The Mediator's Environment
(excerpt)
Crocker, Chester A., Fen Olser Hampson, and Pamela Aall. eds. Taming Intractable Conflicts: Mediation in the Hardest Cases United States Institute of Peace: Washington D.C., 2004, pg. 88-90.
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The Barriers Posed by Multiple Mediators
Since the end of the Cold War, many institutions have found themselves, if not ready, at least willing to undertake mediations. As a consequence, the number of outsiders that get involved in the conflict management process in any given conflict has risen sharply, resulting in a crowded field of third-party institutions that each mediator must deal with. Jacob Bercovitch and his colleagues have identified about four hundred distinct instances of mediation in the Balkans since the beginning of the wars that have marked the area since the early 1990s.[22] European neighbors, the United Nations, the United States, Russia, the OSCE, and myriad NGOs have launched efforts to create or consolidate peace in the region. Some of these intervention efforts have built on previous initiatives; others have been simultaneous and often competitive. This situation, repeated in many hot spots around the world, underscores an important characteristic of the mediator's environment in most intractable conflicts: the presence of multiple mediators, all trying to bring peace to the same troubled area. Multiparty mediation has advantages and disadvantages and as such presents both opportunities and costs to the principal mediator.
Benefits of multiparty mediation include the ability to facilitate third-party entry at different stages of the conflict through different mediatory institutions. An NGO may be able to gain entry at periods in the conflict when attitudes are softening or when other institutions are not interested in engaging or have been locked out by the parties; a powerful state may be able to convince or induce the parties to shift their positions at times when the United Nations or NGOs have no influence. Multiple mediators working in concert can open new avenues for dialogue, create leverage, isolate spoilers, share costs, divide risks, and, by working at both the international and the local levels, put in place the necessary elements to transform the conflict into a platform for political negotiations.
In addition to benefits, however, multiple mediators can bring serious problems, problems that can compound a conflict and add to its durability. As mediators compete for the parties' attention, they can deliver mixed messages about the international community's willingness to back a negotiating process and confusing signals about which negotiating process it is willing to back. At the same time, apparent discordance among the mediators encourages "forum shopping" among the parties to the conflict. In this situation, parties will seek to work only with those mediators that seem to favor their side and will want to change mediators as the political winds shift. Achieving smooth handoffs between mediators is a particularly challenging aspect of multiparty mediation, as much valuable information, history, and perspective can be lost in the transition from one mediator to another. In addition, the presence of a clutch of mediators allows each one to pass on to others the responsibility for defeat, thereby avoiding the stain of failed mediation and the pain of analyzing what went wrong.
No matter how the individual mediator views multiparty mediation or how well he or she understands the particular advantage of the various potential mediators, one thing is clear: in today's messy conflicts, there will always be more than one mediator. Third-party congestion is an ever-present hazard in third-party intervention, especially in long-enduring conflicts.[23]
Conclusion
Understanding the mediator's environment and the opportunities and constraints it presents is an understudied but important part of assessing whether an intervention is likely to be effective in any given conflict. It is, however, just a part of this assessment and as such forms a backdrop to the more obvious tasks -- discussed in the next chapter -- of mastering the issues at stake in the conflict, engaging the actors, and designing and implementing a mediation strategy. It is worth noting, however, that this backdrop affects every part of a mediation strategy in an intractable conflict.
While these tasks may not be substantially different from mediation in more tractable conflicts, they become more complex because of the constant or recurrent lack of ripeness within the conflict.[24] Just as this lack of ripeness contributes to fixed attitudes among the parties to the conflict, it can also lead to a fixed judgment among outside parties: "This conflict will never end because it is intractable. Were it tractable, it would have ended by now." Never mind that this reasoning is circular; it is too useful to discard. It offers an explanation for many of the long-enduring conflicts in the world today and provides an easy excuse for outsiders to do nothing. The challenge to the mediator in an intractable conflict is to encourage movement forward where possible, working on the environment within a conflict in order to make a space for political dialogue to occur. At the same time, the mediator must also develop support for the peace process within his or her own institution and in the larger political environment. The next chapters take us inside this complex set of tasks as the mediator engages in a peacemakinge effort, devises strategies for the inevitable breakdown, structures an agreement, and shepherds to safety an implementation process.