Civil War Mediation and the Conflict Environment: Does Regional Instability Influence the Onset of Mediation?

Abstract

Hostile regional environments can spur civil war at home. Do they also affect mediation in a state’s ongoing civil war? We hypothesize they do, but in ways that produce competing effects: Third parties hesitate to offer mediation in a conflictual environment, but hostile environments also make disputants more amenable to mediation. We test these diverging expectations using a measure of conflict environments that aggregates spatially and temporally proximate civil war in a state’s neighborhood. Our empirical analyses reveal that third parties are significantly less likely to offer mediation as exogenous factors mount, a finding that holds even for third parties who have historic or security linkages to the civil war state. However, we find limited evidence that disputants’ decisions to accept mediation are driven by regional security concerns. Instead, local conflict conditions present more pressing concerns that drive disputants to accept offers to mediate. Taken together, the findings suggest potential mediators should pay attention to both a civil war state’s regional environment and local conditions, lest they underestimate disputants’ willingness to come to the table. Our work newly underscores the costs and risks associated with conflict hot spots and the risk for certain conflicts to be bypassed by peace brokers.