Hybrid Peace: Private Mediation in a Fragmented World - New Horizons essay by David Harland
In the Summer 2026 edition of Horizons, HD’s Executive Director David Harland makes the case for private mediation.
With the fragmentation of the current world order, David’s essay in the Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development, published by the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), demonstrates the value of professional private mediators like HD, with their ability to work discretely and interact with actors that states or multilateral institutions may be politically unable or unwilling to speak to directly. Not replacing but complementing official diplomacy, by occupying the spaces where it cannot operate effectively.
See the article on CIRSD’s website here. The full text is below.
In today’s fragmented world, wars are multiplying—and they persist. Instead of ending through negotiated settlement, conflicts keep going, sometimes at high intensity, as in Ukraine, or as punctuated equilibria, as in Gaza or Iran. Diplomacy continues, but it often produces only temporary arrangements—short-lived ceasefires or localized de-escalation measures, rather than broad political settlements.
This represents a striking contrast to the period after the end of the Cold War. As I noted in my essay “The Lost Art of Peacemaking,” the 1990s and early 2000s were, in many respects, a golden age of peacemaking. During those years, mediation processes helped end wars in places as diverse as Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mozambique, Namibia, Aceh, Sierra Leone, Nepal, and Sudan. Partly as a result, the number of wars being fought fell, and the number of people killed in war fell to historically low levels.
The UN and regional organizations led most of these processes. The United States was often a mediator of last resort, as with the Dayton Accords on Bosnia, and Russia played a role in agreements such as the Moscow Agreement of 1997 that ended the civil war in Tajikistan. There was already a small but growing role for private mediation, too: the Community of Sant’Egidio played the central role in the Rome agreement that ended the Mozambican civil war in 1992.
All of this work reinforced the view that most armed conflicts could be resolved through negotiated settlements, and that international mediation could help produce durable agreements. It was far from perfect—many of the agreements reduced levels of violence without doing much more—but the impact on the overall level of armed conflict in the world was dramatic.
The context within which these interventions took place was unique. The United States had emerged from the Cold War as the world’s hyperpower. For the first time, a single power was the preponderant military and economic force in every region of the world. While always leaving itself somewhat outside and above the rules-based framework over which it presided, the United States generally wanted to use its power to shape an international order based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter: an order of open societies and free trade, democratic where possible and convenient, and above all peaceful.
The U.S. often sought to bring this about through the system of laws, norms, and multilateral institutions it had done so much to put in place during World War II. America would be there as the guarantor of the system, but much of the work would be done through the intergovernmental machinery it had shaped in San Francisco in 1945. Mediators trying to end conflicts through agreements within that multilateral framework had the wind at their backs.
That period of American hegemony also turned out to be ephemeral. President Putin’s speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 is often cited as the moment the paradigm shifted. Russia’s turn was key, but it was only part of the story. China’s rise, playing out over the same decades, was key as well. China’s share of world GDP at the end of the Cold War in 1990 was 1.6 percent; by the time Russia broke definitively with the Pax Americana in 2007, that share had risen to 9 percent; today it is almost 20 percent.
The United States itself also did much to undermine the rules-based system it had helped create and sustain. In 1999, it led a NATO intervention in Kosovo in violation of the foundational principle of the international order—that force should not be used against the territorial integrity of any state, enshrined in Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter. Four years later it invaded Iraq, again without a legal basis and without a mandate from the Security Council. And in 2008, it orchestrated an international effort to detach Kosovo from Serbia entirely, without a negotiated agreement—a precedent President Putin would cite when Russia invaded Ukraine three years later.
The post-Cold War period has thus given way to a more fragmented and conflict-prone international order. Geopolitical competition has intensified. The use of force has re-emerged as a preferred tool of statecraft, producing more interstate wars. Multilateral institutions are increasingly defunded, divided, and often paralyzed. Core norms against territorial conquest and the use of force are eroding.
At the same time, conflicts have become more fragmented internally. Many contemporary wars no longer involve a small number of reasonably coherent parties negotiating a shared political future, but sprawling networks of state and non-state actors.
