Still Time to Talk: PeaceRep research features in Accord 30

PeaceRep partner Conciliation Resources recently published their highly anticipated new Accord, which focuses on the evolving mediation landscape. Accord 30 explores innovative approaches to engage armed groups, navigate the digital environment, and ensure diverse views are incorporated into peace processes.

PeaceRep thinking contributed extensively to the report, including the underlying approach and the following articles by PeaceRep authors:

1. ‘Multimediation’: adapting in response to fragmentation (Christine Bell)In her contribution, Christine Bell argues that ‘multimediation’ – a collection of mediation and dialogue innovations taking place through ad hoc initiatives across contexts and organisations – could benefit from being developed into a more deliberate collective strategy. She suggests that multimediation could provide a pragmatic response to conflict fragmentation.
2. Diversification and congestion in international peacemaking (Mateja Peter and Sanja Badanjak)In their chapter, Mateja Peter and Sanja Badanja draw on data from the PA-X Peace Agreements Database to provide insights into changing trends in international involvement in peacemaking. Across the mediation field, data shows diversification of third parties in peace processes and potential for congestion. These trends, they argue, are contributing to an increasingly fragmented mediation space.

PeaceRep Managing Director, Tim Epple, reflects:

Conciliation Resource’s new Accord could not have been timelier. Teresa Whitfield has done an incredible job editing this volume that is released at a time when peacemaking has come under considerable pressure. Recent armed conflicts and increasing fragmentation of both conflict and mediation constellations have led mediators to seriously reconsider their approaches and strategies. This Accord issue of 128 pages offers rich analysis and practical recommendations for a field at a crossroads.

Epple continues: “As the applicability of peacemaking models of the 1990s to today’s conflicts is – rightfully – questioned, this volume provides both a sobering assessment of the limits of conventional mediation approaches while highlighting the immense adaptation and innovation that negotiators, civic actors, and mediators have driven in the recent past. We are proud to have contributed two chapters based on our work. PeaceRep can now draw on years of rigorous empirical research into exactly the kind of dilemmas this Accord so beautifully distills. We congratulate Conciliation Resources, Teresa Whitfield, and all those who have contributed to this Accord issue which will be an indispensable resource for years to come!”

This issue of Accord explores areas of adaptation and innovation in peace mediation in four sections:

1. The landscape for peace mediation
2. Diversified mediators, mandates and ambitions
3. Engaging resistant, elusive and excluded parties in peace mediation
4. Mediating with and on technology

Among the many recommendations included in the volume, and amid contexts of ‘multimediation’, Christine Bell proposes to:

• First, at the national level it would be possible to develop better mapping and exchange of information on mediation and peace efforts in ways that do not destroy them (recognising the need for discretion around some initiatives).
• Second, at the global level, there is a need for innovation in how to mediate between the mediators. In the short term, so Bell, thinking about how very different types of mediator could at least be corralled into some joint forums of information exchange or even dialogue, would be useful.
• Third, alongside these process innovations, we may also need substance innovation. Bell asks, provocatively: Could we find more novel ways to fund coherent pockets of democratisation or ‘civicness’ and self-government, without requiring it somehow to be fit into an idealised (state) architecture that bears very little relationship to how power is actually transacted?