Anniversary Special Issue Talking peace: International mediation in armed conflicts

Mediation, as a means to end armed conflicts, has gained prominence particularly in the past 25 years. This article reviews peace mediation research to date, with a particular focus on quantitative studies as well as on significant the-oretical and conceptual works. The growing literature on international mediation has made considerable progress towards understanding the conditions under which mediation processes help bring armed conflicts to peaceful ends. Still, the field of international mediation faces a number of problems. In this article, we aim to identify findings on mediation frequency, strategies, bias, and coordination as well as on trends in defining success. Although previous research has generated important insights, there are still unresolved issues and discrepancies which future mediation research needs to explore. Many of the challenges that the field faces could be managed by giving greater attention to accumulative knowledge production, more disaggregated analysis, and a closer dialogue between policy and research