Shaping Future Peace Mediation in a World without a Center

In 2024, my last full year in government, I sat in a room with mediators of increasing relevance from the Gulf, Türkiye, and Africa.¹ The agenda called in part for a discussion about norms like human rights, principles that the Western-led peace architecture had long insisted were the foundation of durable agreements. The representatives scoffed. They had not come to talk about norms. They had come to talk about realism and peace. Given what the “rules-based international order” was failing to prevent in Gaza and elsewhere, it was hard to argue with them. In fact, the system that claimed universal principles had always applied them selectively (Carney 2026). The populations and governments on the receiving end of that selectivity noticed long ago.

Looking to the future, international peacemakers and diplomats must grapple with a changing mediation space in which post-war norms and frameworks are being ignored and discredited. No single country will likely be able to set the terms for how peace is achieved. Yet, international peacemakers and diplomats can still help shape conflict incentives toward peace by using coalition pressure to weaken war economies, raise the cost of ruling without legitimacy, and press for settlements that have wider public backing.

An Increasingly Crowded, Challenging Mediation Environment

In the post-Cold War era, U.S.- and Western-mediated or enforced peace initiatives produced real successes, including the Dayton Accords, the Good Friday Agreement, and Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement (Dalay 2026). But those outcomes depended on a combination of U.S. primacy, coherent external leverage, and favorable political windows shaped by world events. Western peacemaking was never neutral: it was tied to stabilizing regions, extending a market-based order, and reinforcing institutions aligned with Western strategic and economic interests. Norms mattered, but they were applied selectively and used to legitimate hegemonic power, never to constrain it. In the last 20 years, however, the United States and its allies have become less convinced about the geo-strategic value of long-term peacebuilding projects.

Over time, Western selectivity hollowed the norms out. In a multipolar world, there is no longer a single actor able or willing to enforce them consistently. Peacebuilders should neither hope for nor expect one to emerge. They have to work within the constellation of power as it is.

The mediators filling the space are less pretentious than the old guard was about their interests. They seek regional influence, economic leverage, strategic positioning, and the prestige that comes from brokering a deal. There is no longer the expectation of a single process. This “multimediation” environment is what Christine Bell has called the “accidental and deliberate use of multiple overlapping mediation processes” (Bell 2024) and new mediators can choose relevance over resolution (Adhikari, et al. 2025). A fragile ceasefire may be more useful to a broker than a comprehensive settlement that ends the conflict and removes their influence.

To be clear, transactional and limited agreements can still unlock real progress. Ceasefires save lives, prisoner exchanges bring people home. However, the transactional approach often reinforces and sustains the conflict parties’ efforts of exclusion, extraction, or domination, which are not compatible with more sustainable and just peace. The laws of war, human rights, and self-determination norms emerged out of universal experience. Whether or not they are explicitly named, durable peace depends on whether the substance of those norms is upheld (Kaufman 2022).

Furthermore, this crowded and challenging mediation environment is more easily manipulated by conflict parties. Multiple processes let parties cherry-pick gains across venues without ever making the tradeoffs that resolution requires (Chughtai and Murphy 2023). Why commit to one process when you can play three off against each other?

An even harder problem is the weakened role of legitimacy: when foreign subsidies, illicit finance, and resource extraction can sustain a belligerent indefinitely, the cost of losing popular support drops. The people who bear the highest cost of conflict end up with the least voice in how it ends, especially when they must chase multiple processes.

Working with Power as It Is to Create Incentives for Peace

There is no way back to norms-based conflict mediation and resolution through insistence on norms. Norms come from consistent application in practice, and we are no longer in a unipolar world where any hegemon can impose that consistency. Western peacemakers and diplomats need to forge better connections with emerging mediators and pay greater attention to effective coalition management. At the same time, they can still take important actions to create conditions and incentives for more durable peace processes. Specifically:

– Target the war machine. States with the power to do so should focus on the resources that allow parties to wage war without popular support or legitimacy: arms flows, foreign subsidies, illicit finance, and conflict commodities.² That means following the money, identifying the state patrons and commercial enablers who profit from war, and blocking these channels. The goal is not to reclaim old mediation centrality but to use what influence remains to disrupt the networks that sustain violence and impede viable mediated solutions.

– Convert popular energy into power. Unarmed populations hold a deeper source of legitimacy than armed groups but turning it into leverage requires organizing and collective action. Traditional mediators tried to contain that energy inside process and programming. Emerging mediators often ignore it altogether. The better approach is to find where popular energy already exists, resource it flexibly without burdensome restrictions, and let it unfold on people’s terms. What happens at the mediation table is downstream of who holds power outside it. Building popular leverage changes both what belligerents can credibly refuse and whom mediators must include—not out of altruism but because of where the power is (Chenoweth 2025).

– Push multimediation toward population-backed settlements. International peace actors should emphasize the practical importance of securing public buy-in for mediated processes and agreements to make them durable. The task is to identify where elite survival, political control, or security interests overlap with legitimacy, governance, and civilian protection, then structure inducements, pressure, and sequencing around those overlaps. International actors can work to shape fragmented mediation space so that the available bargains move closer to popular needs.

The United States and Western powers will be nursing the hangover from norm destruction for a long time. The field should be less concerned with who is convening and what performative moral foundations they apply and more concerned with using its resources to influence the flow of power and the capacity to wage war. Weaken the economies that let belligerents fight against their populations’ will; build the leverage those populations need to be heard; and push multimediation toward settlements with a real constituency. The peacemakers who do that work will shape the next era of practice. The ones who do not will keep designing better tables for rooms where the outcome has already been decided.

Works Cited

Adhikari, Monalisa, Jennifer Hodge, Christine Bell, and Zabra Siwa. 2025. “Disaggregated Mediation: The Localisation of Peace Processes amid Global Domestic Fragmentation.” European Journal of International Relations, 1-32. https://www.storre.stir.ac.uk/retrieve/dc30356a-905a-4d9e-b335-cdf653f50427/adhikari-et-al-2025-disaggregated-mediation-the-localisation-of-peace-processes-amid-global-and-domestic-fragmentation.pdf.

Bell, Christine. 2024. “‘Multimediation’: Adapting in Response to Fragmentation.” In Still Time to Talk: Adaptation and Innovation in Peace Mediation (Accord 30), edited by Teresa Whitfield. Conciliation Resources. https://www.c-r.org/accord/still-time-talk/%E2%80%98multimediation%E2%80%99-adapting-response-fragmentation.

Carney, Mark. 2026. “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.” Special address at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 20. https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/.

Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. 2021. The Role of External Support in Nonviolent Campaigns: Poisoned Chalice or Holy Grail? ICNC Monograph Series. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/icnc_monograph_external_support_poisoned_chalice_holy_grail/

Chughtai, Ameer, and Theodore Murphy. 2023. “Conflict and Interests: Why Sudan’s External Mediation Is a Barrier to Peace.” European Council on Foreign Affairs, September 8. https://ecfr.eu/article/conflict-and-interests-why-sudans-external-mediation-is-a-barrier-to-peace/.

Dalay, Galip. 2026. “Forget Geneva. The World’s New Peacemakers Are in the Global South.” Time Magazine, January 6. https://time.com/7343161/conflict-doha-un-peace-broker-mediation/.

Kaufman, Stuart J. 2022. “Normative Influences on War.” New Lines Institute, August 1. https://anthologies.newlinesinstitute.org/universal-values-and-foreign-policy/normative-influences-on-war/.