Fifteen Eighty Four

In a world increasingly at war, defined by both great power-rivalry and forgotten conflicts, the United Nations (UN)—the international organization tasked with the responsibility to maintain international peace and security—is at an existential crisis. Since the onset of violence in 2011, the conflict in Syria has stood as a harbinger of what is to come to the UN’s credibility as the global peacemaker and ‘indispensable organization.’ As Ambassador Frederic Hof, who generously shared a foreword to this book, writes “Today, thanks in large part to what has happened in Syria, the UN faces its greatest crisis since its founding in 1945.”

The case of Syria draws attention to a longstanding contradiction in the UN’s peacemaking status. On the one hand, the UN’s perceived impartiality, leverage, and diplomatic and financial capacity empowers it to take the lead in mediating in seemingly intractable conflicts like Syria marked by mass violence, multiple parties to the conflict, and other factors that constitute a threat to international peace and security. It is its perceived unique ability to respond to the momentous challenge such conflicts demand, that the UN leverages to distinguish itself as the ‘indispensable organization.’ On the other hand, the UN also falters in cases like Syria, which either draw in conflicting interests among geopolitical powers in the UN Security Council or subsequently fade from attention, failing to attract sufficient political will from these powers. The case of Syria, once emblazoned across headlines and now relegated to the annals of forgotten conflicts, serves as a poignant reminder that the UN cannot cherry pick the conflicts it is responsible to resolve nor ignore the impact its peacemaking interventions have on the organization’s legitimacy and the broader credibility of the global peacemaking order it seeks to uphold. Whether ‘high profile’ conflicts or forgotten wars, each conflict and each peace-making failure or success, intimately weaves itself into the fabric of the UN’s authority and integrity in responding the crises of our time and fulfilling its raison d’être.

So, if conflicts like that in Syria are key to understanding the future of the UN’s legitimacy as a global peacemaker, how does it make peace in these settings? What do we even mean when we refer to the United Nations? The UN, an inter-governmental organization made up of different member states, administrated by a global civil service, divided into different organs with distinct responsibilities and powers, and established to uphold transnational obligations enshrined in its charter, has many different faces which can lead to confusion regarding the UN’s decision-making processes, particularly in peace-making contexts. Consequently, much of the scrutiny over the UN’s shortcomings in Syria and beyond has centered on the Security Council, the so-called ‘muscle’ of the UN, and its paralysis and indecision. What often gets overlooked in this focus is the key role of the individual mediator appointed to lead the peace-making efforts on behalf of the UN.

At the heart of this book lies a crucial yet often overlooked question: what do UN mediators actually do in conflicts like the one in Syria? To begin to answer that question, it first demonstrates how UN mediators operate with a significant margin of maneuver due to a combination of environmental and institutional factors, like the volatility of conflict and large discretionary powers they wield within the organization. By elucidating the agency of UN mediators as decision-makers, it firmly centers the individual mediator in the study of mediation, pinpointing the input of each mediator on the peace-making process. In its focus on the UN’s mediation in Syria, it offers readers with a detailed record of what the different UN mediators in Syria have done in their roles and a thorough analysis of their decision-making.  But this book does not only ask what do these mediators do, it also seeks to unpack the strategic perceptions that shape their decision-making. More specifically, it draws on empirical studies in mediation to identify key factors that affect mediation outcomes, and traces how the mediator’s perceptions of the: 1) identity of the mediator, 2) context, 3) parties, and 4) process of mediation, affect their behavior. In doing so, it presents a method to identify a mediator’s input on the mediation process and a framework to unpack their decision-making process, expanding its applications beyond the case of Syria.  Most importantly, by pinpointing the agency of mediators, it clarifies what these mediators are actually responsible for and encourages future steps to hold them accountable for those responsibilities—no more, no less.

In his resignation as mediator in Syria, the late Kofi Annan, famously lamented: “You have to understand: as an Envoy, I can’t want peace more than the protagonists, more than the Security Council or the international community for that matter.”  It is a sentiment, indeed, shared by many mediators—that their actions were bound or limited by factors outside their control. Their failures seemingly inevitable; their missions, impossible. But this book does not seek to deliver answers as to why the conflict in Syria endures, nor hold mediators single-handedly responsible for the successes or failures of peace-making interventions. Rather, it focuses on explaining what mediators do in their roles in light of the realm of possibilities and limitations in which they operate in.  Like the mediators who make them, those decisions matter.  And while mediators may be selected by the UN’s hierarchy or invite consent from the parties to the conflict, it is those living through the pangs of conflict, the ones Lakhdar Brahimi aptly called “our first masters”, that are most impacted by those decisions, yet have no power in selecting or removing a mediator.

By demonstrating the impact of a mediator’s agency on the process of mediation and explaining the strategic drivers of their decision-making, this book finds that individual mediators carry significant personal responsibility that Annan’s departing words fail to acknowledge. UN mediators must be accountable for their decisions—for their successes and their failures—if only for those who continue to live with the outcomes of those decisions.  As former U.S. mediator Chester Crocker writes with regard to the momentous responsibility, mediators hold: “If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. That means that someone must be placed in charge, held accountable, given the requisite mandate and resources, and steadily supported, or else replaced.”

Fadi Nicholas Nassar is Director of the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution and Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University (LAU). He is also the US–Lebanon Fellow at the Middle East Institute; Fellow at The Sectarianism, Proxies and De-sectarianisation (SEPAD) project based at Lancaster University’s Richardson Institute; and Research Fellow at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS). He holds a PhD from the War Studies Department at King’s College London. A graduate of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, he also received a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University.