These developments have made mediation harder and enduring agreements rarer. Although there are more wars than ever, the number of mediated agreements to end them has dried up. There have been a few over the last 15 years, but not many. The 2014 agreement in the Southern Philippines, brokered by Malaysia with the support of an International Contact Group, was an exception, as was the Colombian peace agreement supported by Cuba and Norway in 2016. Many of the other major agreements attempted in this period have simply led to more war: the South Sudan agreement gave way to civil war in 2013, and the Algiers Accords on Mali of 2015 have done nothing to hold back the gathering storm of violence now engulfing the Sahel.
Why Comprehensive Settlements are Increasingly Difficult
Three main features of the emerging world disorder are making mediation harder: the end of the Pax Americana, the nature of the international system emerging in its wake, and the impact of social media. Some of this is reversion to the mean—to the normal way in which states interacted before 1945—and some of it is genuinely new.
First, and above all, the erosion of the U.S.-led rules-based order has left more room for geopolitical competition: the sort of competition that leads to war and stymies efforts to end it. Scholarly work on the durability of ceasefires has found that most hold over the long term only when great and regional powers are aligned. A fragmented, competitive international system reduces the number of cases in which the major external actors are aligned.
The multiple conflicts now roiling the Horn of Africa are a case in point. External actors, mainly from the Gulf, are—literally—fueling them, providing the fuel, finance, drones, and digital support that drive the intensity of the fighting. Some foreign sponsors back multiple clients at once, producing region-wide webs of interest and violence that cross borders and hollow out what remains of the region’s governing institutions. These conflicts are almost beyond mediation. A deal between the RSF and SAF in Sudan, for example, would be almost impossible to reach, because the real drivers of the conflict—the external sponsors supplying the money, fuel, and weapons—would not be at the table. And even if such a deal were somehow reached, it would mean little: the war is sustained from outside, and an agreement between the local belligerents cannot bind the foreign hands that arm them.
Second, the internal structure of conflicts has changed. There are really only two ways for an insurgency of any kind to sustain itself: patronage or business. These are not mutually exclusive—the conflicts in the Horn of Africa contain elements of both—but which model dominates greatly shapes the structure and dynamics of the conflict.
The patronage model, in which an insurgent organization seeks support from a powerful external sponsor, was the dominant form of insurgency during the Cold War. It naturally favored and strengthened proxy organizations claiming ideological alignment with the sponsor—communism, market democracy, or whatever else—and tended to produce large, centralized, reasonably coherent structures with powerful legitimating myths and grievance narratives.
The other way of sustaining an insurgency is business: extortion (otherwise known as taxation) or the trafficking of something—people, arms, drugs. When the Cold War ended, the United States had no real need to support proxy insurgents, and the Soviet Union no longer existed. As a result, pre-existing insurgencies that wanted to survive—from the FARC to the IRA—had to change their business model. And new insurgencies did better not by espousing grand causes favored by great powers—”freedom,” “socialism,” and the like—but by focusing on the core business of undermining state authority just enough to let the rents of the black economy flow.
Such organizations often have fig-leaf causes and grievance narratives, but more often than not they are not really fighting for a cause at all. Political objectives are frequently vague or absent, which makes negotiation difficult. Alliances shift constantly, based not on ideological affinity but on market logic. These groups can be very small, so there can be a great many of them: Congo, Myanmar, and Syria each produced hundreds, sometimes thousands, of armed groups. The medium-term effect of this model is the corrosion of state authority—conducive to the kind of generalized mayhem that characterized Europe during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century.
Third, the evolution of the media both exacerbates conflict and makes it harder to resolve. Social media algorithms connect people who already agree with one another and feed them material they want to believe, eroding the boundary between belief and fact and driving polarization. This fuels a whole range of malignancies, from the mass violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya to the rise of populist parties across Europe and beyond. That polarization has, in turn, reduced leaders’ willingness to explore compromise openly. Compromise has become taboo; the art of diplomacy—in which you give something to get something—is delegitimized.
Armed conflicts are thus more common, more violent, and harder to resolve. Mediation has never been more difficult, nor more needed.
