Introduction: Unsettled Reflections From Golden Valley, Myanmar

Abstract

This book is about the role of nongovernmental (NGO) mediators in promoting “inclusive peace” to negotiating parties in Myanmar’s Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) negotiations from 2011 to 2015. I analyze how the norm of inclusivity was effectively localized as “all-inclusiveness” (hereafter used without quotation marks) in the NCA negotiations, albeit with unintended consequences. While NGO mediators may have been able to exercise “normative agency” in introducing and promoting the inclusivity norm, they did not have the normative agency to control the outcome of the norm diffusion process. Importantly, the localization of the inclusivity norm as all-inclusiveness centered the discourse on inclusion and exclusion and reified existing identity (ethnic and religious) politics in the country. This had both intended and unintended consequences on the outcome of the NCA process itself. In sum, NGO mediators’ promotion of a more inclusive process counterintuitively contributed to an exclusive outcome of the NCA process. The Myanmar case illustrates the limits of normative agency and the use of mediation processes as a site for norm diffusion, and serves as a cautionary tale for the consequences of promoting international norms without understanding the particular processes of norm diffusion. In this chapter, I lay out a narrative that introduces the main questions this book seeks to address, my main argumentation and approach, ending with a roadmap of the book’s chapters.

1.1 Introduction

Despite the staggering differences between each of these countries—in terms of geographies, cultures, people, languages, dynamics of violence, and conflict histories—the interveners who worked in them shared the same daily modes of operation […]. As I moved from one place to another and found the same kinds of environments, the same types of actors, and sometimes even the same individuals, I started to feel part of a transnational community, a community of expatriates who devote their lives to working in conflict zones. I felt that I had become part of a new world: Peaceland.¹

In Myanmar, under U Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government in the first half of the 2010s, Peaceland had a name and a postal code: Golden Valley (Shwe Taung Gyar), 11201 Bahan Township, Yangon. Around gargantuan houses, barbed wire was juxtaposed with jasmine flowers lined up the winding streets. Sometimes one could glimpse the discreet, gold-plated signs of private residences. Nestled in uptown Yangon’s Bahan Township, Golden Valley was the unofficial name of the enclosed gated community where embassies, United Nations (UN) agencies, and international NGOs that comprise Myanmar’s quickly growing “international community” resided.² No longer home to the few border teachers and humanitarian workers among the first to be allowed limited access to the country, Golden Valley then housed a new set of expatriates: peace professionals, actors that have come specifically to support the nascent peace process initiated by Thein Sein’s newly elected government. Much of this expatriate community came to Yangon after 2013, buoyed by the unprecedented easing of restrictions for foreigner visas.

I had been to Golden Valley several times for meetings and lived adjacent to the exclusive neighborhood’s edge in 2017. I was always struck by the palpable barrier between the serene calm of the quarter and the orchestra of Yangon’s traffic and buzzing energy. The Myanmar Peace Centre (MPC), at the time the epicenter of Myanmar’s peace process, was constructed on one of Golden Valley’s quiet side streets just outside the residential areas. It was here that the majority of the ensuing peace negotiations between the government of Myanmar and representatives of multiple armed groups took place. In an upscale refurbished boutique hotel (a favorite hangout spot of “Peacelanders”), information meetings among international peace supporters would take place monthly. In early 2014, when I first attended this meeting along with 10 other members in the small alcove above the Savoy’s swimming pool, I was struck by the peculiarity of it: why was this group of UN staff, diplomatic representatives and conflict resolution NGOs discussing intricate details to the peace process and their support without the stakeholders themselves? What was their role? Are they facilitators? Mediators? Donors? All of the above?

The meeting attendees were sharing report findings and advocacy papers on how Myanmar’s peace process could include the voices of women and grassroots communities from conflict-affected areas. What did not happen in this meeting? Open discussion on what kinds of activities they were actually conducting with the national peace process actors. In 2015, months before the signing of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) between representatives of ethnic armed groups (EAGs) and the government of Myanmar, the venue was moved out from the small boutique hotel to a much larger one, and again, I witnessed 30 participants crammed into the small meeting space to listen to an international analyst discuss how a policy of all-inclusiveness³ had put the negotiating parties at loggerheads and threatened to derail the whole process (a wholly different meaning to the inclusion of women and grassroots communities in the peace process). This analyst, everyone knew, worked directly with the negotiating parties and was worried about this all-inclusiveness position, which dictated that none of the armed ethnic organizations in the 16-member negotiating bloc would sign the ceasefire agreement unless all of them signed. As with my first meeting, there were no national peace process actors in the room.

