address the mechanical aspects of security rather than the underlying human and relational dynamics that drive or exacerbate conflict.

Legal remedies tend to focus on identifying fault and assigning punishment, emphasizing deterrence and compliance over relationship repair. Technical solutions, though essential for system recovery, often stop short of restoring trust among stakeholders affected by a breach. Similarly, diplomatic responses, while critical at the intergovernmental level, can move too slowly to contain the rapid escalation typical of cyber conflicts. These approaches illustrate a shared limitation: they solve what happened but rarely address why it happened or how relationships can be restored afterward.

This gap highlights an opportunity for mediation frameworks to contribute. Mediation, grounded in dialogue, confidentiality, and impartial facilitation, can help conflicting parties explore interests beyond positions, rebuild trust, and develop joint strategies for prevention. By focusing on human communication and mutual understanding, mediation can complement existing cybersecurity mechanisms and provide a sustainable path toward long-term cooperation and collaboration.

Mediation principles applied to cyber disputes

Applying mediation to cyber disputes involves translating its traditional principles into the digital context. One of the most critical elements is confidential dialogue. When stakeholders such as victims, regulators, or cybersecurity experts are brought together in a secure and neutral environment, they can discuss the impacts and potential remedies of an incident without the adversarial tone of litigation. Such dialogue can transform defensiveness into collaboration and foster shared responsibility for future safeguards.

Mediation also aligns closely with restorative approaches. Instead of focusing solely on punishment, mediation provides a platform for affected parties to articulate the harm, express their needs, and agree on reparative actions. For example, following a data breach, a mediator could guide discussions not just on compensation but also on steps to rebuild public trust, improve communication, and strengthen preventive measures.

Equally important is the concept of preventive mediation, which focuses on early engagement to prevent conflicts from escalating. Just as labor mediators intervene to prevent strikes, cyber mediators could facilitate dialogue between governments, corporations, and civil society to address digital policy tensions or data-sharing concerns before they escalate into larger disputes. Preventive mediation reinforces the idea that dialogue and transparency are the first lines of defense in digital conflict management.

Challenges of applying mediation to cybersecurity

Despite its potential, the integration of mediation into cybersecurity practice presents several challenges. One significant difficulty lies in the attribution problem, where there is a persistent uncertainty in identifying who is responsible for a cyber incident. Without clear attribution, mediators may struggle to convene legitimate parties or ensure accountability. Additionally, a trust deficit exists within the cybersecurity ecosystem. Victims of attacks may perceive mediators as lacking technical expertise, while cybersecurity professionals might view mediation as too abstract or slow for crises.

Jurisdictional complexity further complicates cyber mediation. Cyber incidents often cross national boundaries, involving conflicting legal systems and privacy laws. This raises questions about the mediator’s authority and the enforceability of agreements reached through dialogue.

Ultimately, power asymmetry poses a significant challenge. In cyberspace, state actors, multinational corporations, and individual users possess vastly different levels of influence and resources. Mediators must navigate these imbalances carefully to ensure fairness and inclusivity. Addressing these challenges requires mediators to expand their skill set. Digital literacy, awareness of cyber law, and collaboration with technical experts will be essential to ensure credibility and effectiveness. Ethical considerations, particularly regarding confidentiality, neutrality, and informed consent, must also evolve in tandem with the digital landscape.

Possible solutions and future directions

One promising strategy is the creation of hybrid mediation teams that combine conflict resolution professionals with cybersecurity experts. This collaboration allows mediators to maintain neutrality and process management while relying on technical specialists for factual clarity. Such interdisciplinary teams can bridge the knowledge gap that often hinders communication between policy makers, IT specialists, and affected parties.

Developing cyber-mediation frameworks within international or regional organizations, such as the United Nations, the OSCE, or the International Telecommunication Union, could institutionalize these practices. These frameworks would provide standardized procedures for resolving cross-border cyber disputes, similar to the mechanisms already used by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in domain name conflicts.

Capacity building is another critical step. Mediators should be trained in digital literacy, cyber law, and data ethics to strengthen their ability to manage technologically complex conflicts. Meanwhile, institutional platforms dedicated to cyber conflict resolution could serve as neutral spaces for dialogue and research, supporting both preventive and reactive mediation efforts.

Finally, maintaining ethical standards and confidentiality remains central. Given the sensitivity of digital information, mediators must ensure that discussions, evidence, and agreements are protected from unauthorized use and misuse. This ethical vigilance will help sustain trust in cyber mediation as a credible and safe process for addressing disputes.

SUMMARY *

The article’s proposition is that a class of dispute currently handled by technicians and lawyers has a relational dimension that neither addresses. A breach damages a relationship between a company and its customers, between two states, or between a supplier and a client, and the remedies available, a patched system and a damages award, leave that relationship where they found it. The three features the author identifies as distinguishing cyber conflict, anonymity, borderlessness, and speed, are also the three features that make litigation and diplomacy poor instruments here, since each presupposes an identified counterparty, a competent forum, and time. The argument that follows is that mediation’s comparative advantage lies precisely where those presuppositions fail.

CONCLUSION

Cybersecurity represents a new frontier for conflict management and mediation. While technical, legal, and diplomatic tools are indispensable, they alone cannot address the relational and trust-based dimensions of cyber disputes. Mediation’s focus on dialogue, impartiality, and mutual understanding makes it uniquely suited to complement these approaches. By incorporating mediation principles into cybersecurity practices, stakeholders can move beyond reactionary measures and embrace proactive collaboration.

The future of conflict management lies in recognizing that every cyber incident, at its core, is a human conflict expressed through technology. As mediators expand their practice into this domain, they will not only contribute to resolving digital disputes but also strengthen the foundations of trust and cooperation that underpin global security in the digital age.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article opens a field rather than settling a question, and what it most needs is the distinction between the several very different disputes it groups together, because they call for different responses and only some of them are mediable at all.

Where an attacker is unidentified and hostile, there is no mediation, because there is no second party willing to sit down. What exists instead is incident response and, at state level, attribution and deterrence. Where an attacker is identified and is a state, the relevant practice is the diplomacy of norms and confidence building, and it is further advanced than the article suggests: the United Nations groups of governmental experts have agreed voluntary norms of responsible state behaviour, and the OSCE has adopted confidence-building measures including points of contact reachable at short notice, which exist precisely to prevent an incident from being misread as an attack. Those channels are the closest thing to preventive mediation in this domain and they are underused.

The disputes that are genuinely mediable are the third category, and they are the commercially important one: disputes between parties who did not attack each other but who disagree about the consequences of an incident. A company and its cloud provider over who bore which obligation. An insurer and an insured over whether a policy responds. A firm and its customers over notification and compensation. A supplier and a client whose contract did not anticipate the failure. These involve identified parties with a continuing relationship, technical facts that neither side fully understands, and an urgent shared interest in avoiding public litigation. That is a mediator’s situation in the ordinary sense, and the field already exists in outline: several arbitral and mediation institutions have established panels of neutrals with technology expertise, and specialist protocols for technology disputes are in use.

Three practical points follow. Confidentiality here is not a professional courtesy but the reason parties come at all, since an incident that becomes public in litigation damages both sides; mediation’s private character is therefore its principal commercial advantage in this field, and it sits in tension with regulatory notification duties that are not waivable, which any protocol must address explicitly. Speed matters more than in most mediation, because the window in which a dispute can be settled before positions are fixed by public statement and regulatory filing is measured in days; expedited procedures with pre-appointed neutrals are the response. And the expertise problem the article identifies is real and has a standard solution that does not require the mediator to become an engineer: a jointly instructed neutral expert determines the technical facts, and the mediator works on what the parties do about them.

Finally, the article’s framing is worth pressing on one point. Prevention in this domain is largely contractual: the disputes described arise because agreements did not allocate responsibility for a foreseeable failure, and a great deal of the difficulty could be settled at the drafting stage by specifying who monitors, who notifies, who pays, and to whom a disagreement goes. That is unglamorous work and it is where a mediator with technical support is most useful, because the questions to be settled in advance are exactly the ones that will otherwise be fought over afterwards.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Kello, L. (2017). The Virtual Weapon and International Order. Yale University Press, New Haven.

Lin, H. (2012). Escalation Dynamics and Conflict Termination in Cyberspace. Strategic Studies Quarterly, 6(3), 46 to 70.

Rid, T., and B. Buchanan (2015). Attributing Cyber Attacks. Journal of Strategic Studies, 38(1 to 2), 4 to 37.

Singer, P. W., and A. Friedman (2014). Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, New York.

Zeleznikow, J. (2014). Cyberjustice: Online Dispute Resolution for E-Commerce. Springer.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Reports of the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security, and of the Open-Ended Working Group.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Decisions 1106 (2013) and 1202 (2016) on confidence-building measures to reduce the risks of conflict stemming from the use of information and communication technologies.

Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, Budapest, 2001, and the Second Additional Protocol, 2022.

Regulation (EU) 2016/679, General Data Protection Regulation, Articles 33 and 34 on notification of personal data breaches.

Schmitt, M. N. (Ed.) (2017). Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Silicon Valley Arbitration and Mediation Center, Tech List of neutrals with technology expertise.

World Intellectual Property Organization, Arbitration and Mediation Center, procedures for technology disputes, and the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy.

Katsh, E., & Rabinovich-Einy, O. (2017). Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes. Oxford University Press, New York.

Mental Health as a Hidden Casualty of Armed Conflict: Integrating Psychosocial Support into the Mediation Process

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

Considering all the consequences of an armed conflict, the mental health of the civilian population has one of the most significant implications. As a consequence of war and violence, trauma and emotional instability are common among people. For example, the war situation in Iraq, the Vietnam War, and even at the end of the First and Second World Wars, mental health casualties were significantly high. This occurs due to a number of reasons, including exposure to violence, trauma related to combat for military personnel, displacement, economic hardships, and the non-availability of services. In such a situation, it is essential to provide and integrate psychosocial support to those vulnerable people who are affected due to an armed conflict or a war-like situation, creating violence and loss of life. To be more specific, when mediating a situation, it is more important to have a supportive environment that encourages positivity and trauma-specific assistance so that the mental health victims can recover from the trauma, depression, and anxiety. This paper analyses how mental health is a hidden casualty of armed conflict and how integrating psychosocial support into the mediation process is relevant in supporting the mental health of victims of armed conflict.

KEYWORDS *

Mental health, armed conflict, psychosocial support, trauma, post-traumatic stress, displacement, children in conflict, transitional justice, reconciliation, community-based care, gender, peacebuilding

INTRODUCTION

Armed conflict not only affects physical health but also mental health. This is because of the violence experienced by the general population and combatants. It not only causes destruction of houses and properties but also causes displacement. The non-availability of essential public services also makes it difficult for people to find support during and after an armed conflict. According to research published by the World Bank Group, 2 billion people worldwide are affected by some form of conflict, which leads people to seek refuge in other countries, displacement of habitation, food insecurity, and lack of access to healthcare. Research also showed that more than 190 million people lost their lives because of armed conflict in the 20th century. This is why health facilities are required to integrate psychosocial support for the mental health victims due to armed conflict, so that better care and support can be provided. In a post-war mediation process, mental health support is necessary so that the affected parties can go back feeling normal and have access to essential services like education and healthcare. In this regard, a study concluded that anxiety levels are high among combatants and violence increases among civilians during armed conflict, which causes more than 90 per cent of the population to face some form of mental trauma and distress. Neglect, displacement, lack of education, food, and other essentials put people into an adverse situation without any alternative, which directly or indirectly affects their confidence, ability to perceive things, and have a positive outlook overall. For example, armed conflict in several African countries has shown high post-traumatic stress disorder (43%), insomnia (63%), depression (41%), and anxiety (45%), which is why health facilities must have integrated mental health support in African countries. This is why community-level mental and psychosocial support during and after armed conflict has been frequently suggested for countries in Africa. Also, in a post-war situation, it is important to help people transition to normal life, which is often known as transitional justice, which can be done through mediation and reconciliation. A very recent study in this regard took the example of Sri Lanka, which was in a huge civil and political turmoil affecting thousands of people, and this made the government build Mental Health and Psychosocial Support as a part of humanitarian assistance so that people can reintegrate themselves into a normal society. Therefore, mental health support is necessary considering the nature and extent of the mental health impact of armed conflict on people and combatants.

MAIN CORPUS

How is mental health affected by armed conflict?

