Sticks and carrots for peace: The effect of manipulative mediation strategies on post-conflict stability

Abstract

Mediation is widely used to settle armed conflict and interstate crises. However, the debate over the most appropriate and effective mediation strategy is still ongoing. In particular, manipulative mediation is controversial, with some research indicating that heavy-handed mediation may buy short-term peace at the expense of an instable long-term situation. This paper re-evaluates these claims. We discuss how existing theoretical arguments either do not imply long-term instability or implicitly make unrealistic assumptions to explain possible long-term problems of manipulative strategies. We re-examine published empirical evidence for problematic long-term effects of manipulative mediation in interstate crises. We demonstrate statistically that this evidence actually implies a different conclusion and instead supports our theoretical argument: manipulative mediation is associated with substantively greater stability compared to unmediated cases, although this effect weakens and becomes statistically insignificant after several years. Interestingly, non-manipulative mediation appears to be uncorrelated with post-crisis stability, based on our analysis.