On the one hand, traditional rebel groups are subject to several challenges deriving from increasingly complex environments, making it difficult for them to decide whether they should engage in dialogue or continue fighting (Zartman and Alfredson 2019). In addition, the rise and fragmentation of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs) resulted in more complex and unpredictable scenarios. The peace and security environment after 9/11 dramatically reduced the space for dialogue with especially extremist armed groups that show little interest in recognition of their cause or negotiating for control over existing governing structures. With the recent transition to a more complex and multipolar international order, mediation has become less sought after and more challenging to implement in volatile and uncertain conflict-affected situations (Milián et al. It is thus not surprising that Collier and colleagues found that 50 percent of peace agreements reached relapsed into conflict within ten years (Collier et al. The reality is that, for the most part, domestic actors did not have control over these mediation processes, and third-party mediation became associated with imposed conflict transformation and power mediation (Eriksson and Kostić 2013). Most of these peace agreements share at their core a similar logic and structure, deriving from a determined-designed model based on a liberal peace ideology and the so-called international best practices, which tend to be linear, staged, normative, and individualistic in orientation (Bagshaw and Porter 2013). A characteristic feature of this period is that the content of the peace agreements typically reveals more about the liberal peace values of the mediators than they do about the values or context-specific interests of the parties to the conflict. Since the 1990s, mediation and conflict resolution processes have often been intimately related to liberalpeacebuilding interventions, helping first to bring the fighting to an end with cease-fire agreements and then shaping the post-conflict phase through more comprehensive peace agreements.
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