Financing Peace Negotiations

Those who seek to make and build peace have a number of tools at their disposal. Since the end of the Cold War, negotiation and mediation between conflicting parties has become an increasingly common part of this toolkit. These approaches avoid the expense of other activities but significant debates have arisen about their effectiveness and the features that determine their success or failure. In this article, we consider
an often-overlooked aspect of peace negotiation and mediation processes—how they are funded. We assess the importance of how a negotiation is financed for successful conflict resolution and assess the threats and opportunities therein. Based on 48 semi-structured interviews, we find a series of interlinked financing threats that could inhibit negotiation processes, pertaining to informational asymmetries, misaligned incentives, and collective action problems. While resulting in losses of efficiency, no evidence emerges that these threats materially affect outcomes once a negotiation has begun. At the same time, there is some potential that inappropriate financing inhibits the start of negotiations in conflicts that are ripe for resolution.