The second level of contestation is the local actors-third party peacemaker level, where a third party mediator seeks to mediate a power-sharing settlement between the local groups. At this level, promotion of power-sharing by third peacemakers is likely to run into conflict with the local parties who would prefer a majoritarian system or other political goals over power-sharing such as secession or annexation by another country. The peacemaker, thus, may end up in a contestation for power-sharing with one or more of the disputants and is likely seek to ally itself with one party in order pressure the other one. In such contexts the peacemaker would need to manipulate the disputants and the mediation context if the mediation process is to succeed. As the parties tend to have other issues at stake, such as territory and security, the mediator could formulate and propose different sets of possible compromises (i.e. settlement proposals), thus providing a basis for negotiation. However, if mediated negotiations on such proposals also seem to be failing, the mediator could try to exert its influence on the parties by either simply threatening to end the process and/or through other pressuring tactics. For instance, a common combination of such strategies is declaring a deadline for ending the mediation and indicating what consequences a collapse of the process would entail for the parties, which could include public naming and blaming, and imposition of some diplomatic or economic sanctions. In other words, a mediator in power-sharing negotiations is usually not an intermediary which simply conveys one party’s message to the other side (which could be described as facilitator), but it is often a formulator- manipulator. The overall negotiation framework can be described as a three way interaction having the mediator at its core: one interaction between each disputant and the mediator in addition to the disputant-disputant interaction. The bilateral negotiation processes between the mediator and each disputant may then even supersede the local-local interaction and become the main level of power-sharing negotiation, particularly where the local-local level is ridden with
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political violence and mutual distrust, which often causes the disputants direct interactions to become quarrelsome and unproductive.
The Bosnian case exemplifies how power-sharing negotiation in the context of a deeply divided society may turn into parallel negotiation processes between the individual disputants and the mediator. When it became clear that collective mediation was unlikely to succeed as the war continued, the US took over the mediation and negotiated separately with the main power- brokers in the region, even by-passing some of the primary disputants. In the case of Cyprus, the mediation was undertaken by the UN, which had very limited manipulative capacity, and the mediation process was largely maintained because continuation of the process was necessitated by certain wider developments of strategic importance. For most of the period studied, the Cypriot leaders usually met face-to-face under UN mediation but, in terms of the actual dynamics of the wider process, this was a smokescreen as both sides were more involved in maintenance of their relationships with certain other actors. This was simply due to the fact that the Cypriots saw the UN led negotiation as a sub-game of their respective wider political games. The wider games were the EU integration processes of Cyprus and Turkey: while the Turkish Cypriots, initially, continued to participate in the UN mediated process because of Turkey’s pressure, the Greek Cypriots were engaged in the process in order to advance their EU accession and also to maintain their international status. In other words, what brought the Cypriots to the table was not a genuine interest in negotiated settlement but their wider strategic calculations. The Cypriot case thus largely confirms the argument in the peacemaking literature (which was discussed in Chapter 3) that what brings the disputants to the table is consequential for the result of a peacemaking process. The Northern Irish process was totally different in this respect because it was mostly mediated at Anglo-Irish level. Although a third party mediation team lately joined the process, it only assumed a facilitative role in the substantive negotiations, which included chairing the all- party negotiations even-handedly and presenting the Anglo-Irish prepared papers as its own in order to provide more legitimacy to such documents for public opinion purposes. I will discuss the kin-states’ involvement in the Northern Irish case in the next section, which is on the local actors– kin-state(s) level. However, as for third party mediator in a context where there is strong kin-state involvement, a sustained cooperation between those kin-states and the mediator (as it was the case in Northern Ireland) could contribute to the process as the latter may add some form of international legitimacy to the process.
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Although collective mediation is often deemed incoherent and ineffective, as the Bosnian case particularly illustrates, it remains a fact of contemporary diplomacy. This is dictated by the wider context: the conflicts that are known by their intractability are hardly ever likely to attract state actors or other varieties of influential mediators unless there are issues at stake that are concerning such actors. For these reasons, a plausible alternative to collective mediation, which could largely rectify its weaknesses, is a more focused collective mediation, one composed of actors who share similar perspectives on the conflict situation at hand. The case of Cyprus underscores that the UN’s mediation is also suffering from problems similar to that of collective mediation. The UN’s mediation, after all, is a particular form of collective mediation as it rests on the organisation’s universal character. The UN’s problems in mediation mostly stem from its intergovernmental nature which provides only limited independent capacity and resources. But where there is a strong and uniform international consensus backing its mediation, the UN could play an effective role in negotiating power-sharing. The successful US mediation in Bosnia empirically supports my proposition in Chapter 3 that power mediation appears as a more apt style in mediation of power-sharing settlements. However, power mediation cannot be a sustainable and fruitful mode of intervention in the post-settlement phase. Power mediation is effective in bringing about agreements, but for the stability of the settlement in the longer term the relationship between the disputants need to become more cooperative and this cooperation cannot be achieved by power mediation. First of all, no power mediator would be willing to take up such role persistently and, more crucially, power mediation is not an effective strategy in the longer term as it tends to create severe legitimacy and ownership problems for the local political system. Therefore, a facilitative mediator who seeks to improve the relationship between the disputants should take over in the post-settlement phase. In sum, depending on the stage of the peacemaking intervention, each style of mediation can play a significant role in resolution of the conflict.