Regional Sanctions Against Burundi: A Powerful Campaign and Its Unintended Consequences

This paper examines the impact of regionally imposed sanctions on the trajectory of the Burundian regime and its involvement in the peace process following the 1996 coup in the country. Despite the country's socioeconomic and geopolitical vulnerability, the Buyoya government withstood the pressure from the sanctions. Through a vocal campaign against these sanctions, the new government mitigated the embargo's economic consequences and partially reestablished its international reputation. Paradoxically, this campaign planted the seed for comprehensive political concessions in the long term. While previous literature has attributed the sanctions' success in pressuring the government into negotiations to their economic impact, the government actually responded to the sanction senders' key demand to engage in unconditional, inclusive peace talks under the auspices of the regional mediator once the economy had already started to recover. The regime's anti-sanctions campaign, with its emphasis on the government's willingness to engage in peace talks, backfired, with Buyoya forced to negotiate after having become entrapped in his own rhetoric

Mediation

In 2017, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres recognized mediation as "essential, flexible and effective tool which is utilized for conflict prevention, management and resolution by the United Nations and a wide range of other organizations and actors" (UN Secretary-General 2017, p. 6). Mediation is defined as "a process of conflict management, related to but distinct from the parties' own negotiations, where those in conflict seek the assistance of, or accept an offer of help from, an outsider [...] without resorting to physical force or invoking the authority of law" (Bercovitch 2009, p. 343). Thus, mediation, at a minimum, denotes the assistance by a third party to a negotiation between two or more conflict parties to find a peaceful agreement (see also "Negotiation," "Peace Agreements"). It has become a standard international response to armed conflicts since the end of the Cold War (Gowan and Stedman 2018; Greig and Diehl 2012). This is reflected in research, which has produced relevant knowledge on how to render mediation more effective. It has thereby strongly relied on positivist approaches with rationalist conceptual frameworks and quantitative methodologies. While producing important findings, it has left three main gaps, calling for more disaggregated findings, a stronger focus on ideational aspects, and awareness of changing macrolevel factors in the broader world political context of mediation