The Cost of Talking Peace: Financing peace negotiation and mediation processes

Peace negotiation and mediation processes are standard approaches to ending armed conflicts. While the international system has put norms, structures and capacities in place to support these processes, how they are financed has not undergone a similar transformation. Funding is perceived as purely technical, though it is political in its implications and often complex in its operationalization. Consequently, it is difficult to derive good practices from other fields, particularly because, at first glance, conventional economic logic is not at play.

This research is based on 47 semi-structured interviews with those deeply involved in peace negotiations. They show that funding can be an enabling and disabling factor for negotiations. A series of inefficiencies arises in the ‘market’, though how harmful these inefficiencies are is less clear. This policy brief discusses how these inefficiencies can threaten the successful operation of negotiation and mediation processes and how they might be overcome.