The timing of mediation: commitment problems in civil wars

The peaceful settlement of civil wars represents a key challenge for the international community and its policymakers. Even though mediation has become the most common tool of conflict management to settle these conflicts, so far we know relatively little about how to best manage them. This thesis examines mediation in civil wars and by building on the bargaining model of war the author argues that mediators have to concentrate primarily on the resolution of commitments problems in order to establish robust peace agreements. This paper uses an edited version of the Civil War Mediation (CWM) dataset, which comprises 366 mediation events in the time period of 1946 to 2004. By employing logistic regression analyses, the author finds that the later the intermediary enters a conflict, the lower the development and democracy level of the respective state, and the more intense a conflict is, the higher is the probability of a successful mediation outcome. The results also suggest that international and regional organizations are better equipped than other mediators to resolve commitment problems.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Christian Winke