The phrase “mental health as a hidden casualty” underscores how psychological wounds remain invisible compared to physical destruction, yet they are equally debilitating. In conflict zones, this manifests in three dimensions:

1. Direct impacts, trauma from exposure to violence, torture, or sexual assault.
2. Indirect impacts, anxiety and depression resulting from displacement, poverty, and insecurity.
3. Long-term impacts, intergenerational trauma transmitted through families, perpetuating mistrust and hostility.

“Psychosocial support” in mediation should be understood not merely as clinical therapy but as a broader ecosystem of care. This may include community-based counselling, peer-support groups, storytelling, rituals of remembrance, truth commissions, and cultural or religious healing practices. Recognizing psychosocial needs, therefore, requires mediators to move beyond legal texts toward fostering safe spaces where emotions and identities are acknowledged.

Violence, destruction and displacement

An armed conflict is expected to cause not only violence but also the displacement of people from their homes. Maybe because their home has been destroyed due to war, or they lived in a region that is struck by destructive military conflict. In this process, people lose their homes and are led to seek refuge elsewhere. A study noted that the breakdown of communities led to the displacement of people, which made it less safe to travel and seek refuge. Increased violence and disruption of law enforcement increased homicides in countries like Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Iraq. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that people losing their homes will definitely have a substantial impact on their mental health when they are not able to meet their every necessity. This can also be said to have an impact on the health outcomes of people since displacement also leads to a lack of access to essential services.

Depression, anxiety and trauma

The impact of armed conflict on mental health is not something uncommon, and several studies have confirmed the widespread suffering that humans face because of war and armed conflict between countries. For example, a study found that in Afghanistan, armed conflict has caused 67 per cent of the people to have suffered from depression and 52 per cent suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Another study found that symptoms of anxiety, PTSD, and depression were common in Afghanistan, which increased the risk factor of both adults and children. Similarly, research on the war in Iraq showed that more than 23 per cent of the combatants had depression and PTSD. Even the World Health Organisation affirmed that mental health as a casualty of armed conflict is more widespread than previously perceived, and it is difficult to describe the kinds of mental health issues caused by war until a person actually meets a victim or people affected by armed conflict. Additionally, another study discovered that war veterans with PTSD were more likely to experience metabolic abnormalities, sexual dysfunction, sleep disorders, psychoactive substance use disorders, and suicidal thoughts. Studies on the effects of armed conflict on combatants’ memory and other cognitive abilities have revealed that war veterans experience more attention, executive function, learning, memory, and visuospatial issues, and that these issues are mostly linked to military deployment. Therefore, it is imperative that these individuals have access to care and therapy for the support they need for psychosocial development and normality. Access to care is not only about enhancing mental health; it can also be a matter of survival because their diseases frequently affect their capacity to operate. Ignorance of mental health and mental disease is still pervasive in many nations.

Fear, loss of confidence and support

People who are restrained, imprisoned, and concealed from society may be identified as a result of the uptake of mental health care during emergencies and conflicts in nations where such assistance has been scarce. This very support frequently helps debunk misconceptions about mental illness, pave the way for care and treatment, and pave the way for a more respectable existence. For instance, before the war, countries like Syria and Lebanon had very little access to mental health services outside of the mental hospitals. However, due to a growing awareness of the need for support, mental health and psychosocial support have now been incorporated into school-based programming, community and women’s centres, and primary and secondary health facilities. Every nation has a duty to make investments in mental health. However, in populations affected by conflict, where the prevalence of mental health disorders is more than twice as high as in the general population, it is especially crucial. As mentioned earlier, armed conflict creates violence, and violence negatively affects the human brain and emotions, which leads people to have emotional and mental instability, making it difficult for them to feel normal. Recent research found that the psychological effects of conflict are more likely to affect women. There is proof that the anguish of mothers and children during a war is strongly correlated. In areas impacted by war, social support and traditional birth attendants play a significant role in fostering the psychosocial well-being of mothers. Women are vulnerable, but their ability to bounce back from adversity and support their families has been acknowledged. Numerous studies consistently show a clear relationship between the severity of psychiatric issues and the degree of trauma. The severity of the symptoms increases with the amount of physical and psychological trauma experienced. In order to minimise the negative impacts of conflict situations, subsequent life events and their correlation with the onset of psychiatric illnesses have significant significance for prompt and thorough rehabilitation.

Mental disorder among children

Children are extremely vulnerable to armed conflict. Since children are going through their developmental stages, a violent and disrupted society is detrimental to their growth and mental development. In this regard, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) initiated a psychosocial support programme for children depending on the nature of exposure to armed conflict and traumatic situations. Results showed that girls experienced more distress than boys among children. Similarly, women experienced more distress and trauma as compared to men among adults. Also, it has been found that children are dependent on social support, without which they are vulnerable to poor mental health and experience poor psychosocial development. Cultural experience and identity also play an important role when it comes to a child’s psychosocial development. A significant source of cultural identity and a basis for understanding trauma and recovery may be found in religion. According to a study conducted among resilient orphans among war-affected children in Sri Lanka, coping with challenges and fostering well-being can be achieved through Buddhist religious practices such as meditation, reciting the five precepts of Buddhism, reading stories about the Buddha, and developing an understanding of life’s circumstances. These exercises, in particular, were thought to provide structure and aid the kids in understanding and, eventually, coming to terms with the horrific past they had lived. This is where Bronfenbrenner’s classic ecological model of child development can be used to explain the social setting and relationships that provide the micro and macro systems required for the psychosocial development of children. These are the keys to a child’s development, based on the educational curriculum drafted in most schools and educational institutions. A lack of such support in a war-stricken region means the children in those regions are vulnerable to a lack of psychosocial development and would thus require mental health support integrated into the education system.

While all civilians suffer psychological consequences of war, women, children, and other vulnerable groups experience disproportionate harm. Sexual violence in conflict, often used systematically as a weapon of war, leaves lasting trauma, including stigma, shame, and social exclusion. Women are frequently caregivers, tasked with holding fractured families together while managing their own trauma. When women’s experiences are excluded from mediation, agreements risk ignoring critical needs such as access to reproductive health, justice for survivors of gender-based violence, and safe community spaces.

Children represent another vulnerable group. Exposure to violence disrupts education, fosters anxiety, and normalizes aggression. Without psychosocial interventions, children may carry these scars into adulthood, perpetuating cycles of violence. Refugees and internally displaced persons also require special attention, as forced migration compounds trauma with uncertainty and identity loss. The elderly, often forgotten, experience grief from loss of family networks and declining health in exile. A gender-sensitive and age-sensitive mediation model must integrate targeted psychosocial services for these groups.

Exploring the historical perspective: mental implications from war-stricken countries

Afghanistan. Afghanistan has experienced more than two decades of armed conflict and to date, it experiences territorial disputes among militants. A study done in 2004 showed that mental health symptoms were very common and prevalent among people in Afghanistan, specifically in the eastern province, which led to the Taliban movement, which has caused significant disruption to the mental health of the people living in that region. The cause of mental issues was noted as trauma due to increased terrorist movements and gunfire which led to loss of life, causing emotional distress among those who witnessed such horrific incidents.

In Afghanistan, decades of conflict produced widespread trauma, particularly among women who endured both Taliban repression and war-related sexual violence. Mediation efforts, including the 2020 Doha negotiations, largely overlooked psychosocial rehabilitation. International agencies attempted to establish women’s shelters and trauma counselling, yet cultural taboos and stigma constrained their reach. The exclusion of women’s voices from negotiation tables compounded mistrust, demonstrating how neglecting mental health perpetuates gendered marginalization in peace processes.

Iraq. Iraq has officially been at war several times since the 1960s, including the Iraq-Iran war, the Gulf War and the anti-Kurdish Al-Anfal campaign, causing civil but kinetic conflicts. This has been frequently connected to human rights violations because of the mental and physical condition of the people living in Iraq and Iran for more than four decades. Women and children were frequently under threat of being killed and raped due to cross-cultural differences and religious turmoil. For example, a study done on women’s mental health in Iraq found that more than half of the people suffered from curtailment of movement, the right to refuse sex and other developmental decisions. Similarly, another study found that five years of military operations in Iraq led to significantly poor mental health of children, where children experienced PTSD along with their caregivers and parents. Therefore, an integrated psychosocial support program is necessary for such a situation so that the adverse conditions can be addressed.

In Iraq, sectarian conflict and ISIS atrocities left entire minority groups, such as the Yazidis, traumatized. Mediation and reconstruction efforts initially emphasized political power-sharing but underestimated the depth of psychological scars. Programs initiated by UNHCR and WHO to provide trauma counselling to Yazidi women survivors of sexual slavery highlighted that without addressing their psychological recovery, reintegration into Iraqi society would remain incomplete.

Israel. Similar to Iraq, Israel has also been through several kinetic conflicts that involved military interventions and loss of life. In this regard, a study noted that more than three decades of armed conflict, more than 75 per cent of people showed stress-related traumatic symptoms. In this regard, it has been noted that one of the most common coping mechanisms is love from own people and social support.

Palestine. Since the 1990s, Palestine has been experiencing a new-age war, and many studies have reported on the poor mental health condition of Palestinians. For example, as reported by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, more than 32 per cent of people experienced severe PTSD and 49 per cent experienced moderate PTSD, where men had a higher rate than women. In addition to poor academic performance, 27 per cent of parents reported bedwetting, and 39 per cent said their kids experienced nightmares. Additionally, the study found that children who were refugees had more violent behavior than children who were not. According to 38 per cent of the respondents, the primary influence was a shooting, 34 per cent said it was violence on television, 7 per cent mentioned being confined at home, and 11 per cent said it was the arrest and beating of family members and neighbors.

The Israeli and Palestinian conflict demonstrates the danger of prolonged trauma. Generations of children raised under occupation or displacement internalize fear and hostility, fueling cycles of mistrust. Mediation attempts focusing narrowly on borders and settlements have repeatedly faltered. Psychologists warn that collective trauma feeds zero-sum thinking, undermining compromise. Some grassroots initiatives, such as “Parents Circle”, a forum of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families, reveal that acknowledging grief together can open pathways for empathy that traditional mediation fails to access.

Colombia. Colombia, like another country that has experienced armed conflict, is considered to have made its people experience the invisible wounds of war for decades. A recent study noted that mental health victims in Colombia were desperately in need of improved social and mental health outcomes for people. It has been found that mental health treatment is necessary to improve the inequalities between people with mental health issues in Colombia.

Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been experiencing civil disputes for more than 25 years between the minority Tamil and certain Sri Lankan groups, who are alleged to have violated the human rights of minority groups. Studies have shown that the civilian population is highly affected by mental health issues, which led to anxiety disorder, depression and drug use. Stress on women and children is something that has also been noted in the past. This is reason why scholars, through public consultation, have suggested that there has to be mediation and reconciliation mechanism so that post-war trauma can be addressed. This reasonably means that apart from resolving the civil dispute, the mental health of the civilians is something that the Sri Lankan government must take care of through post-conflict mediation and psychosocial support to the victims of poor mental health.

Post-civil war Sri Lanka offers another critical example. While the 2009 end of hostilities formally concluded decades of violence, Tamil communities carried deep trauma from displacement and disappearances. Truth and reconciliation initiatives were proposed but often politicized. NGOs that introduced community therapy and storytelling circles found that such interventions restored inter-ethnic trust more effectively than state-led commissions. This suggests that psychosocial support rooted in local culture can complement formal mediation structures.

Recommendations: integrating psychosocial support into mediation processes

Sustainable peace. For positive mental health, peacebuilding can be considered one of the most important factors. Since mental health after armed conflict is a serious public health issue, it is important to focus on peacebuilding mechanisms and provide the required mental health support to the victims. This is simply because trauma threatens the inner peace of a human being, which has a direct nexus with mental health. A fairly recent opinion noted that PTSD is extremely common in a post-war setting, and the conventional, more strict PTSD diagnosis cannot be applied to communities without taking into account the fact that trauma manifests itself differently in different cultures. If these cultural factors are disregarded, victims may not be acknowledged, and their problems may go unnoticed. Due to peacebuilders’ emphasis on more traditional symptoms like hyperarousal, this symptom inhibition may cause trauma in adults and children to go unnoticed. Peacebuilders need to develop their ability to grasp PTSD in a variety of ways and adjust it to the cultural setting.

