Under what conditions does preventive mediation occur in self-determination disputes?

Abstract Mediation is a crucial instrument employed by external actors to resolve armed conflicts and mitigate violence. A large academic literature examines mediation in civil war, with analyses of which civil wars see mediation and what the effect of this mediation is. Many organizations express a commitment to conflict prevention, and engage in mediation to prevent the outbreak of armed conflict. There is much less research on when mediation is used as a tool of conflict prevention. We have collected new data on all mediation efforts in a random sample of 51 self-determination (SD) disputes from 1991–2015, which includes disputes that never experience armed conflict, as well as years before and after armed conflicts in disputes that do. We use these data to examine the conditions under which preventive mediation occurs in SD disputes. We develop a theoretical argument for when mediators are likely to offer mediation, and governments and representatives of SD groups are likely to accept it. We test this argument using our new data in two samples of SD dispute-years that are not in armed conflict. We find that mediation is more likely in dispute-years outside of armed conflict where SD groups are engaged in low-level violence and in disputes in countries that border other countries that are experiencing armed conflict and less likely in disputes in states that are permanent members of the UN Security Council or former French colonies. This analysis shows that mediators do engage in preventive mediation in disputes that they perceive as having a higher likelihood of escalation to armed conflict, but that they are constrained in their ability to do so by geopolitics.