Being one of these many NGO professionals all trying to support the same national peace process actors made me uneasy. Hearing that this strangely worded all-inclusiveness discourse ended up derailing the process made me more uneasy still. What did it mean? The inclusion of civil society or the women of certain armed actors? Or both? Where did such a normative imperative come from in conflicts fought over political power and territory? I thought back to my first meeting—did the influx of these Golden Valley “Peacelanders” have anything to do with the notion of all-inclusiveness being used by the parties? I knew that a large number of trainings, workshops and coachings on gender sensitivity, human rights and other international norms were being conducted with the negotiating parties and civil society actors (these were never reported at the meetings), but I did not know whether there was a connection between them. If indeed there was a connection, then NGO mediators’⁴ promotion of inclusive peace processes may have had unintended consequences on the outcome of the NCA process. As Myanmar actors chose not to have a third-party mediator, how did conflict resolution and mediation NGOs housed in Golden Valley take on these roles? Did they promote the idea to the negotiating parties that inclusivity would lead to a better outcome of the NCA process? The interconnection between NGO mediators, the promotion of the inclusivity norm, and the all-inclusiveness discourse at the end of the NCA process in 2015 reverberated in my head, and has formed the focus of this puzzle: Can NGO mediators promote norms to negotiating parties in ongoing peace processes? How does this happen?

In this book, I explore this puzzle by investigating NGO mediators’ promotion of inclusivity in Myanmar. I aim to do so by uncovering the agency an NGO mediator has in promoting the inclusivity norm to the negotiating parties during the NCA process (2011–2015). Even if NGO mediators should promote norms, is this possible? Can they do so? To answer these questions, I look to norms diffusion literature and scholarship on international peace mediation, and the role that ideas, narratives and identities play in international peace mediation: to what extent peace processes are the site for norm promotion and diffusion, and to what extent NGO mediators are norm entrepreneurs.

1.2 Are Mediators Norm Entrepreneurs?

The practice of international peace mediation has grown more political in nature (Hellmüller et al. 2015), as mediators are increasingly asked to or themselves willingly consider incorporating norms such as gender equality, human rights, and transitional justice and inclusivity in their interventions.⁵ The question of inclusivity, or which actors should be included in a peace process and how they should be included is a central issue for mediators. As mediation developed as an important tool for conflict resolution after the Cold War (Kriesberg 2001), scholars researching questions on inclusion and exclusion focused on which armed actors should be represented at the negotiating table within a theoretical framework of bargaining theory (Zartman and Touval 1985). While mediators’ roles in determining who gets a seat at the table are mentioned in mediation literature within the topic of process design, it was not until the development of a literature on “spoilers” (Stedman 1997) in mediation processes that mediators were linked to managing inclusivity. Literature on civil war termination discussed how third parties, such as mediators, should engage with actors designated as spoilers (Zahar 2010). Mediation literature began to take a normative turn with the advent of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm. The body of literature discussing the promises and perils of peacebuilding shifted from describing the role of mediators as peace brokers to describing them as peacebuilders: mediators, in this view, not only had to support negotiating parties stop violence through political settlements, but encourage the development of democratic markets and institutions in post-conflict and transitioning societies (Richmond 2018). The debates around inclusivity in mediation literature have also shifted towards the modalities of including non-armed actors in civil society, in particular women, youth actors and minority populations. Mediators are often pressured by their mandate-givers (e.g. donors) and civil society organizations supporting peace processes from a distance to meaningfully include non-armed actors in negotiations (Hellmüller et al. 2015). The professionalization of the mediation field has also resulted in explicitly normative conduct guidelines for mediators, evidenced by the United Nations Secretary General issuing the UN Guidance for Effective Mediation (United Nations 2012). This policy document provides eight “fundamentals” of effective mediation and includes normative imperatives such as inclusivity, defined as “the extent and manner in which the views and needs of the conflict parties and other stakeholders are represented and integrated into the process and outcome of a mediation effort” (United Nations 2012, 11). The centering of inclusivity as a salient norm (Paffenholz and Zartman 2019) that mediators should promote is an example of how the role of mediators has shifted from peace brokers to peacebuilders; not only do they have to end conflicts, but must also integrate norms into the process design of mediation processes and ensure their appearance in peace agreement texts. Despite this development in practice, the role that mediators play in promoting norms around inclusion is under-researched in academic literature.

