Making Peace When the Whole World Has Come to Fight: The Mediation of Internationalized Civil Wars

Abstract

ABSTRACT After a quarter-century during which it was a relatively rare phenomenon, external military intervention is now a common occurrence during contemporary civil war. Research has highlighted the additional challenges that this poses for peacemaking, but to date has not identified evidence to inform mediators assisting negotiations to resolve internationalized civil conflict. This paper addresses this inadequacy by undertaking a structured, focused comparison of a series of mediation processes in six internationalized civil wars during in the 1980s. I find that effective mediation in this era involved now unfamiliar negotiation process designs related to the types of mandates issued to mediators, participation arrangements for talks and strategic choices on how to best sequence and symbiotically link the external and internal dimensions of civil war negotiations. Likewise, internationalized civil wars introduce a distinct class of issues for negotiation, including troop withdrawals and curtailing outside military assistance, non-intervention pledges, possible foreign policy reform of the civil war state and bespoke international roles in implementation. The paper closes by considering the issue of ripeness in relation to internationalized civil wars and the possible applications of these findings to contemporary mediation processes.