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This paper aims to provide a structured overview of the most important research conducted in the field of international mediation. Although there are still strong similarities between the processes of international and domestic mediation, lack of a clear structure on the international level suggests that international mediation activities could be separately academically scrutinized. This literature review is aimed at illustrating the unique nature of international mediation.

Various factors that affect the overall process and the outcome of international mediation efforts were clustered in four distinct yet interrelated groups. The first section illustrates various mediators' characteristics that might induce the disputants to accept mediation and agree to specific terms that were mediated in the process. In the second section two distinct factors affecting the mediation outcome were explained: contextual and behavioral. Finally, in the third sections various types of mediators were discussed.

The article shows the intricate complexities of international mediation, highlighting four distinct features that might have an effect on the mediation outcome: mediator's characteristics, contextual features, behavioral factors, and types of mediators.

This article attempts to offer a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art in international mediation, and suggests potential areas of future research.

This paper aims to outline the state-of-the-art and research contributions in the construction mediation domain to determine whether existing research is compatible with a future scenario envisioning a wider adoption and more systemised use of mediation in the construction industry and to develop a research agenda based on key challenges facing mediation.

A systematic procedure based on keywords was adopted for the selection of relevant research contributions in the area, and a meta-classification framework has been designed based on independent classifications of the content, method and authorship to analyse the publications.

Research contributions in the past decade mostly focused on perceptions of professionals on mediation and the dynamics of the mediation process and mediator tactics. Based on the challenges identified, proposed research agenda includes court-connected mediation, mediation in public projects, project mediation, documentation of case studies of mediation applications and use of IT in mediation.

The publications investigated in this study are limited to scholarly articles published in the mainstream construction management journals and can be expanded to books or articles published in law journals if required.

Existing literature includes important contributions regarding many aspects of construction mediation, however, a holistic agenda is lacking to overcome the key challenges to the widespread use of mediation in the construction sector. The research directions presented in this paper is expected to contribute to the proliferation of the neglected areas and constitute the basis for the development of a research roadmap in the construction mediation domain.

Research on conflict mediation presents a scattered, piecemeal understanding of what determines mediators’ strategies and tactics and ultimately what constitutes successful mediation. This paper presents research on developing a unifying framework – the situated model of mediation – that identifies and integrates the most basic dimensions of mediation situations. These dimensions combine to determine differences in mediator’s strategies that in turn influence mediation processes and outcomes.

The approach used by this paper was twofold. First, the existing empirical literature was reviewed on factors that influence mediator’s behaviors. Based on the findings of this review, a survey study was conducted with experienced mediators to determine the most fundamental dimensions of mediation situations affecting mediators’ behaviors and mediation processes and outcomes. The data were analyzed through exploratory factor analysis and regression analysis.

The results of the study show that four of the most fundamental dimensions of mediation situations include: low vs high intensity of the conflict, cooperative vs competitive relationship between the parties, tight vs flexible context and overt vs covert processes and issues. Each of these factors was found to independently predict differences in mediators’ behaviors and perceptions of processes and outcomes. These dimensions are then combined to constitute the basic dimensions of the situated model of mediation.

The situated model of mediation is both heuristic and generative, and it shows how a minimal number of factors are sufficient to capture the complexity of conflict mediation in a wide range of contexts.

This study aims to explore the conditions that lead to the occurrence of third-party interveners’ coordination in conflict resolution efforts.

The studied theme is elaborated by means of an analysis of two case studies: the Maoist armed conflict of Nepal and the Moro conflict of the Philippines. Importantly, this study solicits the views of third-party practitioners and other relevant stakeholders in the field and attempts to demonstrate how they perceive key issues in third-party coordination.

Third-party coordination is a contingent process, with varying needs and relevance in different phases and types of conflict. The escalation of violence, issues of international concern such as human rights and the homogeneity of interveners are other core elements that have often played a key role in third-party coordination.

In the existing literature, there are no such indicator-based explanations regarding the occurrence of third-party coordination; thus, the findings of this research on this particular theme are well-developed and better conceptualized than what has been discussed in the literature to date.

The analysis undertaken in this study can contribute to the design of better policies and strategies for third-party coordination.

This study is based on in-depth interviews and interactions with a diverse range of third-party practitioners and other stakeholders working in real-world conflicts, who have perhaps the best understanding of various dimensions of third-party coordination. No previous research has been conducted on this particular theme by incorporating direct interaction with a wide range of interveners from two distinct conflict contexts.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediation exit option, which is one of the most important tactics available to any third party mediator.

The paper analyzes a crucial intermediary channel between the Irish Republican Army (hereafter IRA) and the British Government utilizing unique material from the private papers of the intermediary, Brendan Duddy, including diaries that cover periods of intensive communication, extensive interviews with the intermediary and with participants in this communication on both the British Government and Irish Republican sides as well as recently released official papers from the UK National Archives relating to this communication.