To address this gap, my book links mediation literature with the wide body of scholarly work on the role of norms in global politics and change. Understanding how ideas shape interests and how norms can be promoted, accepted, rejected, or contested between and among different actors, can shed light on the role that mediators play in promoting norms in mediation processes. One of the most prominent theories of norm diffusion puts forth the notion of “norm entrepreneurs:” actors that attempt to convince a critical mass of actors to adopt a certain norm (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). As these actors were studied at the state and transnational levels, norm diffusion theories also sought to explain why some norms found greater acceptance in certain contexts and not in others. Theories around the localization of external norms addressed this question by positing that local agents reshaped external norms and incorporated them into local contexts through a process of congruence building with existing normative frameworks (Acharya 2004). Norm entrepreneurs diffusing norms from a transnational context to a local one highlights the agency of the “norm-takers” and the “norm-makers,” as norms localize through a process of contestation and reconstitution (Wiener 2004). So are mediators norm entrepreneurs? (Hellmüller et al. 2017).

So the question “are mediators norm entrepreneurs” can be narrowed to the following: to what extent can (should?) mediators promote the inclusivity norm to negotiating parties in peace processes? This requires focusing on mediators as norm entrepreneurs of inclusion and therefore, on the normative agency they have to promote norms to negotiating parties in a given conflict context. In this book, I seek to understand the conditions under which mediators can influence the behavior of parties regarding the inclusion and exclusion of different actors in a mediation process. I do not assume mediators have normative agency from the beginning, but construct it through a complex process of discursive framing, specific sets of social practices and power dynamics.

1.3 Why NGO Mediators in Myanmar?

There is a considerable research gap on NGO mediators.⁶ This dearth of previously existing work meant that I had to generate my own data on what NGO mediators’ normative frameworks and normative socialization could be. Looking at the universe of cases where NGOs played a prominent role and which could offer such data, I found that peace processes concentrated on conflict contexts in South East Asia and specifically, ASEAN contexts (e.g. Philippines, Nepal, Aceh and Myanmar) were promising single case studies. Myanmar, like other ASEAN states, adhere to the ASEAN Way, a strongly held normative framework that emphasizes sovereignty and non-intervention. This framework has opened space for private diplomacy actors like the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Crisis Management Initiative, who pioneered contemporary NGO-led mediation in by the peace processes between the Indonesian government and the GAM (Free Aceh Movement) in Aceh. In Myanmar, where there is no formal mediator and NGO mediators have taken on mediation rather than facilitation roles.

For Myanmar, I chose the timeframe of 2011–2015 in terms of collecting data, focusing on the NCA process from the opening of the process in August 2011 to the signing of the peace agreement in October 2015, under the reform government of Thein Sein. This is the timeline of my process tracing and the period in which I refer to in my data collection. Within the contemporary history of Myanmar, this represents an exceptionally well-delimited timeframe, as Myanmar was going through an extraordinary reform period. Until 2011, Myanmar had been ruled for decades by the military government, while post-2015 is defined by the historic first “free and fair” election that saw the election of the first democratic government headed by national icon Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party and the current conditions under the military coup of February 2021. The focus on this period between the shifts allows me to focus my analysis on this time period accordingly.

Myanmar is the largest country in South East Asia, and one of diverse peoples and geographies. From the mountainous northern regions to the watery plains of the southern delta area, Myanmar is a country whose strategic location on the Andaman Sea, abundance in natural resources, and five shared borders⁷ has contributed to its tumultuous and, at many times, tragic history. It has a population of over 50 million people, although actual numbers are contested and politically sensitive, as some ethnic groups are excluded because they are not considered citizens. Recent attempts to label lum yo (race, ethnicity or nationality) identity have been intensely criticized by scholars and analysts. The UN’s 2014 attempt at a nationwide census was widely criticized as a contextually inappropriate and dangerous exercise that risked “shattering” Myanmar’s peace and stability at a time of tenuous political transition from a military regime to democracy (Callahan 2014). The ultimately botched census project provides a glimpse into the restive grievances around a central issue: what does it mean to be Myanmar?⁸ Who is included in this national identity, and who is excluded? Questions around fundamental rights to national belonging form the crux of Myanmar politics: ethnic minorities in the borderlands waging decades-long insurgencies for self-determination, but also incendiary inter-communal and religious⁹ tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine state¹⁰ (Crouch 2016), are telling examples. Already in 1982, Robert Taylor offered the somewhat cryptic observation: “ethnic politics is the obverse of the politics of unity in Myanmar” (Taylor 1982, 7). Over 35 years later, it remains the most pressing issue for the country and requires much soul-searching.