Social and cultural support. There is a pressing need to focus on how specific psychosocial support mechanisms can be adopted for children that might be different from those required for adults. It is important for social work practitioners, psychiatrists and mental health counsellors to work at a community level so that specific intervention policies can be implemented. Transitional justice has been frequently quoted by scholars for the purpose of psychosocial support in African countries. Post-conflict mediation, reconstruction and restoration processes are often integrated with mental health support so that peacebuilding approaches can be promoted. Even during the Ukraine-Russia war, addressing the mental health of the civilians and those who are impacted by the war was considered by studies which suggested that the creation of the Inter-agency Coordination Council on Mental Health Protection and Psychological Assistance to Persons Affected by the Armed Aggression within a short span of time shows the importance of social support to those directly and indirectly affected by kinetic conflict.

International institutions increasingly recognize the role of mental health in peacebuilding, yet implementation gaps persist. The United Nations acknowledges mental health in its Sustainable Development Goals, while WHO’s Mental Health Action Plan emphasizes services for crisis settings. However, mediation mandates, such as those of UN Special Envoys, rarely incorporate psychosocial programs as integral components of peace talks.

NGOs often bridge this gap. Organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Rescue Committee have provided trauma counselling alongside humanitarian aid. Yet these efforts are often short-term and lack integration with mediation frameworks. Local civil society groups sometimes offer more culturally resonant interventions, such as storytelling circles in Africa or community rituals in South Asia, but funding and legitimacy challenges persist. Institutionalizing psychosocial support within mediation therefore requires stronger coordination between international bodies, national governments, and grassroots actors.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument moves from an epidemiological finding to a procedural one. The evidence assembled here, drawn from clinical research across a dozen conflicts, establishes that psychological injury in war is neither rare nor confined to combatants, and that prevalence in affected populations runs at roughly double that of the general population. The procedural point follows: mediation processes are designed around interests, territory, and institutions, and address none of this. The author’s most consequential observation concerns what that omission costs the process itself rather than only the individuals concerned. Collective trauma sustains the zero-sum perception that makes compromise appear as surrender, which means that the psychological condition of a population is not merely a humanitarian consequence of a conflict but among the conditions determining whether it can be settled.

CONCLUSION

From all the discussions above, it can be concluded by saying that the effects of armed conflict on mental health are not very hidden nowadays and rather are well documented through research. Be it as a result of direct warfare on combatants or indirect impact on civilians, armed conflict is always a barrier to promoting justice and equitable needs. Availability of resources, affordability, and economic stability are all affected by an armed conflict. Another important finding and implication is in relation to the condition of the countries that are war-stricken. Most countries that have experienced armed conflicts for decades are economically poorer, politically unstable and backward in several aspects. It shows a similar pattern in relation to the degradation of public health and government capabilities. This is the reason why a conflict setting also requires an integrated psychosocial support that is capable of actually assisting the victims of poor mental health. Existing research has extensively established the prevalence of a wide range of psychological disorders and syndromes among communities in conflict settings. Nonetheless, studies also show that over half of the population is resilient when faced with the most severe trauma during times of conflict. Without question, mental health care should be provided to people affected by war and conflict as part of the overall relief, rehabilitation, and reconstruction efforts. The post-war mediation process can be explored to integrate the psychosocial support required to provide the necessary social assistance to the victims of poor mental health due to war and kinetic conflict. Similar to the first half of the 20th century, when conflict significantly influenced the development of mental health concepts, research into the psychological effects of the wars of the present century may provide fresh insights and answers for issues pertaining to the mental health of broader populations.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article establishes the need and the practical question is how such provision enters a mediation process, which is where the field has developed answers worth setting out.

The framework already exists. The guidelines of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee on mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies set out an intervention pyramid that resolves much of the difficulty this article describes: basic services delivered in a way that protects dignity at the base, community and family support above it, focused non-specialised support next, and specialised clinical services at the apex for the minority who require them. The value of this model for mediation is that it locates most of the necessary work outside the clinic, which matters where clinicians number in the dozens for populations in the millions. The corresponding delivery model, task shifting, in which lay counsellors are trained and supervised to deliver structured psychological interventions, has been evaluated in trials in conflict-affected settings and produces effects comparable to specialist care. This is what makes the article’s recommendation feasible rather than aspirational.

The second point concerns where in a process such provision belongs, and there are three distinct openings. Within the negotiation itself, the condition of the delegates is a working consideration rather than a welfare one, since people negotiating on behalf of populations that have suffered mass violence are frequently bereaved themselves, and fatigue and reactivity at the table have identifiable causes. In the agreement, provision can be written into the chapters on reintegration, on transitional justice, and on health service reconstruction, and where it has been included, as in the Colombian accord of 2016, an implementing programme followed. And in implementation, disarmament and reintegration programmes have consistently found that ex-combatants who receive psychological support are less likely to return to armed groups, which converts the case from a humanitarian one into a security one and is the argument most likely to secure funding.

Two cautions from the evidence. The literature has moved away from assuming that clinical categories developed in one setting apply universally, not because trauma is culturally relative but because its expression, its idiom, and the practices through which people recover differ; the article’s own Sri Lankan material illustrates this, and the corresponding practice is to identify and support what a community already does rather than to import a protocol. And a large majority of those exposed to conflict recover without clinical intervention, given safety, income, and social connection, which means that the most effective psychosocial interventions are frequently not psychological at all but concern shelter, livelihood, family reunification, and the resolution of the uncertainty that keeps people from settling.

Finally, the observation that most conflict-affected states are also among the poorest deserves to be stated as the constraint it is. Provision that depends on clinicians who do not exist, funded by donors who leave, delivered through facilities that were destroyed, will not survive the departure of the mission that established it. What has survived is provision built into schools, primary health posts, and community organisations that were going to continue anyway. That is a modest design principle and it is the difference between a programme and a legacy.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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World Health Organization and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2015). mhGAP Humanitarian Intervention Guide, Geneva.

World Health Organization (2022). Mental Health and Forced Displacement, and the Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan 2013 to 2030, Geneva.

Charlson, F., van Ommeren, M., Flaxman, A., Cornett, J., Whiteford, H., & Saxena, S. (2019). New WHO Prevalence Estimates of Mental Disorders in Conflict Settings: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. The Lancet, 394(10194), 240 to 248.

Tol, W. A., Barbui, C., Galappatti, A., Silove, D., Betancourt, T. S., Souza, R., Golaz, A., & van Ommeren, M. (2011). Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Humanitarian Settings: Linking Practice and Research. The Lancet, 378(9802), 1581 to 1591.

Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace, Colombia, 24 November 2016, provisions on psychosocial rehabilitation and comprehensive care for victims.

Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards, United Nations, module on health and psychosocial support.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and subsequent resolutions on women, peace and security.

Ukraine and the Limits of Mediation

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article assesses an ongoing war and the conduct of the states and leaders involved, and its closing section sketches the terms of a possible settlement. Those assessments and proposals reflect the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral as between the parties. The article was written in 2025 and should be read with that date in mind.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the limited effectiveness of mediation in high-intensity interstate conflicts, using the war in Ukraine as a case study. While mediation has proved useful in intrastate and post-conflict settings, it faces distinct structural, strategic, and normative challenges in other contexts. The paper explores why third-party efforts have failed to de-escalate the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and considers whether a rethinking of mediation frameworks is needed for better results in future interstate conflicts.

KEYWORDS

Ukraine, Russia, mediation, conflict resolution, diplomacy, peace process, success, failure

INTRODUCTION

Mediation has long stood as one of the most important instruments in the diplomatic repertoire for managing and resolving armed conflict. From the Camp David Accords to the Dayton Agreement, its record suggests that even protracted disputes can, under the right conditions, be brought to the negotiating table. Yet not all wars are equally receptive to mediation. High-intensity conflicts, especially those involving major power rivalry, existential stakes, and geopolitical entanglement, pose challenges that often render traditional mediation ineffective. The war in Ukraine is a striking example.

Since the full-scale invasion of February 2022, the international community has launched a series of mediation efforts, both formal and informal. From the Minsk and Istanbul talks to more recent meetings in Saudi Arabia, and initiatives by the United Nations, Turkey, China, and the African Union, none has produced a sustainable outcome. Peace remains distant, while the military, political, and symbolic stakes continue to rise. Mediation, despite its normative appeal, has been displaced by a combination of irreconcilable war objectives, entrenched distrust, the perceived bias of potential mediators, and the absence of a mutually hurting stalemate.

The return of Donald Trump to the American presidency adds a revealing dimension to the broader difficulty. Promising a swift end to the war and invoking his personal rapport with Vladimir Putin, he has presented himself as a dealmaker uniquely capable of brokering peace. His administration has so far produced sharp deadlines, threats of expanded sanctions, and public disagreement with President Zelensky. His approach, personalistic, coercive, and transactional, serves less as a decisive change than as a mirror reflecting the deeper structural difficulties of international peacemaking today.

This article argues that the failure of mediation in Ukraine is not simply the result of diplomatic missteps or errors of timing, but a symptom of systemic constraints that afflict high-intensity interstate conflicts. These constraints include power asymmetry between the parties, imperfect information, incompatible war aims, the framing of the conflict as existential, the collapse of credible neutrality among mediators, and the geopolitical instrumentalisation of peace efforts themselves. By situating Ukraine within a broader theoretical and comparative context, the paper offers a critical assessment of whether current mediation frameworks are fit for purpose in the contemporary security environment.

MAIN CORPUS

Identifying success and failure

Mediation is broadly defined as a form of third-party intervention aimed at facilitating negotiation between two or more parties in conflict. Unlike arbitration or adjudication, mediation is non-binding, voluntary, and heavily dependent on the perceived legitimacy and strategic utility of the mediator. Its flexibility makes it attractive in both intrastate and interstate disputes, but this same characteristic reveals its limitations, particularly when applied to wars between sovereign states with high stakes, high casualties, and deeply entrenched geopolitical dynamics.

When is mediation successful? Research, particularly the work of Bercovitch and Jackson (2009), has identified four primary variables that shape the success or failure of international mediation: the identity and characteristics of the conflict parties; the nature of the dispute itself; the identity and credibility of the mediator; and the broader political and international context. All these elements are crucial, determining the nature, quality, and effectiveness of the mediation and indicating why some efforts succeed while others fail (Bercovitch and Jackson 2009: 34). Where any of these is unfavourable, the prospects for successful mediation diminish considerably.

The parties in conflict

Bercovitch and Jackson emphasise that effective mediation is highly contingent on the legitimacy and internal cohesion of the conflicting parties. Mediation requires that each party be represented by actors with clear authority, unified political backing, and international recognition. Mediation has a better chance of success where the adversaries are recognised as the legitimate spokesmen for their parties. This insight helps to explain why mediation has historically struggled in settings such as Lebanon, Sudan, or Cyprus, where internal disunity or competing claims to authority undermined the credibility of negotiation.

While Ukraine and Russia both possess clearly defined state leadership, the question of legitimacy nonetheless re-emerges here through Russia’s repeated denial of Ukrainian sovereignty, its support for separatist proxies, and its characterisation of the Ukrainian government as illegitimate (BBC News 2023; Treisman 2022; EUvsDisinfo 2025). Earlier this year, the American presidency also used the language of dictatorship in reference to the Ukrainian government (Howard 2025; Sauer and Harding 2025). Such narratives, coming not only from one of the belligerents but also from one of the principal potential mediators, obscure the basic premise of mediation, namely that two recognised sovereign parties negotiate as equals, guided by an impartial third party.

The dispute

While the structure and identity of the actors involved are critical, a second and perhaps more decisive factor is the nature of the dispute itself. Where a conflict centres on issues perceived as existential, such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, or regime survival, mediation efforts are significantly less likely to succeed. These are what Zartman (2008) refers to as intractable issues and what others, including Ott (1972) and Randle (1973), have framed as non-negotiable interests. The war in Ukraine presents precisely the kind of high-stakes, zero-sum conflict that renders traditional mediation structurally ineffective. For Ukraine the war is not merely a geopolitical dispute but an existential struggle for national survival, political independence, and democratic self-determination. For Russia it is framed as a civilisational confrontation with the West and a strategic campaign to reassert dominance within a perceived sphere of influence.

Kleiboer (1996), in her work on understanding success and failure in international mediation, sets out the main elements of a dispute that determine outcomes. First, she identifies the problem of ripeness, the idea that conflicts pass through a life cycle and that mediation is more or less likely to be effective at particular phases. Some scholars suggest that mediation is more effective in later stages, when the costs of war have escalated, battlefield optimism has faded, and the parties reassess their goals. In Ukraine this threshold has arguably not been reached. Russia continues to perceive strategic value in prolonging the conflict, believing that Western unity may fray, that fatigue may increase, and that further territorial gains remain possible. Ukraine has benefited considerably from Western support and maintains hopes of reversing Russian advances.