Private Mediation Organizations as Adaptive Actors
Mediation in armed conflict is almost as old as conflict itself. The central narrative of Homer’s Iliad, the oldest work of fiction in the Western canon, is the mediation by Odysseus of a dispute between the Greek commander Agamemnon and Achilles—the most powerful of the Greek warriors and the leader of one of the most powerful Greek contingents. Many of the episodes we remember from that story, from Helen of Troy to the Trojan Horse, appear in the Iliad only as flashback or foreshadowing; the central axis around which the story revolves is the mediation. Most conflicts since then have involved mediation of one sort or another.
Until almost our own time, whatever third-party role was needed in crisis and war was generally performed by individuals acting alone—sometimes to positive effect, sometimes the opposite. Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, undertook diplomatic efforts during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 to facilitate humanitarian access and communication between the warring parties. During World War I, the dramatic and infinitely consequential arrangement that enabled Lenin to travel by sealed train from neutral Switzerland across Germany to Russia originated as a proposal from private intermediaries. And on the eve of World War II, the Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus attempted unofficial mediation between Nazi Germany and Great Britain—an episode that offers powerful lessons in the perils of amateur diplomacy.
Since World War II, private actors have continued to play significant roles. Gavin Relly, head of the Anglo-American mining company, was key in the early stages of the talks that ultimately led to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the eventual move to majority rule in South Africa. The Irish businessman Brendan Duddy operated a channel between Britain and the IRA throughout the Troubles, a process that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement and the end of the conflict.
What has changed in the area of mediation in recent decades is the emergence of professional private mediation organizations, including the one I lead, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD). Unlike ad hoc intermediaries, these combine professional mediation expertise with operational flexibility. The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue engages discreetly, and can interact with actors that states or multilateral institutions may be politically unable or unwilling to speak to directly. In doing so, we do not seek to replace official diplomacy. Rather, we occupy the spaces where formal diplomacy cannot operate effectively, often complementing the efforts of states and multilateral organizations.
The Aceh war in Indonesia was an early example. HD helped facilitate negotiations between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement during a period when official channels had largely broken down. The process depended heavily on discreet engagement, flexibility, and the creation of politically low-risk spaces where ideas could be explored before being formalized. Agreement was reached; and when that agreement foundered, another private mediation actor—former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari—was able to secure a more durable one.
As formal mediation spaces become more constrained in the current geopolitical environment, the comparative advantages of private mediation organizations grow more pronounced.
The Added Value of Private Mediation Organizations
Private mediation organizations bring several comparative advantages that allow them to make important contributions in today’s fragmented international environment.
First, they function as laboratories for diplomacy. This may be their most important role. In contemporary conflicts, formal negotiations are often politically risky from the outset. Leader’s fear appearing weak. Governments worry that engagement may imply recognition or concession. Public diplomacy leaves little room for experimentation. Private mediation organizations help create politically low-risk environments where actors can test ideas, explore trade-offs, clarify red lines, and identify possible areas of convergence before issues move to the formal negotiating table. The purpose is not always to produce immediate agreements, but to allow political imagination to function without constraint.
Second, private mediators can generate creative ideas for complex conflicts and can serve as a bridge between the world of testing ideas and the world of official agreements. Institutional diplomacy often operates within highly formalized mandates and established political positions; private actors frequently have greater freedom to explore unconventional arrangements or incremental approaches.
The Centre for Human Dialogue played exactly such a role in developing the concept of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. As soon as the war in Ukraine began, on February 24th, 2022, the Russian navy imposed a total blockade on Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. In parallel, invading Russian forces swept out of Crimea and along Ukraine’s Black Sea while invading forces swept along the coast from Crimea before being halted just short of Odesa. Ukraine was left holding its vast agricultural hinterland and its main ports, but with the sea routes beyond them closed by the Russian navy. Its grain exports were cut off from world markets, and grain spiked around the globe.