Studying Myanmar entails three caveats for the “Burma studies” researcher, let alone the political scientist. First, I travel through “contested histories” (Baechtold 2016) to glean the narratives, norms, beliefs and identities of political actors in Myanmar. Clearly, a comprehensive account of the political and socioeconomic history of the country is far beyond the scope of my research. Nevertheless, I aim to avoid what Thant Myint-U observes in many analyses and debates occurring on Myanmar today: “the most striking aspect of the Burma debate today is its absence of nuance and its singularly ahistorical nature” (Thant Myint-U 2006, 41). In a related vein, I position my analysis of Myanmar politics firmly in between the dichotomy that many of those studying Myanmar fall prey to: on one hand, treating Burma as applicable to international templates of analysis and prescription, and on the other hand, seeing Burma as unique and eluding any comparative perspectives. As Steinberg argues, many analysts ascribe to their case study a certain uniqueness (and at its worse, a form of exoticism)¹¹ that eludes any type of foreign formulae (Steinberg 2013) or comparison with other contexts. At the other end of the spectrum, the use of Myanmar as an increasingly popular “case study” in policy literature risks sweeping generalizations or forcing a theoretical and conceptual “fit” for a theory or foreign policy. Risks of romanticizing or exoticizing Myanmar are also high, particularly due to its isolation for the past few decades.¹²

Second, I recognize the special relationship that Myanmar politics has to information, truth and narrative. Many scholars write about having to navigate through the thickets of “information and misinformation” (Taylor 2008, 219), the complexity of the Burmese language and the politics of labelling. My use of either Burma or Myanmar to name the country is a clear example of this. Calling the country either Burma or Myanmar can signal a political position: when the military government changed the country’s name from “Burma” to “Myanmar” in 1989, governments, individuals and organizations refused to recognize a change they deemed illegitimate by extension of the illegitimacy of the regime. I choose to use “Myanmar” when describing the country after 1989 and “Burma” when describing the county before 1989. I use “Myanmar” when describing the country in general terms and the word “Burmese” to describe the inhabitants of the country. This label is a misnomer of sorts as it is associated with the Bamar, the dominant ethnic group of the country, but is used frequently in the country as well. Myanmar has never had a multi-ethnic identity before independence, so finding a word expressing a truly civic rather than ethnic identity marker is a massive challenge for the country. These labels pose challenges in my research but are essential to distinguish.

Third, I must be aware of any bias of selecting particular flashpoints of such contested histories and avoid the tendency to place Myanmar histories into “tropes” of isolation and decline juxtaposed with “opening” to the outside world (Wittekind and Rhoads 2018). Doing so decenters prevailing discourses around what constitutes history for certain audiences concerning certain “objects” (e.g. Burma or Burmese people) that risk centering or decentering specific Burmese voices (Prasse-Freeman 2014). Language matters. Some Burma studies scholars lament the transposition of “Western” terms and concepts and phrases onto analyses of Burmese culture and politics. There is no direct Burmese translation for “inclusivity” and its salience is in English newspapers, appearing in Burmese as the English term “all-inclusiveness.” To the extent possible, my book attempts to decenter English phrases and explain cognitive priors that include Burmese terms and concepts in my analysis. In the following section, I choose particular historical eras that illustrate my argumentation rather than provide a comprehensive historiography or chronology of the country.