Others argue that mediation is best pursued in the early stages, before violence escalates and positions harden. But this window never truly existed. The war of 2022 began with a full-scale invasion predicated on regime change, under the assumption of a rapid fall of Kyiv. Early maximalist objectives foreclosed early diplomatic options. Still others suggest that ripeness is not a matter of time but of key events, such as a mutually hurting stalemate or a radical shift in the balance of power that forces a strategic rethink. Neither has yet occurred. While Ukraine has mounted successful counteroffensives and even operated on Russian territory, and Russia has endured significant attrition and sanctions, neither side perceives itself as losing outright.

Second, Kleiboer draws attention to conflict intensity and its divergent logics. Contrary to simple assumptions, intensity can push parties towards or away from negotiation depending on their position. For Russia, as the stronger party, high intensity may reinforce optimism and a form of victory thinking, particularly where losing may mean not only the loss of the conflict but a threat to the leadership itself. For Ukraine the same intensity might encourage negotiation, especially as civilian costs and social exhaustion mount. But this assumes that negotiation offers a meaningful path forward. For Ukraine the prospect of territorial concession, neutrality, and the legitimation of annexation is not only politically unacceptable but strategically hazardous. Both logics therefore work against mediation.

Third, the intensity of violence cannot be separated from the substance of the dispute. The war concerns issues that are deeply divisive and difficult to settle: sovereignty, with incompatible territorial aims; ideological questions about the nature of political systems and core values; security questions concerning borders and territory; and questions of self-determination and nationhood. All of these make the war a paradigmatic case of a structurally resistant conflict, in which mediation is not merely difficult but may be fundamentally misaligned with the logic of the conflict itself.

The mediator

A third determinant is the identity and attributes of the mediator. While it is tempting to assume that any well-intentioned third party can play a constructive role, the literature shows that effective mediation depends on the interplay of three core factors: impartiality, leverage, and status (Kleiboer 1996).

Conventional wisdom holds that a mediator’s success depends on perceived impartiality, following a logic in which impartiality breeds confidence, confidence fosters acceptability, and acceptability increases the likelihood of success. Impartiality is less a matter of objective neutrality than of perception: the parties must believe that the mediator has no hidden agenda and is equally invested in a fair resolution. In Ukraine, very few mediators have met this threshold. The United States and the European Union are widely seen from the Russian side as partisan players rather than neutral brokers. Ukraine is equally suspicious of actors perceived as close to its adversary, such as China, which has maintained careful rhetorical neutrality while deepening economic ties with Moscow.

On the other hand, a degree of bias can be useful. A mediator with strong ties to one party, particularly the more powerful one, may be better able to persuade that actor to make concessions. This suggests that while the most consequential mediators, the United States and the European Union, have the capacity to influence Ukraine, they lack access to or trust with Moscow, rendering any influence over Russia practically non-existent.

A further key factor is leverage, understood as the mediator’s ability to shape the parties’ behaviour through incentive or pressure. Without leverage, even the most neutral mediator is little more than a facilitator; with it, a mediator can shift calculations and create meaningful costs and benefits attached to a settlement. The conflict in Ukraine reveals a dual paradox. The United States and the European Union possess considerable leverage, particularly over Ukraine, given that they provide the bulk of its military and economic support, but this leverage has proved politically fraught: any signal that the West is pressing Ukraine towards negotiation can be interpreted as abandonment, may embolden Russia, and may fracture Western unity.

On the Russian side, those same actors have very little leverage, since sanctions, isolation, and warrants issued by the International Criminal Court have closed off diplomatic channels and hardened resistance. Middle powers such as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa have attempted to fill the gap, seeing it as an opportunity to increase their standing in a changing world order (Friedrich 2025). But their lack of military, economic, or institutional weight has made their proposals appear more symbolic than strategic.

Lastly, a mediator’s status shapes the ability to convene talks and to drive outcomes. High-status mediators have struggled with credibility, while low-status actors have struggled with access. The United Nations has repeatedly called for peace, but its credibility has been undermined by internal division and by paralysis in the Security Council. Religious and humanitarian actors such as the Holy See or the International Committee of the Red Cross enjoy moral authority but have not been entrusted with a political mandate. Middle powers such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey have hosted talks, but their standing is too ambiguous to convert diplomacy into firm commitments.

International context

Mediation efforts do not unfold in a vacuum; they are embedded in a broader international context. This includes the involvement of third parties and the effect of other global conflicts. As to the former, the war in Ukraine has been internationalised to a very high degree, with each involved actor pursuing its own interests and strategic calculations; these actors do not simply support or oppose mediation but often seek to steer its outcomes. The United States and the European Union have rhetorically endorsed peace while simultaneously intensifying military aid and deepening sanctions. Moscow, for its part, has used mediation initiatives from states of the Global South to advance a narrative of Western hypocrisy and to legitimise its own account of the conflict.

As to the latter, the war in Gaza that began in 2023 has affected mediation elsewhere by diverting international attention, political capital, and diplomatic capacity (Fischer 2023). It has hardened divisions between Western and non-Western states, exposed the selective application of international norms, and weakened the moral authority of the same actors who are prominent in Ukraine.

Prospects for constructive mediation

The failure of mediation in Ukraine does not imply that peace efforts should be abandoned, but rather that they must be rethought. Any future initiative must reckon with the structural constraints of the conflict. There is no quick remedy, but some strategic adjustments may improve the prospects for meaningful mediation.

Mediation cannot be forced where no basic readiness exists. At present neither party appears to regard the situation as unsustainable enough to warrant real concession. Ukraine, sustained by external support and by resistance morale, continues to prioritise territorial integrity; Russia, although facing attrition, shows no sign of internal collapse or strategic retreat. Yet this state of affairs will not persist indefinitely. Mediating actors must prepare now for a future moment of ripeness, through discreet channels of communication, unofficial diplomacy, and the careful cultivation of relationships with intermediaries who are perceived as neither partisan nor lacking in weight.

No single state or institution holds both the legitimacy and the leverage required to mediate this war effectively. One possible response is a multilateral mediation group, a consortium including regional powers from both camps, such as Turkey, India, Brazil, and China, paired with neutral international organisations such as the OSCE or an envoy appointed by the United Nations. This hybrid format would help to offset perceived bias while allowing each actor to bring a different form of influence, whether diplomatic, symbolic, or economic. While past attempts at such inclusive formats have faltered, a renewed attempt could succeed if accompanied by real confidence-building measures. The goal cannot be a comprehensive settlement overnight, but rather incremental progress, such as humanitarian agreements, local ceasefires, or mechanisms for the exchange of prisoners of war.

Rather than aiming immediately at a comprehensive peace agreement, mediation should for the present pursue limited but strategic goals that are easier to achieve and politically less costly for the parties. These might include demilitarised humanitarian corridors, nuclear safety arrangements, grain export frameworks, and monitoring mechanisms for violations of the law of armed conflict. Such issue-based mediation offers two advantages. First, it creates channels for communication and cooperation even amid continuing violence. Second, it can build the trust and the institutional scaffolding needed for more substantive negotiation. Small steps, if consistently successful, can shift the logic of the conflict away from zero-sum calculation.

SUMMARY *

The article’s analytical achievement is to show that the failure here is overdetermined rather than accidental. Applying an established framework, it finds that every one of the four conditions for successful mediation is absent at once: one party disputes the other’s standing to negotiate at all, the issues are of the kind that parties do not divide, no actor combines access to both sides with the capacity to impose a cost, and the wider system in which any process would sit is itself divided. The consequence the author draws is not despair but a reallocation of effort. If the conditions for a settlement cannot presently be produced, the useful work is to build the channels and relationships that a later moment will require, and meanwhile to pursue the humanitarian and technical arrangements that do not depend on those conditions.

CONCLUSION

The war in Ukraine has exposed the limits of international mediation in the face of entrenched geopolitical interests, high-stakes territorial disputes, and a global order marked by fragmentation and normative inconsistency. This article has sought, through theoretical insight, to clarify why mediation has struggled to gain traction. Ukraine is not merely a war between two states but one deeply embedded in the ideological and strategic rift between the West and a bloc of non-Western actors; mediation in such a context is not only about stopping bullets or drawing borders but about fundamental questions of global power, legitimacy, and security.

This should not lead to fatalism. The war should serve rather as a stress test for the theory and practice of mediation. It calls for more flexible, plural, and long-term approaches that recognise the complexity of modern conflicts. Ripeness cannot be imposed, but it can be anticipated and prepared for. Mediators may not be impartial, but they can still be effective if they bring influence, coordination, and creativity. The challenge is not to revive old models but to rethink diplomacy itself, so that it is more adaptive, more plural, and better equipped to navigate the fractured realities of contemporary war.

While a comprehensive and just peace may remain a distant prospect, serious diplomatic thinking must begin to consider what a minimally viable settlement could look like, one that does not reward aggression but recognises the strategic realities on the ground and the need to prevent prolonged devastation. Given the effective occupation of parts of eastern Ukraine, one scenario that has been discussed is a negotiated arrangement addressing the status of the occupied territories. This would require significant concessions from Ukraine, which, to be politically and strategically acceptable, would demand powerful counterbalancing guarantees from the international community.

For Kyiv, any territorial compromise, however limited, would be viable only if paired with long-term security and integration guarantees. Chief among these would be membership of the European Union, providing institutional, financial, and political anchoring for Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy. Membership of the Atlantic alliance, while more contentious, might be considered as a long-term objective, or at least a structured bilateral security guarantee negotiated with allies. Such arrangements would signal resolve, provide tangible deterrence against future incursion, and avoid the risk of a mere pause in hostilities of the kind that followed 2014.

The role of the international community is therefore not to impose a blueprint but to cultivate the political conditions under which compromise becomes possible. That entails a shift from reactive, fragmented diplomacy to sustained multilateral engagement that includes emerging actors who may lack leverage but offer legitimacy. Since mediators have found it difficult to reach ideal solutions, it is necessary to begin building a security architecture that can contain conflict, institutionalise restraint, and allow diplomacy to take root.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The analytical framework is applied carefully and its most important implication deserves to be separated from the article’s closing proposals, because the two rest on different footings.

The framework establishes that the conditions for a negotiated settlement are absent. The proposals for issue-based mediation follow from this directly and are supported by what has actually worked: the grain initiative moved cargo out of Ukrainian ports for a year, prisoner exchanges have continued throughout, the agency responsible for nuclear safety has maintained a presence at Zaporizhzhia, and children have been returned through the mediation of a small number of states. None of these required either party to accept anything about the other’s claims, and each was negotiated by intermediaries whose usefulness lay precisely in having no position on the war. That is the model the author’s analysis supports, and it is being executed now.

The territorial proposals in the closing section stand differently, and one distinction would strengthen them considerably. There is a difference between recognising a territorial change in law and accepting it in fact while withholding recognition, and the second has a long history. The Baltic states were occupied for fifty years without Western recognition of the annexation, and the non-recognition preserved a claim that was eventually realised. Applied here, an arrangement that fixes a line of control without conceding sovereignty offers Ukraine something a recognised cession does not, namely the preservation of the claim, and offers Russia the practical control it holds, while requiring neither to say what its own politics forbid. The constitutional position reinforces this: the Ukrainian constitution reserves any alteration of territory to a national referendum, which means a cession is not within the gift of any negotiator, and a formula that avoids the question is not merely diplomatic tact but a legal necessity.

The security guarantee question is the harder one and the article is right to make everything turn on it. Ukraine has been given guarantees before, in the Budapest Memorandum, and the experience is precisely why assurances are now insufficient. The distinction that matters is between a guarantee that requires a decision at the moment of crisis and one that is automatic, and only the second deters, which is why membership of the alliance and the presence of forces on the ground are the forms that have been pressed for. Any arrangement that leaves the guarantor a choice will be read by both parties as leaving the guarantor a choice.

Two additions on the mediation analysis itself. The article treats leverage over Russia as absent, and the more precise statement is that it is held by parties who have not chosen to exercise it: the states purchasing Russian energy and supplying the components that sustain the war have influence that the sanctioning states do not, which is the strongest argument for the plural format the author proposes and also the reason it has not yet materialised. And the Istanbul discussions of spring 2022 deserve more weight than the article gives them, since they came closer to terms than anything since and are the clearest available evidence about what each side would accept when it believed it had to; whatever one concludes about why they ended, they establish that the positions are not fixed by nature.