In March 2022, HD wrote a concept note for the United Nations Secretary General proposing a mediation between Russia and Ukraine to establish agreed corridors from Ukraine’s Southern ports, across the Black Sea and through the Russian blockade, onward to world markets. For Ukraine, the incentive was clear. In return, Russia would be offered an easing of sanctions on its own agricultural exports and would retain the goodwill of friendly countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that had been hit by rising food prices. HD discreetly tested the ideas with the Ukrainian authorities, who were at first cautious and then supportive. We then supported Türkiye and the UN—who would become the official mediators—in securing formal agreements. With the UN and Türkiye in the lead, HD seconded senior staff to the two UN negotiating teams and, separately, continued to encourage the African Union, China, and others to intercede with President Putin.
The Libyan national ceasefire declarations—brokered by HD in August 2020 and then expanded and formalized through the mediation of the United Nations—followed the same pattern. That ceasefire was far from a complete end to Libya’s conflict, but with it the most violent phase of the war came to an end, and it remains in effect at the time of writing.
Third, private mediation organizations sustain backchannels when official diplomacy stalls. In many contemporary conflicts, the most important achievement may not be reaching immediate agreement but maintaining communication. Private mediators can preserve channels between actors who cannot speak to one another publicly, politically, or directly—and they can do so over many years, even decades, when governments may have more limited bandwidth. These channels help reduce the risk of miscalculation, facilitate humanitarian arrangements, and keep the possibility of future engagement alive. This function has become increasingly important in an era in which political polarization and geopolitical rivalry make contact difficult. The ability to provide confidentiality, deniability, and continuity gives private mediators particular relevance during periods of acute confrontation.
Fourth, private mediation organizations help connect the different layers of conflict that formal diplomacy often struggles to integrate. Contemporary conflicts are simultaneously local, national, regional, and geopolitical. Violence in a single locality may be shaped by international competition, while geopolitical agreements often fail because they are disconnected from local realities. Private mediators, present on the ground as well as in international circles, can move more flexibly across these levels.
Finally, contemporary peacemaking increasingly relies on ambiguity, deniability, and arrangements that simultaneously exist and do not exist politically—what might be called “quantum peacemaking.” In some contexts, progress becomes possible precisely because the parties avoid fully formalizing their understandings in public: the agreement must remain, in a sense, unobserved in order to hold.
The disarmament and dissolution of the Basque armed group ETA reflected aspects of this logic. For the Government of Spain, it was essential not only that any talks be confidential but that the government should be able to maintain, truthfully, that it had not negotiated with ETA, that there was no “process,” and that there was no agreement. It did not even accept that there had been a “conflict,” as opposed to a series of criminal and terrorist acts. For ETA, and for those who sympathized with it to some degree, it was important that the conflict be acknowledged and that the talks and their results be recognized. To work, it all had to exist and not exist at the same time.
And it did work. In July 2011, Madrid and ETA embarked on a set of “sequential but unlinked steps”: the end of extortion and of ETA’s armed campaign; then the legalization of the movement’s political wing; followed by further steps culminating in ETA giving up its weapons and finally dissolving. The declaration of ETA’s dissolution was made at HD’s Geneva headquarters in May 2018. There have been no further acts of political violence since.
Such approaches may appear insufficient compared with the comprehensive peace agreements of the 1990s, and they are certainly no full substitute for what was possible during those golden years. Yet they reflect the realities of a fragmented geopolitical environment in which the political space for broader settlements is so often limited.
Pragmatic Peacebuilding
The age of grand, comprehensive peace agreements may be over for now. The rules-based order that emerged from the rubble of World War II—and which provided the enabling framework for such agreements—is profoundly eroded. Historically, the patterns and rules of any international system emerge from crisis, are set by the victorious party, and then slowly degrade. They are not reset until there is a new crisis and a new cast of victors. It is therefore unlikely that a reconstituted rules-based order will emerge until after the next crisis—which, given the levels of destructive power now available, could be catastrophic. We are, in other words, stuck with the increasingly imperfect system we have.
Given this reality, we must work with the tools we have. Private mediation is one of them, because the organizations that specialize in it are well adapted to this environment: able to operate discreetly, to sustain communication, to test ideas, and to connect the fragmented layers of conflict that formal diplomacy struggles to reach. The hybrid peace processes they make possible are not always elegant or complete. But they are what is possible—and what is needed—in the world as it is.