1.4 My Argument

First, NGO mediators can effectively promote norms, using mediation processes as a site of norm diffusion. Bespoke international conflict resolution NGOs have become key mediation actors, within the last three decades through creating the niche world of “private diplomacy” and acting as “norm entrepreneurs” at the same time. As informal third parties, these NGO mediators directly engage with politically sensitive actors or convene unofficial peace talks. As NGOs, they are part of an epistemic community of mediation practice, professionalizing the field and producing knowledge on what peace mediation is and what it ought to be. This dual identity as both NGOs and mediators nicely sets them up with a unique agency to promote and diffuse norms. These norms often reflect the liberal peacebuilding paradigm promoted from the Global North, such as inclusion, gender equality and transitional justice, with the view that these norms are not ends in themselves but as necessary ingredients for effective mediation. This evolution sets up the central dichotomy in this book: whether the purpose of mediation processes is to facilitate dialogues among warring parties to end violence, or to facilitate dialogues to end violence and also rewrite societies around normative lines?

Therefore, even if NGO mediators can promote norms, I question whether they should promote norms in the first place. The outcome of the NCA process presents a critical and cautionary tale of promoting a presumed universal norm into a given locale and expecting a certain outcome without understanding how an external norm interacts with existing normative frameworks. The book illustrates that while NGO mediators do possess the normative agency to effectively promote norms to negotiating parties, my empirical research analyses how their promotion of the inclusivity norm to the negotiating parties in Myanmar’s NCA paradoxically resulted in exclusionary outcomes: only half of the armed groups in the ethnic armed groups’ negotiating bloc signed, and civil society was effectively crowded out from meaningful participation despite lofty rhetoric.

In terms of analytical contributions to scholarship, I draw from constructivist ontology and norm diffusion theories in international relations to build a novel analytical framework that unpacks what normative agency actually means and the actual mechanisms NGO mediators use to promote international norms to negotiating parties in a given context. By applying norm diffusion scholarship to mediation theory, I suggest that normative agency is built on three elements: framing, practices and power. More specifically, the extent of a mediator’s normative agency depends on their ability to (1) discursively frame a given norm as important to effective peace; (2) “localize” a norm in a given peace process context through a set of practices; and (3) possess the legitimacy to navigating arising power dynamics in processes of norm contestation, such as resistance or displacement of a norm. By reframing the elements of what constitutes “peace,” NGO mediators are, effectively, establishing the parameters of acceptable outcomes in cases of conflict. Rather than acting as impartial facilitators of dialogue, which had long been the norm in the unofficial peacemaker space, they are inserting their own values and standards, often Western and liberal ones, into the conflict. This is a development which needs to be recognized and reflected upon.

In terms of empirical contributions, the research for this book is based on one and a half years of field research and 109 semi-structured interviews conducted with NGO mediators, Myanmar negotiators at the heart of the NCA negotiations and civil society representatives at the national, state and township level. First, I illustrate that NGO mediators do possess normative agency through their practice of eschewing formal mandates into unofficial entry points with the parties and through their promotion of inclusivity through convening informal dialogues and providing technical expertise to the conflict parties. Second, my empirics show that while NGO mediators were successful in centering the normative imperative that the NCA negotiations should be more “inclusive,” the negotiating parties localized and redefined the norm to correspond to strongly embedded existing normative frameworks around national unity and ethnonationalism in Myanmar history and politics. Ultimately, the NGO mediators effectively lost control of their influence in the outcome of the process. This suggests that their normative agency was limited to diffusing inclusivity rather than influencing an inclusive outcome. Paradoxically, the way in which the negotiating parties localized inclusivity led to a deadlock in the negotiations and ultimately, led to an exclusive outcome of the NCA agreement.

1.5 How I Did the Research for This Book

My research follows an approach that is qualitative and interpretative in nature. The methodology underlining this approach is a single case study bolstered by empiric-heavy process tracing. I conduct process tracing through several intersecting methodologies, a combination of discourse analysis (Keller 2013) and a close analysis of the everyday practices of NGO mediators and the negotiating parties they engage with, akin to what Pouliot (2015) terms “practice tracing.” The methods I choose to gather information are semi-structured qualitative interviews and the collection of primary documents, opinion pieces and analyses and news articles.

