Summary
HLS PILAC is preparing to undertake a research project aimed at providing a structured understanding of how legal frameworks shape mediation processes, perspectives, and outcomes. The project does not engage in mediation itself but, rather, focuses on generating a rigorous evidentiary and analytical foundation that diplomats, policymakers, and legal professionals can draw upon. In doing so, the initiative seeks to promote legal awareness as a component of principled and sustainable peace efforts.
Background
In a time of persistent global uncertainty and prolonged armed conflicts, the interplay between international humanitarian law (IHL) and peace negotiations remains underexplored. While existing legal frameworks, including IHL, provide a foundation for addressing violations, they are often disengaged from the practical realities of mediation processes. This initiative seeks to help illuminate critical intersections between IHL and mediation, focusing on how legal claims, accountability mechanisms, and state obligations affect prospects for sustainable peace. Beyond addressing enduring analytical and conceptual gaps, the project is calibrated to yield insights of practical salience to mediators and mediation-support actors. Especially in a period marked by acute geopolitical flux, the aim is not simply to enrich the literature or provide yet more abstract research publications but to help inform and enable principled, context-sensitive decision-making in the field.
There is a critical gap in knowledge regarding how legal frameworks and legal claims shape efforts to end armed conflicts and prevent their recurrence. On one hand, governments and international actors engage in framing violations, filing claims, and pursuing accountability through formal legal mechanisms. On the other hand, mediation practitioners operate within distinct professional paradigms focused on negotiation, de-escalation, and the crafting of politically viable settlements. These two communities tend to function in isolation, with limited sustained engagement or mutual understanding. Mediation is frequently viewed, and at times pursued, as operating apart from the legal pathways of international proceedings, public censure, and formal accountability mechanisms. Yet legal concepts, especially from IHL, routinely find their way into mediation texts and processes, though often refracted through political or operational priorities. At the same time, legal and mediation communities often carry unexamined assumptions and biases about one another’s roles and approaches. A key part of what remains understudied is how international legal norms shape, constrain, or enable mediation in practice, as well as how mediators engage with these norms in the design of process, interim arrangements, and final agreements.
The consequences of this disconnect are potentially far-reaching. Without a structured framework for understanding the relationship between IHL and mediation practices — including the conditions under which legal norms shape, complicate, or recalibrate negotiation dynamics — it remains difficult to distill lessons, identify enabling or constraining patterns, or make informed strategic decisions about how to support future mediation efforts. Legal claims advanced in proceedings before international courts, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights or the International Criminal Court, have, in some contexts, demonstrably influenced the conduct of armed actors in ways that intersect unpredictably with mediation tracks.
Yet these are only one part of a much wider terrain. Ceasefires, humanitarian arrangements, and subnational accords — rather than comprehensive peace agreements — now often constitute the majority of mediation outputs. Across these efforts, the ways in which IHL is referenced, paraphrased, reinterpreted, ignored, or instrumentalized remain under-examined. Meanwhile, mediators themselves operate across distinct interpretive orientations: some adhere closely to normative guidelines such as the UN Guidance for Effective Mediation, which emphasizes principled integration of legal norms; others engage from positions shaped more by contextual pragmatism or shifting geopolitical incentives.
Such divergences may become more salient as the broader international architecture, long assumed to provide a relatively stable normative and institutional environment for mediation, is increasingly viewed as fractured or contingent. If that underlying framework continues to erode, or is increasingly viewed as contingent, it could recalibrate the legal and normative tools that are deemed available — or viable — for mediation or even affect the durability of hard-won agreements once they are achieved. To begin to assess those stakes, however, a more systematic analysis must first be undertaken: to map where, how, and why international legal norms, especially IHL, have been invoked, reshaped, or strategically deployed in mediation efforts.
Through this project, HLS PILAC seeks to:
provide an analytical foundation for understanding how IHL and legal claims may influence negotiation dynamics, conflict termination, and post-conflict stability;
illuminate ways in which legal frameworks shape negotiation and mediation environments, without assuming that mediators themselves need to operate as legal experts; and
develop informational and analytical resources that can help enable policymakers and diplomatic actors to more effectively navigate the legal dimensions of peace negotiations and mediation efforts.
Contact
Dustin A. Lewis, Research Director, HLS PILAC, dlewis@law.harvard.edu.
Page last updated: October 2025.