(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. 73-75.

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The atmosphere of an intractable conflict may be charged or indifferent, hopeful or fatalistic, but it will certainly bear the marks of a long, entrenched fight and many previous attempts at reconciliation. The mediator will have to deal with attitudes and conditions created by the intractable nature of the conflict as well as those created by the conflict itself. In a long conflict, the parties know each other very well. They know how the other side will react to specific proposals even before those proposals are put on the table. They know how much leeway their opponents have to compromise before hard-line supporters withdraw their support. They know how to manipulate the various third parties in order to play one off the other. They know how they benefit from continued fighting and what they would lose from acceding to peace. By this time, the world, in the guise of informed outsiders, also knows a lot about the conflict. It knows the issues and the players, and how the players' identities are caught up in the conflict. It knows that the conflict can be contained, that it is not such a big threat to regional or international security as to demand intervention. It knows about the many failed third-party efforts to do something about the conflict, and it thinks it knows why each failed. Welcome to the mediator's multifaceted environment.[l]

How much control the mediator has over this environment depends in part on what institution he or she is representing. Mediators representing significant powers providing the kinds of incentives and disincentives that move along a peace process may be able to do a great deal to shape an intervention effort. When Richard Holbrooke brokered the Dayton accords, the history of NATO bombing and the determination of the United States to use both carrots and sticks to stop the fighting formed the backdrop to the mediation. These were elements of the mediation environment that the mediator had control over and could deploy to an end — whether to halt the violence, to stymie its regional spread, or simply to manage the situation until better moments for negotiation opened up. If the significant power is also a democracy, however, the mediator will be subject to open criticism of his or her efforts and will face the ever-present possibility that the peace process will become politicized, not just in the area in conflict but in the mediator's home environment.[2]

If the mediator represents the United Nations, other conditions apply. The United Nations confers international legitimacy on an intervention, separating the mediation effort from the foreign policy concerns on any single state and freeing the mediator from the constant task of convincing government colleagues and international allies of the wisdom of banking on this mediation effort. The United Nations, however, is an intergovernmental organization and as such brings its own set of constraints: dissension among the permanent members of the Security Council, contending agendas between the Security Council and the secretary-general's office, a mammoth bureaucracy, and very limited resources.

In contrast, if the mediator represents an NGO, he or she may have a great deal of freedom of movement but will also have few points of leverage and almost no ability to induce or force the parties to the conflict to change their behavior. In order to shape the mediation, NGO mediators must rely on persuasion, help from other third parties, and luck.

Even in situations in which the mediator can shape some part of the intervention effort, however, much of the mediator's environment reflects circumstances and dynamics that lie outside of his or her control: the robustness of institutional support, the play of international politics, the stability of the conflict region, and, most important, the nature and interactions of the conflict itself.[3] While mediators representing states may have a greater ability to influence the conflict situation than do those representing international or nongovernmental organizations, all mediators operate in uncertain, complex environments. As in every complex situation, there are many layers to this environment, including the individual mediator's personal situation; the mediator's institutional base and the political context within which it operates; and, of course, the on-the-ground environment -- the history, nature, and dynamics of the conflict itself.