Making the middle: localizing inclusivity in the IGAD-led mediation in South Sudan (2013-2015)

Regional organizations are rising as one of the leading actors in international peace mediation. Similar to other mediation actors, they increasingly mandate their mediators to promote norms such as gender equality, transitional justice / Dealing with the Past, and democracy. Along with the rise of regional organizations in mediation, inclusivity has emerged as one of the top norms regional peace mediators have been increasingly mandated to promote in addition to their primary mandate of helping end violence through a peace agreement. This trend is premised on fundamental assumptions currently under-investigated in research: that inclusivity, along with the plethora of norms in the mediators’ mandate, categorically leads to peace and that mediators have the agency to promote norms in the first place.
Examining these assumptions, this dissertation investigates, “How do regionally-mandated mediators promote inclusivity in mediation processes?” The dissertation builds on the constitutive localization framework conceptualized by Amitav Acharya in analyzing the process of promoting inclusivity and the mediator’s role. The study examines the possible local agency of the mediators mandated by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the regional organization in the Horn of Africa, in enabling the inclusion of a broader set of stakeholders (armed and unarmed) in the South Sudan mediation process from 2013 to 2015.
This dissertation makes a case for the mediator as a “local agent” of the regional mediation process. The mediator has agency first, to modify inclusivity’s substance to be more congruent with pre-established norms in the regional mediation context, and second, to link with leverage-wielding actors that can further socialize the conflict parties into compliance through incentives and constraints. This kind of diffusion of inclusivity, where the norm undergoes reinterpretation and re-representation in congruence-building with other norms and conflict parties are socialized through big carrots and sticks, does not necessarily lead to sustainable peace.
The study has both conceptual and empirical contributions. At the conceptual level, the dissertation engages in core discourses in mediation research as well as in International Relations at large on the nature and role of norms, the relationship between structure and agency, and the interplay of material and ideational processes in analyzing political change. At the empirical level, through in-depth narrative and semi-structured interviews with officials, experts, participants of the peace process, and other South Sudanese as well as content analysis of official documents and other literature, the dissertation offers an account of the IGAD-led mediation process from 2013 to 2015.
This Ph.D. dissertation is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the project, “Are Mediators Norm Entrepreneurs? The Role of Norms in International Peace Mediation.”