Promoting Professionalism: A Normative Framework for Peace Mediation

This chapter analyses the current process of rendering explicit norms pertaining to peace mediation, it argues that adopting a historical perspective and a critical-pluralist understanding of legal norms is useful to understand the reasons for and effects of rendering explicit what used to be largely implicit. In fact, peace mediation, from mediation in the early modern period to contemporary efforts to resolve armed conflicts, has always been governed by certain norms, whereas presumably universal rules, such as the neutrality and impartiality of a mediator, have never existed as absolutes and have always been qualified in some way. The chapter discusses the reasons behind the apparent need to articulate such a framework and the effects on the practice of peace negotiations.