Making disorder more manageable: The short-term effectiveness of local mediation in Darfur
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319898241 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Author | Allard Duursma |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Making disorder more manageable:
The short-term effectiveness of local
mediation in Darfur
Allard Duursma
Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich
Abstract
Much of the quantitative conflict resolution literature focuses on mediation between states or on efforts to end a civil
war through a comprehensive peace agreement that brings peace to the entire country. This article instead analyses
the effectiveness of mediation between a wide range of armed actors on a subnational level. Utilizing unique data on
Darfur covering the January 2008–August 2009 period, this article finds that mediation efforts following armed
clashes in a given area significantly prolong local lulls in fighting in this area. This finding remains robust when
controlling for the presence of a peacekeeping base, battle-deaths and the type of armed actors engaged in armed
clashes. In addition, the finding remains robust when accounting for the non-random assignment of mediation
efforts through matching similar observations in the dataset. Finally, anecdotal evidence from sites of armed conflict
beyond Darfur suggest that the findings from this study might also hold in other armed conflicts.
Keywords
conflict resolution, Darfur, local mediation, local peace, peacekeeping, United Nations
Introduction
Following the failure of the Darfur Peace Agreement
(DPA) in 2006, the United Nations (UN) and the Afri-
can Union (AU) were much criticized between 2007 and
2009 for their inability to build on the DPA and resolve
the conflict in Darfur, as well as for their inability to
bring the government of Sudan (GoS) and the major
Darfurian rebel groups together for peace talks. How-
ever, within this time period many different smaller, less
publicized initiatives to curb armed violence in Darfur
took place. Broadly speaking, two approaches to deal
with armed conflict can be recognized. The first
approach aims to conclude an elite-level bargain between
a government and a rebel party, potentially paving the
way for a peacekeeping mission that ensures continued
commitment to peace of the conflict parties. The second
approach aims to mitigate violence and build peace on
the local level, either though grass-roots initiatives led by
local people or with the support of state-level or interna-
tional mediators supporting the peacemaking effort. It
was this second type of mediation that was conducted
throughout Darfur in the wake of the failed DPA in
order to manage armed violence.
Much of the quantitative conflict resolution literature
focuses on mediation efforts between states or on efforts
to end a civil war through a comprehensive peace agree-
ment that brings peace to the entire country (Wallens-
teen & Svensson, 2014; Duursma, 2014). This article,
instead, focuses on mediation in conflicts that are ‘local’
and take place below the surface of the highly publicized
peace processes that have the potential to end in a Nobel
peace prize ceremony in Oslo. National-level mediation
efforts have been criticized for being out of touch with
realities of a conflict on the ground (Autesserre, 2017,
2010). However, these critiques of mediation efforts
aimed at resolving national-level conflicts ignore the fact
that while international mediation and peacekeeping
indeed often fail, a wealth of scholarly studies show that
these type of international conflict management efforts at
Corresponding author:
allard.duursma@sipo.gess.ethz.ch
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(3) 554–567
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319898241
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