The study reveals how the intermediary channel was used in order to get information, how the third party and the primary parties traded in asymmetries of information, and how the intermediary utilized the information advantage to increase the credibility of his threats of termination.

The study outlines an avenue for further research on the termination dynamics of mediation.

Understanding the conditions for successfully using the exit‐option is vital for policy‐makers, in particular for peace diplomacy efforts in other contexts than the Northern Ireland one.

The paper challenges previous explanations for why threats by mediators to call off further mediation attempts are successful and argues that a mediator can use the parties' informational dependency on him in order to increase his leverage and push the parties towards settlement.

The case of the Canadian Forest Round Table on Sustainable Development provides evidence of diverse stakeholder representatives managing their conflict through dialogue, informal exchange, and field trips. This case study reveals new insights on factors which facilitate constructive conflict management and collaboration in a multistakeholder context. The findings indicate the value of dialogue, common evidence, and shared experience. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relations between peacemaking at work and peacemaking at home. Peacemaking is defined as voluntarily helping behavior in interpersonal conflict, by a person who has no formal authority over the conflicting parties, acts impartial and works with either one or more parties to solve the conflict constructively (Zhang et al., 2018).

In total, 639 participants engaged in a survey to measure their peacemaking behavior at work and at home. First, the peacemaking scale is validated using factor analysis. To test the hypotheses regression analysis is conducted.

Results show that peacemaking at work and at home are positively-related. Further, compared to peacemaking at work, people tend to be more often engaged in peacemaking at home; are more focused on settling the issues, provide more emotional support and use more humor, however, are less multi-partial.

Although based on self-reports, the results regarding the positive relation between peacemaking at work and at home may be enlightening in human resource management such as personnel selection.

The study provides the first theory-based instrument to measure peacemaking as informal helping behavior in interpersonal conflict, at work and at home. Five components are measured, namely, peacemaking in general, multi-partiality, settlement-oriented, emotion-oriented and humorous peacemaking behaviors.

Much of the negotiation literature involves two parties that are each assumed to behave in a unitary manner, although a growing body of knowledge considers more complex negotiations. Examples of the latter include two parties where one or both parties do not behave in a unitary manner, multiple parties on one or both sides, parties on multiple sides and parties engaged in separate but linked negotiations. Greater degrees of complexity distinguish these negotiations from negotiations with two unitary parties.

After reviewing the logic and basics of Environmental Conflict Resolution (ECR), this article analyzes the praise for and criticisms of ECR. This article acknowledges the initial successes in the 1970s and 1980s that led to a major period of expansion for ECR, and continues today, but argues that it must do a better job of proving itself. That is, proponents must conduct more rigorous assessments of its utility under different conditions and invest in data collection that goes far beyond present efforts. The article concludes by reviewing the challenges and opportunities facing ECR in the twenty-first century. Singled out for attention is the need for scholars and practitioners to understand ECR interventions as targeted at aggregate rather than dyadic relationships, as complex systems embedded in even larger complex systems, as time-extended phenomena, and as ripe for evaluation for their impact on substantive environmental outcomes.

Success and failure in mediation are widely understood to determine whether a state will receive positive or negative reputation outcomes from undertaking a mediation role in an international conflict. Research from mediation in domestic settings contradicts this view, finding that peer mediators in school and community settings received positive mediator outcomes from undertaking their role, even when they failed to facilitate an agreement between disputants. This paper aims to test this assumption and argues that mediation success and failure are only weakly correlated with observable reputation outcomes for mediating states and proposes an alternative explanatory framework.

The hypothesis was inductively generated through a comparative analysis of single-state mediation attempts selected from the Uppsala Conflict Database Project MILC data set. The cases selected were South Africa’s mediation attempts in Côte d’Ivoire from 2004 to 2005 and Comoros from 2003 to 2004, and Mexico’s mediation attempts in Colombia (National Liberation Army) in 2004 and Guatemala (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) between 1994 and 1996. To contextualise the findings and develop the explanatory framework, South African mediation attempts in Burundi and the DRC are discussed in the closing sections of the paper.

This paper finds that mediation success and failure are only weakly correlated with mediator outcomes. Mediator outcomes are explained by the activity level of the mediating state in providing mediation services; the positive intention of the mediator to assist in resolving the conflict; the scale of the conflict mediated; the severity of spill over effects from the conflict in question; the regional importance of the conflict; the proximity of the government which a mediating state looks to develop relations with to the conflict; the importance of the mediation attempt within the peace process; the level of contestation of the mediation attempt, meaning the extent to which mediation attempts are themselves sites of regional or global international power politics; and the success or failure of the mediation attempt.

An explanatory framework for state mediator outcomes in which the outcome of a mediation attempt for the third-party state is not determined solely, or even primarily, by mediation success or failure bridges mediation research applying to international and domestic issue areas and provides additional information for policy makers regarding the costs and benefits of committing their state to processes of mediation in conflicts with low probabilities of resolution. This is particularly important for state policy makers, given that mediation is successful on average in only one out of every three attempts.