Cowboys or Mavericks? The Normative Agency of NGO Mediators by Julia Palmiano Federer
Cowboys or Mavericks? The Normative Agency of NGO Mediators
Bespoke conflict resolution nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become key mediation actors within the last three decades, increasingly engaged in direct dialogues between warring parties and professionalizing the mediation field through capacity building and knowledge production. The rise in reputation and prominence of NGO mediators such as the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, Inter Mediate, Crisis Management Initiative and many others as key actors in international peace mediation represents an important shift in who conducts international peace mediation and how. But who exactly are these “NGO mediators,” and what consequences does their rise in prominence have on mediation theory and practice?
“Not Your Average Diplomats”: The Rise of NGO Mediators
NGO mediators can be understood as private actors taking on discreet or public mediation or facilitation functions among and between negotiating parties in a peace process (Palmiano Federer 2021). The NGO mediator operates across and between Track I, II, III levels of mediation processes; they embody the ‘normative turn in mediation’ through their promotion of norms such as inclusive peace processes, and they lead the professionalization of the field through conducting trainings, capacity building, research and other mediation support activities.
As The Economist pointed out in their 2020 feature on NGO mediators pithily titled, “Not Your Average Diplomats,”these actors have created a niche space for themselves in sea of would-be mediators. As NGOs, they also professionalize the mediation field through producing guidance and manuals on how to conduct mediation more effectively and play large roles in training and capacity building for new or established peace practitioners and mediators. As such they operate not only as norm-takers within the existing normative structures of the peace mediation field, but also as norm-makers, using their unique position to set and diffuse norms.
Skin in the Game: The Normative Agency of NGO Mediators
While this dual identity as both NGOs and mediators creates strong selling points, it still does not afford NGO mediators the same amount of political or material leverage as their more formalized counterparts, especially at high pressure points in formal Track I political processes. If NGO mediators do not wield high political or material resources, what gets them ‘in the room’ with negotiating parties? What are their sources of legitimacy or agency?
NGOs are able to set norms around how mediation should be conducted through knowledge production activities like research, lessons-learned exercises, documenting best practices or forming networks of mediation actors to exchange experiences. Often, these norms explicitly reflect the liberal peacebuilding paradigm: NGO mediators can promote norms such as inclusivity or gender equality as ingredients for effective and legitimate mediation.
NGO mediators can also act as ‘norm-takers’ in which they are constrained by certain normative parameters (e.g. don’t talk to terrorists) within their mandates. However, due to their informality and unofficial nature, NGO mediators often redefine what a ‘mandate’ actually means: they can be less of an official mandate from a formal institution such as the UN, and more of a mandate from the parties themselves to engage in a process. Beholden ‘only to their advisory boards and funding agencies (as opposed to 193 member states as per United Nations Envoys), NGO mediators can take advantage of the constructive ambiguity around their mandate and take on backchannel talks, engage with politically sensitive armed groups and go where formally-mandated mediators cannot. Their ability to act as both norm-makers and norm-takers is what affords them agency – and is what really gives them ‘skin in the game’ in an increasingly complex mediation arena.
The Future of Peacemaking? Consequences of NGO mediation
What does this mean for mediation theory and practice? There is little consensus among mediation practitioners, and even less research on the topic. The reception has been mixed, with NGO mediators being lauded as ‘mavericks’ in the entrepreneurial sense, redefining the mediation field through new practices at the frontier of contemporary peacemaking. They have also been dismissed as ‘cowboys’ who disregard the field’s normative and political parameters with little accountability and questionable impact.[1]
Where there is agreement, however, is that the days of the (mostly male) single high-level mediator are effectively over, as complex multi-track processes become the norm and the landscape of contemporary conflict continues to become decentralized and fragmented. As the converging crises of climate change and the global pandemic continue to fundamentally change our societies, some analysts argue that interventions led by politically agile and unofficial actors like NGO mediators are the future of peacemaking, while others caution against assuming their effectiveness, especially given the perils of incoherence between competing mediation efforts among multiple mediators in a given context. While the jury is out on their impact on the mediation field, NGO mediators will continue to play increasingly important roles in contemporary mediation, and it’s time that their importance is recognized in theory and practice.
Biography:
Dr. Julia Palmiano Federer is the Head of Research at the Ottawa Dialogue at the University of Ottawa. The research for this book chapter was conducted in the framework of the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project, “are mediators norm entrepreneurs?” during her doctoral research at the University of Basel/swisspeace. The views expressed are the authors’ own, and she can be contacted at julia.palmianofederer@uottawa.ca.
[1] Martin, Harriet. Kings of Peace, Pawns of War: the Untold Story of Peacemaking. London/New York: Continuum Books/The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, 2006.