Finally, one observation from this field. The article’s proposal that mediators prepare for a ripeness that has not yet arrived is the most practical thing in it and the hardest to fund, because it produces nothing visible. Channels are maintained by people who meet for years without result, and the value of that work becomes apparent only at the moment when someone needs to make a call and finds that a line exists. Every settlement examined in this journal has depended on such channels having been kept open by someone during the period when keeping them open looked pointless.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

BBC News (2023) Ukraine War: President Putin Speech Fact-Checked. 21 February 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/64718139

Bercovitch, J., and R. Jackson (2009) Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-First Century: Principles, Methods, and Approaches. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

EUvsDisinfo (2025) The Kremlin’s Misuse of Nazism as a Weapon of Information Manipulation. 27 January 2025. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/the-kremlins-misuse-of-nazism-as-a-weapon-of-information-manipulation/

Fischer, S. (2023) Diplomacy in the Context of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Continuation of War by Other Means. German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin.

Friedrich, J. (2025) Outcome Neutral? The Limits of Third-Party Mediation in Ending the War Against Ukraine. Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin.

Howard, J. (2025) Trump Calls Zelensky a Dictator as He Hits Back at Disinformation Criticism. BBC News, 18 February 2025.

Kleiboer, M. (1996) Understanding Success and Failure of International Mediation. Journal of Conflict Resolution 40(2), 360 to 389.

Ott, M. (1972) Mediation as a Method of Conflict Resolution: Two Cases. International Organization 26(4), 595 to 618.

Randle, R. (1973) The Origins of Peace: A Study of Peacemaking and the Structure of Peace Settlements. Free Press, New York.

Sauer, P., and L. Harding (2025) Trump Calls Zelenskyy a Dictator amid Fears of Irreconcilable Rift. The Guardian, 20 February 2025.

Treisman, R. (2022) Putin’s Claim of Fighting against Ukraine Neo-Nazis Distorts History, Scholars Say. NPR, 1 March 2022.

Zartman, I. W. (2008) Negotiation and Conflict Management: Essays on Theory and Practice. Routledge, Abingdon.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Initiative on the Safe Transportation of Grain and Foodstuffs from Ukrainian Ports, Istanbul, 22 July 2022.

Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, 5 December 1994.

Constitution of Ukraine, 1996, Article 73 on the alteration of territory.

Minsk Protocol, 5 September 2014, and the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements, 12 February 2015.

International Atomic Energy Agency, reports on nuclear safety and security in Ukraine, Vienna.

Fearon, J. D. (1995). Rationalist Explanations for War. International Organization, 49(3), 379 to 414.

Zartman, I. W. (2001). The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments. Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 1(1), 8 to 18.

Centre of Competence on Humanitarian Negotiation, professional standards and field manuals, Geneva.

The Neuroscience of Conflict Resolution: Implications for Modern Mediation Strategies

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

The manuscript opened its second part by repeating the opening paragraph of the article verbatim; the repetition has been removed. The case cited as State v Jones could not be verified and the reference has been retained in the author’s words with that qualification. The article’s account of polygraph and functional magnetic resonance imaging technology contains a conflation of the two, which is addressed in the section added by this journal rather than altered in the author’s text.

ABSTRACT *

This article examines the incorporation of technology into mediation practice, with particular reference to Kenya. Three developments are considered. The first is online video conferencing, whose adoption accelerated during the pandemic and has continued since; the author sets out its advantages in accessibility, scheduling and the reduction of power imbalance, against its costs in digital exclusion, the loss of non-verbal communication, and data security, and notes that the Court Annexed Mediation Rules of 2022 do not address it. The second is deception detection technology, whose possible use in mediation the author considers in terms of encouraging candour and supplying objectivity, against the reliability problems of the method, its coercive potential, and its effect on the voluntary character of the process. The third is artificial intelligence, examined through the tasks it can perform in preparation, analysis and drafting, and through the questions of liability, bias and inclusivity that its use raises. The article closes with recommendations on training, data protection and regulation.

KEYWORDS *

Mediation, technology, Kenya, online dispute resolution, video conferencing, digital divide, polygraph, deception detection, artificial intelligence, confidentiality, data protection, access to justice

INTRODUCTION

Alternative dispute resolution is a recognised means of settling disputes between conflicting parties. The more common mechanism is mediation, in which a neutral party is chosen to help disagreeing parties arrive at a mutually acceptable agreement. This is the traditional person-to-person approach and has been applied to disputes between individuals, local governments, international bodies, and states. In the recent past, however, we have seen the incorporation of technology and artificial intelligence into mediation, which has changed the dynamics of settling disputes. The advent of machine learning and predictive algorithms has produced systems trained to offer data-driven insights and to streamline communication with the parties.

This article examines the integration of technology and artificial intelligence into mediation practice. It considers the use of video conferencing, the possible incorporation of deception detection technology, and the implications of both for modern mediation strategy. In doing so it also considers the underlying difficulties raised by these technologies and proposes possible responses.

MAIN CORPUS

Mediation and technology

Mediation has long been an important method of alternative dispute resolution, offering parties the chance to work on their conflicts outside the judicial system. For a long time mediation relied heavily on in-person meetings, with the conflicting parties and the mediator working face to face in order to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Technological advance has transformed many aspects of legal practice, and mediation is no exception. Recent developments, particularly the use of online video conferencing and the introduction of deception detection technology, have significantly affected the field.

The incorporation of these technologies raises fundamental questions about efficiency, fairness, accessibility, and the protection of core principles such as confidentiality and voluntariness. This article examines the implications of using online platforms in place of in-person mediation, and the possible role of deception detection technology in dispute resolution, with attention to the Kenyan context.

The use of online video conferencing in mediation

A shift from in-person mediation. The rise of platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet has reshaped the delivery of mediation services. The pandemic was the principal driver of this development, as there was a need for continuity, and the use of these platforms has continued to grow since, as practitioners have recognised the increased flexibility and efficiency. In Kenya, where geographical distance is a real obstacle to access to justice, the shift to online mediation provides a workable alternative for parties who would otherwise face difficulty in participating in face-to-face processes.

This transition has significantly altered the dynamics of mediation. It preserves the essence of the process, namely dialogue, negotiation, and resolution, but the digital medium also introduces elements that differentiate it from in-person interaction. Online platforms are convenient where transcription is incorporated, and there may be no need for a separate interpreter where the medium can render information intelligible to a receiver who speaks a different language. To understand these differences it is necessary to examine the advantages, disadvantages, and overall effects of online mediation.

Advantages. One of the standout advantages is increased accessibility to justice. For parties involved in cross-border disputes, or those located in remote areas of Kenya such as Mandera, online mediation offers the opportunity to participate without the need for physical travel. Removing these logistical hurdles saves both time and cost and makes mediation a more attractive route for individuals and businesses alike. Accessibility is a vital principle of justice, and the capacity of these platforms to bridge geographic barriers is a significant contribution to the aim of amicable, prompt, and just dispute resolution in Kenya.

Online mediation also provides considerable flexibility in scheduling. Traditional mediation often requires significant coordination to arrange meetings between the parties, their legal representatives, and the mediator. By using video conferencing, a session can be arranged with a shared calendar and a few messages. This means that mediation is conducted with fewer delays, as participants can engage from their respective locations, not only across Kenya but internationally. The effect is faster resolution, which is a major benefit in a jurisdiction where the courts struggle with backlogs.

Video conferencing also has the potential to neutralise certain power imbalances that arise in in-person mediation. Physical presence in a shared space can create tension, especially where one party is more socially or economically powerful than the other. In a virtual setting, physical distance can reduce intimidation and allow parties to communicate more openly, so that the mediator is better able to assess the situation. The availability of private breakout rooms, in which parties hold confidential discussions with the mediator, further supports balanced and effective mediation.

Disadvantages. Online mediation also presents challenges that must be addressed if it is to be effective. One of the primary drawbacks is the barrier of technology. In Kenya, where digital literacy and internet access vary widely between regions, not all parties will have the necessary skills or access to participate effectively. Poor connectivity, still prevalent in many rural areas, can disrupt the process, causing delay and frustration. Older participants and those unfamiliar with the technology may struggle to navigate the tools, and may be disadvantaged as a result.

A further significant disadvantage is the loss of the personal interaction inherent in in-person mediation. The ability to read body language, facial expression, and other non-verbal cues is part of the mediator’s work and plays a critical role; these signals often provide insight into the emotions and motivations driving the parties’ positions. In a virtual setting these cues are harder to perceive, which impedes the mediator’s ability to gauge the emotional state of the parties. This can hinder the establishment of trust and rapport, both crucial to successful mediation.

Cybersecurity presents a further challenge. While platforms have introduced measures such as password protection and encryption, the risk of unauthorised access or data breach remains. In mediation, confidentiality is paramount, and any compromise in security undermines trust in the process and affects the willingness of parties to engage candidly.

Effects. The shift to online mediation has had visible effects on the efficiency and outcomes of the process. Studies from jurisdictions where online mediation has been widely adopted suggest that virtual mediation often leads to quicker resolution than traditional methods, probably owing to ease of scheduling and the reduction of logistical delay. Whether these quicker resolutions are as effective and as durable as those achieved face to face remains a matter of debate.

From a psychological perspective, virtual mediation alters the interpersonal dynamics of dispute resolution. Research has shown that online communication can lead to what is known as the online disinhibition effect, whereby individuals behave differently, sometimes more aggressively, in virtual settings than in person. This can affect the spirit of cooperation and compromise that is central to mediation. Conversely, some parties may feel more comfortable and less exposed in a virtual setting, which could enhance their willingness to engage openly.

Legal framework. In Kenya the legal framework governing mediation has only begun to adapt to these changes. The Court Annexed Mediation Rules of 2022 provide a foundation for the institutionalisation of mediation within the court system, but they do not explicitly address the use of online platforms, leaving a gap in the regulation of virtual mediation. As online mediation grows, there is a need for reform providing clear guidance on the use of technology and ensuring that the principles of fairness, confidentiality, and voluntariness are upheld.

The use of deception detection technology in mediation

Deception detection technology, most commonly associated with the polygraph, has long been used in criminal investigation and security screening. Its potential application in mediation is a relatively new question. Its use raises interesting possibilities, particularly in cases where truthfulness and credibility are central to the resolution of the dispute. Although such technology is not widely used in mediation today, its potential warrants careful consideration.

The polygraph assesses the credibility of statements by measuring physiological indicators, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, perspiration, and skin conductivity. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is used to assess brain activity, on the theory that heightened activity in certain regions, particularly the prefrontal cortex, correlates with deception. Although there is debate about the admissibility of such evidence in courts, its use in non-court-based dispute resolution has attracted interest.

Advantages. One of the primary arguments in favour of incorporating such technology is the potential to encourage honesty among the parties. Its presence could deter the provision of false or misleading information, streamlining the process and increasing the chances of a truthful and fair resolution. In disputes where conflicting factual accounts lie at the heart of the disagreement, it could help the mediator assess credibility and identify common ground.

Such technology also offers a form of objectivity that is often lacking in traditional mediation, where the mediator must rely on subjective impressions of credibility. By providing a measurable basis for assessing truthfulness, it could reduce reliance on personal judgement, potentially leading to more accurate outcomes. This might be particularly useful in high-stakes commercial or family disputes, where the consequences of dishonesty are significant.

Disadvantages. Despite these potential benefits, the use of such technology in mediation is fraught with difficulty. The most significant concern is accuracy. Physiological measurements are not conclusive. Tests can produce false positives, in which truthful individuals are identified as deceptive, and false negatives, in which deceptive individuals are judged honest. This unreliability raises serious questions about fairness, since the consequences of an incorrect result could be severe for one or both parties.

The introduction of such a test could also fundamentally alter the voluntary and cooperative nature of mediation. Mediation is built on openness, trust, and the willingness of parties to work together. The use of a test may introduce an element of coercion, as parties may feel pressed to submit to it or to alter their statements out of fear of being accused of dishonesty. This could produce a more confrontational atmosphere, undermining the purpose of mediation as a means of achieving amicable resolution.

Effects. The psychological impact on participants cannot be overlooked. Testing may increase anxiety and stress, which could distort the ability to engage fully in the process. Fear of being labelled dishonest, regardless of the accuracy of the result, may cause participants to withhold information or alter their behaviour in ways that are counterproductive. The introduction of such technology could also shift the focus of mediation away from dialogue and negotiation, transforming it into a fact-finding or investigative exercise.