In the fall of 2016 (October to December) I spent three months conducting field research and interviews with NGO mediators to understand the normative framework and normative socialization of NGO mediators in the different contexts that they work in. In 2017, I travelled to Myanmar to conduct the bulk of my field research. I wanted to understand the nature of mediation in Myanmar: what mediation means in the context, who plays mediation roles, and the specific roles that NGO mediators play in Myanmar. Within the first few weeks of my field research, it quickly became apparent that the mediation space in Myanmar is messy and undefined: mediation was a sensitive word because it implied third-party intervention, which contradicts the country’s history of claiming non-interference and strongly entrenched regional norms of sovereignty. In Myanmar, mediation activities were nevertheless being conducted, but under the moniker of dialogue and facilitation. For this work, I was based in Yangon from January to June 2017. I returned to Myanmar in late August 2017 and conducted additional interviews in the fall of 2017. At this stage, I was no longer based in Yangon, but in Mawlamyine, the capital of the minority ethnic Mon state in the southeast of Myanmar. I lived in Mawlamyine for one year, from August 2017 to August 2018 (including two trips back to Switzerland for writing retreats in between). The ability to be based in Myanmar for one and a half years (18 months) was an extreme privilege. My main sources of data were semi-structured interviews conducted between January 2016 and March 2018. In total, I conducted 90 in-depth interviews and conversations with peace process actors in Myanmar and abroad, two focus group discussions totaling to 109 respondents (see Appendix).

I chose to also focus on textual analysis because of the contextual relevance of public documents, newspaper articles, public correspondences and social media postings in the country. The NCA process was unprecedented in its transparency and access to both nationals and internationals. After decades of military rule where freedom of association and freedom of the press were curbed, the peace process was now extraordinarily public. Therefore, there was an abundance of news analyses and policy documents from a variety of sources. As such, my second source of data came from English language or transliterated policy documents, newspaper articles and analyses, meeting minutes and timelines, speeches given by members of the negotiating parties, blog posts, private email correspondences, NCA text drafts, social media accounts, and both public and private statements issued by the EAGs.

While scholarship on norms offers rich theoretical contributions on how norms are promoted, contested, internalized or rejected, there is little empirical work addressing the role of norms in mediation processes or the role that mediators play in promoting norms. Furthermore, mediation literature is dominated by strategic bargaining theories that focus on material and contextual factors such as political leverage and resources rather than norms, ideas and identities. My research attempts to fill this research gap regarding the role of mediators in norm diffusion by linking norms research and mediation literature. My research also contributes to both mediation and norms literature by looking at norms and norm entrepreneurship in an a priori manner, which addresses the overemphasis on progressive norms by looking at inclusivity not as an inherently “good” norm (Hellmüller et al. 2017). I remain open to multiple interpretations of the inclusivity norm by different actors and do not necessarily assume that more inclusive mediation processes lead to more “effective” agreements or outcomes, contrary to an emerging set of mediation literature on the benefits of inclusivity (Nilsson 2012; Paffenholz 2014).

1.6 Overview of This Book

The following three chapters of the book explore the concept of normative agency applied to NGO mediators promoting inclusive peace. In Chap. 2, through discussing the evolution of the role of mediators from peace brokers to peace builders, I present an analytical framework around a mediator’s normative agency, or their ability to promote norms. Chapter 3 unpacks the actors I call “NGO mediators” through discussing their alternative legitimacy vis-à-vis formal mediators and their “normative socializations,” or the way they interpret norms. In Chap. 4, I discuss NGO mediators’ normative agency in regard to the norm of inclusivity, assessing their ability to frame the norm as important, engage in practices that intentionally promote the norm, and the power they have to do so.

Chapters 5 through 7 focus on NGO mediators promoting inclusivity to the negotiating parties in the Myanmar NCA negotiations. In Chap. 5, I discuss existing normative frameworks of inclusion and exclusion in Myanmar history and politics, centering around the contested concept of “unity” in the country. Chapter 6 provides granular empirical analysis of the interaction between NGO mediators and negotiating parties, who fundamentally reinterpreted and redefined the norm according to existing normative frameworks in Myanmar. In Chap. 7, I illustrate how the “successful” diffusion of inclusivity resulted in both intended and unintended consequences and ultimately, an exclusive outcome of the negotiations and crowding out of civil society.

In Chap. 8, I conclude the book with a synthesis of my argument, implications for mediation, peacemaking and conflict resolution research, policy and practice. I also discuss policy recommendations for practitioners and future research agendas for scholars, wrapping up with some philosophical and ethical food for thought about the ultimate purpose of mediation processes, leaving the reader to decide for themselves.