Why the Old Peacemaking No Longer Fits the New Wars

Jul 11 , 2026
By Abdul Mohammed

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Across Sudan and the Horn of Africa, the men who can stop the war are the same men fighting it, and the old model of peacemaking no longer fits the wars it must end.

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I have sat across from men who command armies, knowing some were responsible for the very violence we were trying to stop.

There is a particular silence that fills such rooms. It is not the silence of diplomacy but of moral tension, the unspoken awareness that peace, if it is to be achieved, may require engaging those whose actions made peace necessary. This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of modern conflict mediation, what Pierre Hazan called "negotiating with the devil."

In the Horn of Africa, it is not a metaphor but a daily reality. Yet the difficulty facing mediators today reaches beyond the moral dilemma of dealing with armed actors. What we are witnessing across Sudan, the wider Horn of Africa and beyond is more consequential, a growing structural mismatch between mediation as it is practised and the realities it should address. The world in which modern mediation evolved has changed fundamentally.

The assumptions that once underpinned international peacemaking, such as shared norms, coherent multilateral leadership and a broadly agreed international order, are steadily eroding. In their place is a more fragmented and competitive geopolitical order, one in which conflicts have become regionalised, internationalised and economically embedded. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Horn of Africa. The region no longer suffers isolated national crises but is evolving into an interconnected system of conflict, shaped by cross-border armed networks, external intervention, fragmented sovereignties, war economies, ideological polarisation and intensifying competition along the Red Sea corridor.

Sudan illustrates this in its sharpest form. It is no longer simply a country at war but a state and society being hollowed out, its institutions collapsing, its cities destroyed, millions displaced by a conflict whose consequences transcend Sudan itself. The war is entangled with regional rivalries and international strategic interests. And yet, for all the urgency, the path to peace runs partly through the very actors sustaining it.

The nature of conflict has shifted, and that tests the current model of mediation.

Contemporary wars are no longer chiefly about seizing state power or a decisive military victory. They increasingly resemble wars of permanence, open-ended struggles sustained by political fragmentation, economic incentives, and geopolitical rivalry. As the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel show, many are transnational, entangled with regional and international criminal networks. They have also grown more intractable, because the means of warfare have changed.

From the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan, drones are now the weapon of choice, a sign of a rapid evolution reaching warfare enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), governed by rules written for an earlier age. Digital platforms, meanwhile, shape not the conflict alone but mediation itself.

This returns us to the central dilemma. The men who can stop the war are often the same men fighting it. It is tempting to believe peace can be built by excluding them, that legitimacy alone can stand in for power. Experience showed otherwise. Wars do not end because we morally isolate those who wage them. They end when those actors are brought, however reluctantly and imperfectly, into a political process capable of reshaping their incentives and constraining their violence. Every mediation effort forces the same question.

Is it better to engage and risk legitimising violent actors, or to refuse and risk prolonging the war?

There are no clean answers, only consequences.

In much of the Horn of Africa, power is not exercised through formal institutions but embedded in networks of patronage, coercion, economic extraction and armed mobilisation. Alex de Waal has called this a "political marketplace," where loyalties are transactional, alliances fluid and violence a tool of bargaining. Peace processes that ignore this collapse under their own assumptions, coherent on paper yet cut off from the structures that sustain the fighting.

That is one of the defining weaknesses of contemporary mediation. Too often, it has shifted from shaping political outcomes to managing diplomatic processes. Meetings proliferate, statements multiply, and tracks expand, yet leverage weakens and coherence declines. The result is a paradox visible across many conflicts, where there is more mediation but less peace. The Horn of Africa shows this plainly. Regional organisations, international institutions, bilateral powers and external actors pursue overlapping, sometimes competing initiatives without alignment. The proliferation of forums has not produced a greater effect; in some cases, it has deepened fragmentation.

This is not an operational problem but a symptom of a deeper transformation in the international system. The era in which mediation could rely on coherent multilateral consensus is fading, replaced by a contested diplomatic environment of geopolitical rivalry, transactional partnerships, declining trust in institutions and the rising weight of middle and regional powers.

For mediators, it is no longer enough to navigate the conflict; one also has to navigate the competing interests of those seeking to shape its outcome. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Red Sea corridor, where the Gulf, global and regional actors and non-state networks intersect across the Horn of Africa, blurring the line between domestic conflict and geopolitical competition. Proximity to the Middle East has folded the region into a wider security arena, yet mediation frameworks have largely failed to evolve, still built on assumptions of localised conflict and coherent multilateral authority.

Today's wars, economically embedded and digitally amplified, do not yield to that approach.

The task, then, is not to improve mediation but to redefine it politically, strategically and institutionally for a different era. Three deficits define the current practice.

The first is a deficit of political strategy, as process becomes a substitute for it, and mediation cut off from a clear reading of power, incentives, and end states turns performative. The second is a deficit of coherence, as misaligned actors weaken leverage and allow conflict parties to exploit divisions among mediators. The third is a deficit of legitimacy, as formal processes drift away from the societies most affected, inclusion remains symbolic, and local actors capable of sustaining peace remain marginalised.

In Sudan, where state structures are collapsing, these gaps risk a prolonged fragmentation whose consequences reach well beyond national borders.

Mediation also confronts the enduring tension between peace and justice. Victims do not speak in abstractions about stabilisation. They speak of accountability, dignity, recognition and grievance, demanding not only an end to violence but justice for the violence already done. Yet actors who fear immediate accountability are often unwilling to negotiate, and insisting on maximalist justice at the outset can foreclose the chance to stop the killing. This does not mean abandoning justice. It means justice has to be sequenced carefully within a broader political transition.

Mahmood Mamdani has long argued that violence in Africa is rooted less in individual criminality than in political structures and historical exclusion, so lasting peace requires transforming the conditions that reproduce conflict, not prosecutions alone.

In practice, this means prioritising the end of violence while preserving pathways to accountability, institutional reform, reconciliation and political transformation. It is not perfect, but in the midst of war, perfection is rarely on offer. This is where African agency becomes indispensable. It is such imperatives that animate the African Union (AU) Transitional Justice Policy, premised at once on the necessity of justice and on the recognition that wars are extraordinary events, not amenable to a justice designed for peacetime.

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PUBLISHED ON Jul 11,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1367]

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