As regards the voluntary nature of mediation, such testing could create a power imbalance, particularly where one party is more willing or able to undergo it than the other. This could confer an unfair advantage and further complicate the process. The use of deception detection technology in mediation therefore raises serious ethical and legal concerns that must be addressed before it could be widely adopted.

Legal framework. In Kenya there is currently no legal framework governing the use of such technology in mediation, and its admissibility in court proceedings remains contentious. Polygraph results are not generally accepted as evidence in Kenyan courts, notwithstanding the provisions of the Evidence Act on the admissibility of electronic records, and their use in mediation would face similar legal and ethical difficulties. Some jurisdictions have experimented with such technology in dispute resolution processes, with limited success.

Comparative analysis: in-person and technology-based mediation

The shift from traditional in-person mediation to technology-based mediation represents a significant evolution in dispute resolution. In-person mediation has long been valued for its capacity to foster personal connection, trust, and empathy, which are crucial to achieving amicable settlement. Mediators rely heavily on face-to-face interaction to read non-verbal cues, build rapport, and facilitate open communication. However, the logistical challenges of coordinating in-person meetings, particularly in cross-border disputes, can make this form of mediation time-consuming and costly.

Technology-based mediation, particularly through video conferencing, offers a more efficient and accessible alternative. By removing the need for physical presence, it reduces travel costs, allows for more flexible scheduling, and increases the overall speed of the process. This convenience comes at the cost of losing the personal element that is often essential in resolving disputes, and mediators must navigate the difficulty of interpreting emotion and motivation in an environment where non-verbal cues are harder to discern.

The use of deception detection technology represents an even more radical departure. While in-person mediation emphasises voluntary participation and open dialogue, the introduction of such a test could shift the focus toward determining factual accuracy rather than fostering collaboration and compromise, raising concerns about coercion and about the loss of the voluntary, non-adversarial character of the process.

Mediation and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence augments the capabilities of mediators through data processing, predictive analysis, natural language processing, and various support tools. The transformation such systems have brought to many workplaces, through rapid processing and the analysis of large volumes of information, is widely recognised. Generative systems, trained on very large datasets, have considerable capacity for natural language processing, allowing them to search, compare, summarise, and extract insights from large volumes of text, images, and data.

In the mediation context such systems are used in several ways: in preparing the process by setting objectives, in analysing the mediation brief, in streamlining communication between the parties and the mediator, in proposing settlement terms, and in drafting the final agreement. In setting objectives, such tools can be used to help balance the interests of the parties. The mediator can supply the facts of the case and the claim of each side and receive an immediate response, and can then compare the objectives suggested with those already identified in order to see which suits the context.

What is artificial intelligence, and what is its role in mediation?

Artificial intelligence is a technology that enables computers to simulate aspects of human learning, comprehension, problem-solving, and decision-making. Computers are programmed to apply what appear to be cognitive operations in tandem with the human mind. The process requires the input of large quantities of data, the training of algorithms, and machine learning techniques. Systems are then able to perform specific tasks on request, processing data, analysing it, predicting outcomes, and proposing multiple solutions to problems. It is from this capacity to imitate aspects of human reasoning that such systems find a role in modern mediation practice.

The use of these systems has changed mediation through detailed processing and analysis of data. The process begins when the parties consent. Each party presents its case in a manner it deems fit, as in ordinary mediation practice. Natural language processing allows for easier communication between the parties, who may present their case in audio, video, or text form. The system collects the data, which may include documents, deeds, financial statements, and receipts, depending on the circumstances of the case. From these facts it can assist in developing the objectives of the process, in drawing out the strengths and weaknesses of each case, in comparing the case with precedent, in analysing it in the light of relevant law and regulation, and in predicting and proposing outcomes.

Such systems aid human mediators in performing these tasks. The mediator acts as the impartial third party with that assistance. The absence of a human presence in decision-making raises controversy about giving autonomy to non-human systems to act upon human subjects, because such systems do not possess emotional intelligence, interpersonal skill, or ethical judgement. Although they are credited with excluding subjective factors in the interest of impartiality, it is within those apparently subjective aspects that social qualities such as trust are formed. As Galvão observes, symbolic vision, intuition, imagination, creativity, innovation, inspiration, ethics, justice, principle, meaning, purpose, and ideals are not reached by mechanical logic, combinatory analysis, and positivism. A system might, for example, apply a penalty where a party arrives late to a session without regard to circumstances such as traffic. The human element therefore remains critical. A human mediator, with emotional intelligence and an ability to grasp the nuances of the case and to consider resolutions that incorporate the subjective considerations motivating one or both parties, can adjust the suggested outcome. It is therefore important to develop platforms that allow for such adjustment.

Such systems also pose critical ethical questions about liability in the event of error. These tools require data input and training. Efficient as they are, an error in the system can lead to mistakes in the result. Suppose that in a mediation process the system fails to register a vital document and reaches a proposed resolution without it. Is the machine, the software engineer, or the company to be held responsible? It is in this gap in the law that users find themselves. Moreover, the input of misleading material leads to biased output. The principle that faulty input produces faulty output applies here, since such systems cannot apply human judgement in assessing the credibility of responses from parties and witnesses. This can lead to biased outcomes that defeat the course of justice. There are also concerns about inclusivity in the development of the software behind these platforms, which could produce biased responses.

SUMMARY *

The article’s organising insight is that the three technologies it examines affect mediation at three different depths, and that the depth determines how much scrutiny each requires. Video conferencing changes where mediation happens and who can reach it, and its principal risks, exclusion and data security, are practical problems with practical answers. Artificial intelligence changes how a mediator prepares and drafts, and its risks concern accuracy, bias and responsibility for error. Deception detection would change what mediation is for, replacing a process directed at agreement with one directed at establishing who is telling the truth. The author’s Kenyan framing gives the first of these particular force, since in a jurisdiction where distance and court backlog are the principal barriers to justice, an accessibility gain is not a convenience but a substantive improvement, and the digital divide that qualifies it is correspondingly the central design problem.

CONCLUSION

The advent of technology in mediation presents both opportunities and challenges for dispute resolution. Online video conferencing has made mediation more accessible and efficient, particularly in a country such as Kenya, where geography and logistics can hinder access to justice. However, the loss of personal interaction, the barriers of technology, and concerns about cybersecurity must be addressed if online mediation is to remain effective and fair. Mediators should accordingly be made aware of the relevant ethical questions, and should be instructed in the protection of personal data in compliance with the Data Protection Act of 2019 and supporting legislation. This will do much to protect privacy rights. Mediators should also be trained to work confidently with the technical tools now in use.

The possible use of deception detection technology raises important ethical and legal questions. While such technology could in principle enhance the objectivity of the process, its limited reliability and its potential to create a more adversarial atmosphere must be carefully weighed.

As regards artificial intelligence, the benefits of these technologies must be secured while the risks are contained. Ethical questions should be considered at the point of design as well as in continuing use. These systems were developed to supplement human capacity, and should therefore complement human effort rather than replace it. It remains an open question whether we should confer on such systems the authority to make decisions on our behalf. The development of jurisprudence, particularly in the Kenyan context, would do much to regulate the use of these systems across different fields, and specifically in mediation.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

One correction must come first, because it is the point on which this journal cannot remain silent.

The article describes the polygraph as measuring brain activity and as detecting activation in the prefrontal cortex. It does not. A polygraph records physiological arousal, namely respiration, cardiovascular activity and skin conductance, and it does so on the assumption that deception produces arousal. That assumption is the source of its weakness, since anxiety, fear of being disbelieved, and the significance of the question itself all produce the same signals in a person telling the truth. The imaging technique described is a separate method, and its application to deception has been tested almost entirely on volunteers instructed to lie about matters of no consequence to them, which is not the situation of a person in a dispute about their home, their business, or their family.

The consequence bears directly on the article’s closing recommendation, and it is the one point at which this journal must disagree with the author. The proposal that mediators be trained to administer such tests and to interpret imaging results, in order to avoid the cost of engaging medical practitioners, should not be adopted. The comprehensive review conducted by the United States National Research Council concluded that polygraph accuracy is insufficient to justify reliance where the consequences are serious, and the position of the relevant professional bodies on imaging-based deception detection is that it is not established for individual assessment. Beyond the science, the roles are incompatible: a mediator who administers a test becomes an investigator, and a party who declines it has, in the eyes of the other, answered the question. The correct response to a dispute of fact in mediation is not to determine who is lying but to construct terms that hold whichever account is true, through verification arrangements, staged performance, escrow, or the involvement of a neutral expert on the specific factual question.

On the online question, the article identifies the digital divide as a disadvantage, and it is better treated as the central design constraint. Where connectivity and device access are unevenly distributed, a process conducted online is not neutral between the parties: the better-resourced side appears from an office with a stable connection and counsel present off-camera, while the other joins from a phone in a place without privacy. Practical responses exist and are being used in comparable jurisdictions: hybrid arrangements in which the less-resourced party attends a supported physical venue, a technology check before the session, and an explicit rule that no participant may have an unannounced person present. These cost little and address the exposure directly.

Two further observations. The Data Protection Act of 2019 the author cites is more directly relevant than the article suggests, since a mediator using a foreign hosted platform or a foreign hosted analytical service is a data controller transferring personal data across borders, and the Act’s conditions for such transfer apply. This is an immediate compliance question rather than a future one. And on the question of liability for error, the answer is available and does not require new law: a mediator who relies on a tool remains professionally responsible for the output, as any professional does for the instruments they use, and the appropriate response is disclosure to the parties, verification of anything material, and professional indemnity arrangements that reflect the practice.

Finally, the article’s strongest claim is one it makes in passing, that in a jurisdiction with distance, cost, and court backlog, accessibility gains are substantive rather than merely convenient. That is the case for the technology, and it is a strong one. It also sets the standard against which each of these tools should be measured: the question to ask of any of them is whether it brings the process within reach of someone who could not previously reach it. Video conferencing plainly does. Drafting assistance may. A device that tells a mediator which party is lying does not, and would take from the parties the one thing mediation offers that a court does not, which is the authorship of their own settlement.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

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Ebner, N., and J. Thompson (2014) Face Value: Non-Verbal Communication and Trust Development in Online Video-Based Mediation. International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution 1, 103.

Edwards, H. T. (1985) Alternative Dispute Resolution: Panacea or Anathema. Harvard Law Review 99, 668.

Exon, S. N. (2017) Ethics and Online Dispute Resolution: From Evolution to Revolution. Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 32, 609.

Fernandez, A. J., and M. E. Masson (2014) Online Mediations: Advantages and Pitfalls of New and Evolving Technologies and Why We Should Embrace Them. Defense Counsel Journal 81, 395.

Giannelli, P. C. Polygraph and Deception Tests: Part II.

Greenop, M. A., Thompson, A., and S. Ajam (2021) The Future for Online Dispute Resolution: Lessons from Electronic Platforms, National Court Systems and Arbitral Institutions. BCDR International Arbitration Review 8.

Highleyman, S. L. (1958) The Deceptive Certainty of the Lie Detector. Hastings Law Journal 10, 47.

Joinson, A. N. (2007) Disinhibition and the Internet. In Psychology and the Internet. Elsevier.

Kawira, K. I. Online Arbitration: The Scope for Its Development in Kenya.

Lombardi, E. M. (2012) Is Online Mediation the Way to Fit the Forum to the Fuss? Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 19, 524.

Marcus, R. L. (2008) The Impact of Computers on the Legal Profession: Evolution or Revolution. Northwestern University Law Review 102, 1827.

Muigua, K. Embracing Technology for Enhanced Efficiency and Access to Justice in the Legal Profession. Alternative Dispute Resolution 1.

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Saxe, L., Dougherty, D., and T. Cross (1985) The Validity of Polygraph Testing: Scientific Analysis and Public Controversy. American Psychologist 40, 355.

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Tiamiyu, O. M. (2022) The Impending Battle for the Soul of ODR: Evolving Technologies and Ethical Factors Influencing the Field. Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution 23, 75.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Constitution of Kenya, 2010, Article 159(2)(c); Civil Procedure Act, Cap. 21, Part IV on alternative dispute resolution; and the Mediation (Pilot Project) Rules and Court Annexed Mediation Rules, 2022.

Data Protection Act, No. 24 of 2019, Laws of Kenya, in particular the provisions on data controllers and on cross-border transfer.

Evidence Act, Cap. 80, Laws of Kenya, sections 78A and 106B on electronic records.

National Research Council (2003). The Polygraph and Lie Detection. National Academies Press, Washington D.C.

