Tag: Peace mediation

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Mediation Perspectives: Military Integration as a Tool for Peacekeeping

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Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.

The challenge of how to deal with armed groups after a conflict ends is one of the many problems facing mediators and negotiators working toward a peace agreement. Such arrangements are critical because mistrust between armed opponents, the challenge of restoring state authority, and the hazards of peace process derailment are not easily overcome. Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs, which attempt to shepherd former combatants into peacetime civilian roles, are one approach. However, DDR rarely provides channels for former combatants to enter the government’s security forces. Instead, this is the focus of the subject of this blog, military integration initiatives.

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Mediation Perspectives: Including Religious Women in Mediation Processes

Image courtesy of Vidar Nordli-Mathisen/Unsplash.

Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.

Religious women often face a double discrimination as regards inclusion into political mediation processes: They are not only discriminated against as women but also as religious actors. While there is an increasing consensus that effective, legitimate and sustainable agreements require the inclusion of both women and religious actors in the contexts where they play a role, the nexus between the two – i.e. religious women – is often neglected. Existing mediation guidelines rarely offer insights on how to better include this actor group in mediation processes. This blog argues that the role of religious women needs to be carefully considered and offers four key reflections for including religious women in mediation processes.

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Mediation Perspectives: Using Religious Resources to Teach Negotiation and Mediation: Reframing

Image courtesy of alsterkoralle/Pixabay.

Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.

In 2017, Simon Mason and Jean-Nicolas Bitter commenced a series of blog posts on the role religion can play in mediation and negotiation. Simon continued the series with an example from work in Zimbabwe with a Biblical text at the center. Posts followed with Susan Hayward writing about dispute resolution and the centrality of peace within Buddhism and Abbas Aroua placing a framework of peace at the center of Islam – engaging and thought-provoking pieces.

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Mediation Perspectives: Temptations of a Mediator II

Image courtesy of Wiros/Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.

This is the second blog on temptations of a mediator. The first blog looked at temptations mediators need to resist that pull the mediator in one direction. This second blog looks at temptations that pull you in different directions, thus all the topics have an “or” in the title.

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Mediation Perspectives: Temptations of a Mediator I

Image courtesy of Wiros/Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that’s provided by the CSS’ Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. Each entry is designed to highlight the utility of mediation approaches in dealing with violent political conflicts. To keep up to date with the Mediation Support Team, you can sign up to their newsletter here.

As mediators, we need to be highly flexible and context oriented. It is therefore sometimes easier to focus on what we should not do than what we should do. This focus on the “not” provides more than just parameters in which one can move freely, it also increases an awareness of ‘orange zones’ where we have to be careful as we may end up in a red zone where one can do more harm than good. Lakhdar Bramhimi and Salman Ahmed provide a fantastic write up of this kind of approach in “Seven Deadly Sins of a Mediator.” In particular, the sins Brahimi and Ahmed describe are ignorance, arrogance, partiality, impotence, haste, inflexibility and false promises.

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