Farah, M. J., Hutchinson, J. B., Phelps, E. A., & Wagner, A. D. (2014). Functional MRI-Based Lie Detection: Scientific and Societal Challenges. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15(2), 123 to 131.

Vrij, A. (2008). Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities (2nd edition). Wiley, Chichester.

Katsh, E., & Rabinovich-Einy, O. (2017). Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes. Oxford University Press, New York.

Ebner, N. (2017). Negotiation via Videoconferencing. In The Negotiator’s Desk Reference. DRI Press, Saint Paul.

LEGAL VALIDITY AND ETHICAL CONCERNS OF AI IN MEDIATION

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

The rise of artificial intelligence in alternative dispute resolution has sparked debate over its legal and ethical implications. Proponents note that such tools can improve efficiency and consistency, but experts warn that these applications must still align with core values of the field. Industry surveys have emphasised that any use of artificial intelligence in dispute resolution must uphold fundamental principles such as fairness, transparency, and due process (Burn, Morel de Westgaver and Clark 2023). UNCITRAL’s technical notes explicitly list due process, fairness, accountability, and transparency as cardinal principles for online dispute resolution (UNCITRAL 2020). This paper examines whether decisions generated by such systems can be legally binding, particularly in international mediation, and whether they can satisfy due process norms. It also explores how algorithmic bias and the absence of human nuance threaten the legitimacy of outcomes reached in this way. The analysis shows that, while no jurisdiction currently bars settlements assisted in this manner, enforceability depends on traditional rules of consent and contract. At the same time, ensuring impartiality, oversight, and the mitigation of bias is critical to preserving the integrity of mediated agreements.

KEYWORDS *

Artificial intelligence, mediation, arbitration, due process, party autonomy, enforceability, Singapore Convention, algorithmic bias, transparency, human oversight, confidentiality, legitimacy

INTRODUCTION

Mediation is a consensual, often cross-border or commercial method of resolving disputes outside the courts. Globally, mediated settlement agreements, once signed by the parties, are enforceable under instruments such as the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Mediation and the Singapore Convention on Mediation of 2019. Recently, institutions in this field and law reform bodies have begun to explore the role of artificial intelligence. Major arbitration centres have issued guiding principles or formed working groups on the subject (Eftekhar 2025). An industry report highlights that while such tools offer substantial benefits, including increased efficiency and enhanced access to justice, they simultaneously raise serious concerns, noting that they also pose significant legal and technical issues and that their adoption requires careful consideration to ensure compatibility with the principles and values of arbitration, such as fairness, impartiality, transparency, and party autonomy (Burn, Morel de Westgaver and Clark 2023). Likewise, UNCITRAL’s technical notes emphasise that any online dispute resolution system must embody impartiality, due process, fairness, accountability and transparency (UNCITRAL 2020). Hence, while these systems may streamline mediation, for example by analysing data or drafting settlement terms, experts uniformly stress that outcomes must preserve the parties’ procedural rights and ethical norms.

MAIN CORPUS

Legal validity of machine-generated decisions in mediation

The legal effect of an outcome reached with such assistance depends on established law. In international arbitration, parties typically delegate decision-making to a tribunal whose award is binding under conventions such as the New York Convention. However, many arbitration laws and institutional rules explicitly or implicitly require natural persons as arbitrators (Norton Rose Fulbright 2024). Although the principal treaties do not expressly forbid the practice, many arbitration laws and institutional rules require arbitrators to be natural persons or to possess qualities that presuppose this. By contrast, no major treaty currently addresses machine-generated arbitral or mediated decisions. In practice, if an arbitrator relies on such tools beyond agreed parameters without disclosure, courts or tribunals could later set aside the award for procedural irregularity (JAMS ADR 2024). One commentator warns that unauthorised use of this kind could jeopardise the enforceability of an award under due process principles (JAMS ADR 2024). The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act classifies use in judicial decision-making, and in dispute resolution outcomes producing legal effects, as high risk, imposing strict transparency and oversight requirements.

In mediation the situation is different. Mediation outcomes are not awards but voluntary settlement agreements. Those agreements become legally binding as contracts once signed by the parties, and may be enforceable under the Singapore Convention if international, irrespective of whether a human or a machine assisted in reaching them. A system could propose terms, but they bind the parties only if the parties agree and sign. There is no known law expressly forbidding the generation of a settlement proposal in this way. However, because mediation is predicated on party autonomy and consent, any such system must operate with clear party authorisation. To date no country has a specific statute on the subject; enforcement would rely on general contract and procedural law.

The absence of a legal prohibition is not the same as positive endorsement. In my view this legal vacuum calls for proactive regulation. Jurisdictions could consider inserting specific provisions in mediation statutes clarifying the permissible scope of such involvement, especially in sensitive or cross-cultural disputes where trust and human intuition play a crucial role. Recommendations generated in this manner are not binding unless the parties formally accept them, and to be safe the parties should explicitly consent to any such involvement in order to ensure that a mediated agreement later holds up as valid (Norton Rose Fulbright 2024; JAMS ADR 2024).

Key points on legal status

Arbitration and mediation distinguished. Arbitral awards are legally binding, subject to review, while mediated settlements are binding only as contracts. Use as an arbitrator raises questions of consent and statutory authority (Norton Rose Fulbright 2024). Use in mediation must ultimately result in a signed agreement in order to be enforceable.

Party autonomy. Under the UNCITRAL framework and arbitration law, the parties control their process. If they agree to such assistance, whether by clause or by procedural order, its output can be incorporated. Without such consent, reliance on it could compromise due process (JAMS ADR 2024).

Regulatory regime. There is currently no dedicated law on artificial intelligence in dispute resolution. Regulators and courts would apply existing rules on arbitral tribunals, mediator ethics, and contract formation. The classification of dispute resolution decisions as high risk under European legislation indicates that future regulation may require strict oversight of any outcome reached in this way (European Commission 2021; Zilberman 2023).

Due process, impartiality and fairness

Even where such tools are legally permitted, they must respect fundamental principles. Mediation, especially in international settings, demands fairness and neutrality. UNCITRAL’s technical notes advise that online dispute resolution must be impartial and compliant with due process (UNCITRAL 2020). In practice this means that each party should have a meaningful opportunity to present its case and to understand how conclusions are reached. Human mediators rely on face-to-face dialogue, empathy, and adaptive judgement. By contrast, such systems currently lack empathy and situational awareness. This gap becomes especially problematic in mediation, where emotional sensitivity often guides resolution. One observer notes that a leading mediator’s particular strength is making parties feel heard, and that mediators build trust and credibility through fairness and emotional intelligence. On this view, objectivity and fairness play a critical role, but emotional intelligence cannot be underestimated, and parties tend to accept a solution only if they trust the mediator (Cao, Cheung and Li 2023). As another author asks, has anyone yet encountered a computer showing empathy or emotion (Fasolo 2025)?

In my view these qualities are not merely helpful; they are indispensable. The essence of mediation lies in trust building and emotional validation, which no such system can replicate. It lacks consciousness, cannot read non-verbal cues, and is incapable of contextual emotional responsiveness. Delegating mediation to machines, even partially, reduces a fundamentally human process to a mechanical transaction, stripping it of the psychological safety that parties often need in order to resolve conflict.

Principles to uphold

Transparency. The opacity of such systems can undermine the parties’ ability to scrutinise outcomes. Guidelines suggest disclosing their use where it affects decisions (Draper 2019). Parties should understand how a recommendation was arrived at and should have the opportunity to challenge or override it.

Human oversight. Experts agree that such tools should aid rather than replace human judgement (ADR Institute of Canada 2023). Arbitrators and mediators must review all outputs: the tools can analyse data, but a human must assess context, catch errors, and ensure that cultural and emotional factors are considered. Unchecked reliance risks procedural unfairness and may later be held invalid (JAMS ADR 2024).

Impartiality. In theory such a system, absent bias, could be indifferent as between the parties. In reality, training data and algorithms can embed subtle biases or preferences (Eftekhar 2025). Ensuring neutrality requires carefully curated data and oversight. Practitioners must verify that the logic applied is free from undue favouritism toward any side or outcome.

Confidentiality and security. Mediation is often confidential. Using such tools requires strict data protection, especially where third-party servers process private information (ADR Institute of Canada 2023). Any platform must be vetted to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information, for example by using systems hosted within the practitioner’s own environment rather than public services. Breaches of confidentiality could contravene mediator ethics rules and erode party confidence.

Due process risks

Delegating aspects of mediation to such systems raises due process concerns akin to those in arbitration. One commentator cautions that novel use could give rise to due process violations or a claim of irregularity if parties are caught off guard (JAMS ADR 2024). For example, if a proposed settlement is delivered without allowing the parties to argue their case fully, or if one party had no role in the selection of training data, a party might object to enforcement. Maintaining procedural fairness means that the parties should consent to the role such a system plays and should retain final control over accepting its recommendations (JAMS ADR 2024; ADR Institute of Canada 2023).

Bias and legitimacy

The potential for bias presents a serious ethical challenge to legitimacy. By design, machine learning systems reflect the data on which they are trained. If historical case data or heuristic rules contain gender, racial, or cultural bias, a system operating in this field will mirror those biases. As has been observed, if there is bias in the input, there will be bias in the output (Eftekhar 2025). Experts in international mediation have likewise raised concerns about cognitive, linguistic, age, and gender biases embedded in algorithms (Fasolo 2025). Parties who suspect that a system has been trained on skewed data may refuse to accept its conclusions, undermining trust in the process (ADR Institute of Canada 2023).

This problem is not merely technical; it strikes at the heart of legitimacy. Unlike human bias, which is subject to ethical scrutiny and corrective feedback in real time, algorithmic bias is often invisible and unaccountable. Worse, once embedded in opaque models, such bias can silently skew outcomes across many cases without the parties’ knowledge. In my view, relying on tools with hidden or untraceable bias risks systemic unfairness and delegitimises the very outcomes that are meant to promote resolution.

At the same time, such systems could reduce certain human biases, such as fatigue or inconsistent emotion-driven decisions, if properly managed. Studies suggest that they can provide a neutral perspective by analysing facts uniformly (Cao, Cheung and Li 2023). However, scholars caution that algorithmic fairness is not automatic. Even demonstrably fair algorithms can perpetuate hidden biases, and any algorithm that weighs certain factors, such as historical outcomes, inherently favours some results. Moreover, large language models are known to fabricate information (JAMS ADR 2024), raising additional fairness issues where output is not verified.

Mitigation measures

Bias auditing. Toolkits developed for this purpose aim to test and correct bias before deployment (Bellamy et al. 2018). In dispute resolution, such tools could scan recommendations for signs of unfair patterns, for example a consistent tendency to favour businesses over individuals.

Party control of data. Parties could negotiate which data a system uses. Excluding sensitive attributes such as race or nationality from the input can reduce some biases.

Guidelines and regulation. Emerging best practice emphasises that users must understand the limitations of these tools, retrain models where bias is found, and keep a human in the loop able to override unjust results (ADR Institute of Canada 2023).

If bias is not managed, the legitimacy of mediation itself suffers. Perceptions of fairness are crucial: parties are more likely to abide by a settlement if they believe the process was fair (Cao, Cheung and Li 2023). Conversely, a tainted outcome, even if technically sound, may not be regarded as just or trustworthy. Ensuring transparency and fairness is therefore not merely an ethical ideal but a practical necessity for enforceable and durable outcomes.

SUMMARY *

The article’s legal finding is straightforward and worth stating plainly because it dissolves much of the anxiety around the subject: a mediated settlement binds because the parties signed it, and the question of what assisted in producing the text is legally irrelevant to its enforceability. Where the difficulty lies is in the two conditions that surround the signature, namely that the parties knew what was assisting and consented to it, and that each had a genuine opportunity to be heard. The article’s second argument is of a different order. It holds that even where every legal condition is satisfied, something essential is lost, because what makes a party accept an outcome is the experience of having been heard by someone, and that experience cannot be simulated. The author accordingly arrives at a position that is permissive in law and restrictive in practice.

CONCLUSION

Artificial intelligence promises to transform mediation by offering data-driven insight and efficiency, but it cannot remove the need for core human values. Legally, outcomes reached with such assistance can bind only under the same conditions as any settlement: party consent and formalisation, since no special exception yet exists. Most laws still assume human neutrals (Norton Rose Fulbright 2024), so practitioners should proceed carefully when introducing these tools into binding decision processes (JAMS ADR 2024).

Equally important are the ethical dimensions. International standards demand fairness, impartiality, and accountability (UNCITRAL 2020). Such systems must be overseen by humans to ensure that they apply sound reasoning and remain neutral (ADR Institute of Canada 2023; Eftekhar 2025). Unmitigated algorithmic bias poses a clear threat to legitimacy; parties must be able to trust that no side is being quietly favoured.

In sum, the law currently treats artificial intelligence as a tool rather than a substitute: its outputs bind only to the extent that the parties accept them and due process is preserved (JAMS ADR 2024; UNCITRAL 2020). Ongoing developments in institutional guidelines and regulation aim to close the gap between technology and legal norms. Until then, the safest course is a human-centred approach: use these tools to assist mediation, but let human mediators and the parties retain ultimate control over the fairness and validity of the settlement. Ultimately, mediation’s legitimacy derives not from speed or efficiency but from meaningful human engagement. Such tools may assist with administrative efficiency, but allowing them to shape, suggest, or direct settlement terms distorts the nature of consensual dispute resolution. If the goal is not merely resolution but just resolution, then artificial intelligence must remain firmly subordinate to human mediators, as an instrument and not as an agent.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The legal analysis is correct and one consequence of it deserves to be drawn out, because it is more reassuring than the framing suggests. A settlement is a contract, and contracts are set aside for want of capacity, for duress, for mistake, or for misrepresentation. None of these turns on what tool produced the draft. The exposure therefore lies almost entirely in non-disclosure: a party who discovers after signature that the mediator’s proposals were machine-generated, and who was not told, has an argument about the integrity of the process that would not otherwise exist. Disclosure at the outset closes that gap at negligible cost, and it is the single measure that most reduces risk. The Silicon Valley Arbitration and Mediation Center guidelines and the recent institutional notes point in the same direction.

The distinction that would sharpen the argument is between the uses of these tools, which the article treats as a single question. Summarising documents, preparing chronologies, translating, and administering scheduling raise no issue of principle and are already common. Analysing settlement ranges from comparable cases informs the mediator without touching the parties’ autonomy. Drafting proposed terms begins to shape the outcome. And generating an evaluation of a party’s case, or a recommendation as to what it should accept, is the point at which the tool has entered the substance of the process. These four uses call for different degrees of disclosure and consent, and a blanket position on either side of the debate obscures that.

On the empathy argument, which the article makes strongly, one qualification is worth adding because it does not weaken the conclusion. Online dispute resolution platforms handling very high volumes of low-value disputes have resolved millions of cases without any human present, and the parties have largely accepted the outcomes. This suggests that the human element matters in proportion to what is at stake and to whether the parties have a continuing relationship. Where a dispute concerns a defective purchase, an efficient and consistent process is what fairness looks like; where it concerns a family, a workplace, or a community, it is not. The author’s argument is therefore right about the disputes this journal’s readers actually handle, and stating the boundary makes it harder to dismiss.

Two additions on practice. Confidentiality is the most immediate exposure and the least discussed: a mediator who enters party material into a service that retains inputs for training may have breached an obligation before any question of fairness arises, and the remedy is contractual and technical rather than ethical. And the fabrication problem the article notes has already produced sanctions against practitioners in several jurisdictions for citations that did not exist, which is a reminder that the first professional risk here is not that these systems will be unfair but that they will be confidently wrong.

Finally, the article’s closing formulation, that the goal is not merely resolution but just resolution, identifies what is genuinely at stake. Efficiency arguments in dispute resolution have a long history of arriving as improvements and settling as reductions in what parties receive, and the question to ask of any such tool is not whether it saves time but who benefits from the time saved. Where the answer is the parties, the case is strong. Where the answer is the institution, the parties should be told, and should be asked.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

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A House Divided: Conflict Dynamics Between Hamas and Fatah

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article concerns an internal Palestinian dispute in a highly contested regional setting. The characterisation of the parties and the attribution of responsibility reflect the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral. The article was written in 2025 and should be read with that date in mind.

ABSTRACT

This article explores the intra-Palestinian conflict between Hamas and Fatah through the lens of conflict analysis, focusing on the historical, ideological, and political divides that fuel the ongoing rivalry. It examines the behavioural dynamics of each party, the power imbalance between Gaza and the West Bank, and the environment in which the conflict persists. The article concludes by outlining sustainable solutions rooted in inclusive dialogue, political reform, and grassroots engagement.

KEYWORDS

Hamas, Fatah, intra-Palestinian conflict, mediation, power imbalance, conflict environment, sustainable peace, political legitimacy

INTRODUCTION

The Hamas and Fatah conflict is a long-standing internal Palestinian division that has fragmented national governance and undermined efforts toward Palestinian self-determination. Though both factions claim to represent the interests of the Palestinian people, their diverging ideologies and strategies have driven them into repeated confrontation since the early 2000s.

MAIN CORPUS

The parties and their origins

Fatah, the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority, was established in the 1950s and has traditionally pursued a secular, nationalist approach. It has shown a willingness to engage diplomatically with Israel and is internationally recognised, through the Palestine Liberation Organization, as the representative of the Palestinian people. In contrast, Hamas was founded at the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987 as an Islamist movement. It maintains a more confrontational stance toward Israel, grounded in its religious ideology and its refusal to recognise the Israeli state.

The legislative elections of 2006 marked a turning point. Hamas achieved an unexpected electoral victory, winning a majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. This exposed deep fault lines in Palestinian politics. The following year, violent clashes erupted between the two factions, culminating in Hamas taking control of the Gaza Strip while Fatah retained governance of the West Bank. This produced a de facto political division that persists today.

Behavioural dynamics

The behavioural dynamics of the conflict reflect differing postures. Hamas has exhibited assertive and at times aggressive behaviour, driven in part by conditions of blockade, by ideological rigidity, and by the objective of maintaining control over Gaza through military capacity and messaging. Fatah, meanwhile, demonstrates a more bureaucratic and constrained character, attempting to maintain international legitimacy and institutional continuity in the West Bank despite internal criticism and charges of stagnation and corruption.

Power and imbalance

From a power perspective, Hamas has held control over Gaza through its military wing and has maintained external support from actors such as Iran and Qatar. Fatah, although weaker militarily, has the backing of Western states and broader diplomatic recognition. This creates a paradoxical imbalance: Hamas has been stronger on the ground in Gaza, while Fatah holds international standing and donor leverage.

The conflict environment

The conflict environment further complicates mediation. Internally, Palestinians face poverty, political fatigue, human rights violations, and generational trauma. Externally, the region is shaped by the interests of Israel, Egypt, the United States, and other regional powers. These actors often take sides or promote solutions that serve their strategic goals more than Palestinian unity. In addition, the blockade of Gaza, limited movement between the territories, and media polarisation deepen mistrust between ordinary citizens and their leadership alike.

Reconciliation efforts, including the Mecca Agreement of 2007, the Cairo talks of 2011, and the reconciliation agreement of 2017, have repeatedly failed for want of enforcement, because of inconsistent political will, and through the interference of external actors. Both parties have accused each other of betrayal, and unity talks have often functioned as political theatre rather than as genuine steps toward reconciliation.

My view of sustainable solutions

For a meaningful and lasting resolution, several strategies must be considered.

Inclusive political dialogue. Neutral third-party mediators, possibly from regional organisations such as the Arab League or from non-aligned states, should facilitate direct and inclusive dialogue between both parties, away from the external pressures and power dynamics that have historically derailed talks.

A power-sharing mechanism. A transitional unity government representing both Hamas and Fatah, with rotating leadership and clear jurisdiction over shared ministries, could gradually rebuild trust and integrate fragmented institutions.

Reform of political structures. Holding transparent and inclusive elections across all Palestinian territories would give legitimacy to new leadership and reflect the current will of the people, many of whom were not eligible to vote in 2006.

Grassroots and civil society engagement. Initiatives led by civil society groups, youth movements, and women’s organisations can reduce reliance on hierarchical political solutions. These groups can act as bridges, rebuilding community cohesion and shared national identity from the ground up.

Transitional justice and accountability. Both parties must be held accountable for internal human rights abuses and the suppression of dissent. An independent national body for reconciliation and justice could facilitate healing and document grievances for institutional reform.

SUMMARY *

The article’s organising observation is that a division usually treated as a symptom of the wider conflict is better understood as a conflict in its own right, with its own parties, its own history of failed agreements, and its own logic of incentives. On the author’s account each faction holds something the other lacks, territory and armed capacity on one side, recognition and access to funding on the other, and neither can govern without the other while each can prevent the other from governing alone. The five proposals that follow address different levels rather than offering alternatives to one another, from mediated talks between leaderships to accountability for what each has done to its own population, with the observation that a generation has now reached adulthood without having voted.

CONCLUSION

The Hamas and Fatah conflict represents more than a political rivalry; it reflects a deep fracture within Palestinian political life that has hindered national unity and weakened efforts toward a broader settlement. Through the lens of conflict analysis it becomes evident that this divide is shaped by ideological difference, imbalanced power structures, and entrenched mistrust, all reinforced by external influence and historical grievance.

Understanding the behaviours at play, from assertion to constrained cooperation, allows mediators to identify the emotional and psychological currents that sustain the conflict. The environment is one in which identity, legitimacy, and survival are constantly negotiated, leaving little room for compromise without trusted facilitation.

For a sustainable resolution, a shift from reactive measures to proactive, relationship-centred dialogue is essential. Third-party mediation, community-based peacebuilding, and mechanisms for inclusive political representation can open a path toward reconciliation. Though difficult, bridging this internal divide is vital both for Palestinian self-determination and for any credible advance in the wider peace process.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s diagnosis is sound and the reason these agreements have failed can be stated more precisely, because the precision points toward what would have to be different.

Every reconciliation agreement since 2007 has foundered on the same two items: the security forces and the movement’s relationship with armed struggle. Neither party will place its armed personnel under the other’s command, because doing so means surrendering the capacity to survive a reversal, and this is the classic commitment problem that defeats settlements between armed factions everywhere. It is not solved by better drafting. Where comparable divisions have been settled, the solution has involved third party monitoring of integration, phased implementation in which neither side disarms before the other, and, frequently, an external guarantor with the standing to impose a cost on defection. Egypt and Qatar have convened; neither has guaranteed.

The second obstacle is external and the article names it without drawing the conclusion. Reconciliation carries an immediate financial penalty, since the Palestinian Authority’s revenues depend on donor funding and on tax transfers, both of which have been suspended in response to previous unity arrangements. A party is therefore asked to accept a loss of income in exchange for a promise from an adversary. Until the international position on a unified administration is settled in advance rather than after the fact, the incentive structure will continue to reward division, whatever the parties themselves prefer.

Two additions bear on the proposals. Elections are the most frequently urged remedy and the most consistently deferred, and the reasons are worth naming: the constitutional position on when a presidential term ends is contested, East Jerusalem participation requires Israeli agreement which has not been forthcoming, and both parties have reason to fear a result they cannot control. The sequencing question this journal has considered elsewhere applies with full force here, since an election held before agreement on what the loser accepts is a mechanism for producing the next round rather than for ending this one. And the emphasis on civil society is right and understates the difficulty: the space for independent organisation has narrowed under both administrations, and any programme built on that constituency has first to secure the conditions in which it can operate.

Finally, one observation from the perspective of this field. The two most striking facts in the article are that the last legislative election was held nearly two decades ago and that a majority of Palestinians have never voted. A settlement negotiated between two leaderships whose mandates predate the adulthood of most of the people they govern will be received as an arrangement between elites, however carefully it is drafted. Whatever else reconciliation requires, it requires a route by which the governed acquire a say, and that is the element every previous agreement has postponed.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

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Milton-Edwards, B. (2017) The Hamas and Fatah Conflict: Shallow but Wide. Journal of Middle Eastern Politics 19(2), 134 to 150.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Mecca Agreement between Fatah and Hamas, 8 February 2007.

Cairo Agreement on Palestinian National Reconciliation, 4 May 2011, and the Doha Declaration, 6 February 2012.

Cairo Reconciliation Agreement, 12 October 2017, and the Beijing Declaration, 23 July 2024.

Basic Law of the Palestinian Authority, as amended in 2003 and 2005, and the Palestinian Elections Law.

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Milton-Edwards, B., & Farrell, S. (2010). Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Roy, S. (2011). Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Walter, B. F. (2002). Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars. Princeton University Press, Princeton, on the commitment problem in the integration of armed forces.

International Crisis Group, Middle East reports on Palestinian reconciliation, Brussels and Ramallah.