Informality and the Social Art of Mediation: How Pure Mediators Create Conditions for Making Peace

This article explores how pure mediators make peace without using political, military, or economic leverage. It argues that informality helps mediators establish and build relationships that make it possible for the disputing parties to receive their assistance, information, and suggestions. The research uses case studies and first-hand interviews to explore beneath the institutional and strategic level of analysis and finds that informality manifests in peacemaking as informal people, language, time, and space. The findings also indicate that informality in peace processes often appeared organically to achieve positive results by default rather than design. The research has implications for the study and practice of international mediation, particularly for those who mediate without power. This research highlights the need for researchers and practitioners to conceptualize peace processes as a mutually reinforcing system comprising a formal and an informal layer and peacemaking as a team effort

Preparing the Psychological Space for Peacemaking

Peace processes fail for many reasons, but one of the critical factors is the state of mind of the participants around the peace table. Often the atmosphere is one of mistrust and suspicion: the traumatic effects of the conflict and the degree of suffering makes the parties likely to be more interested in retribution than accommodation. This state of mind keeps conflict parties rigidly and emotionally attached to their positions and often psychologically blocked from being able to engage productively in a peace process and achieve outcomes that meet their best interests. This article proposes that to make conflict resolution efforts more effective, conflict parties need help to become psychologically ready to enter a peace process. It argues that any commitment to a psychological process must be understood in the context of geopolitical realities, and it recognizes that power dynamics are a critical piece of any assessment of what will bring about an end to conflict. It makes a plea to understand how and why individuals and parties are behaving as they are around the peace table, in terms of power dynamics and human motivations, and how they can be better prepared. A methodology is needed that can transform the intense emotions of war into strategic calculations and in doing so to help get to the end of conflict. This article advocates the creation of a safe space, where conflict parties can explore their feelings, internal narratives, and personal motives and understand that these intense emotions may not be serving their best interest. The aim is to work with the parties to help them abandon their rigid emotional attachments to their positions, modify their expectations, and achieve an improved state of “psychological readiness” that allows them to be in a better state of mind to participate around the peace table

Organic Geochemistry of Permian Organic-rich Sediments from the Sudetes Area, SW Poland

Lacustrine and marine sediments from the Permian rift-basins of southwestern Poland were analysed using GC-MS and petrographic techniques. High Pr/Ph ratios, gamma- and beta-carotanes and gammacerane in the lacustrine sediments indicate deposition under elevated water salinities. The primary organic matter is represented by bacterial and algal lipids with variable terrestrial input. Marine algal lipids with minor bacterial and cyanobacterial lipids are the primary source of organic matter in the marine sediments. Extended hopanes, n-alkanes with even-odd predominance and low Ts/Tm ratios are consistent with deposition in a closed, evaporitic basin with substantial carbonate sedimentation

Peacemaking in Civil Wars:How Power Balancing Mediation Contributes to Durable Ceasefires and Peace Agreements

Ceasefires are critical to war-to-peace transitions. Despite their ubiquitous presence in civil war peace processes, mediated ceasefires struggle to end violence. Academics and practitioners offer many explanations for why mediated ceasefires and, more broadly, peace processes and agreements break down. The prevailing arguments rest largely on failures in four aspects of peacemaking: the conflict, the negotiation process, the agreements and their implementation. As these arguments do not provide a framework connecting all four aspects of peacemaking, it has been impossible to advance a theory for general application.This thesis examines how peacemakers mediate ceasefires in civil war peace processes. Acute power asymmetries often characterise civil wars, which encourage governments to use violence to avoid negotiations and armed groups to pursue violence to force negotiations. In such a situation, peacemakers struggle to mediate ceasefires and when they do, they are often short-lived. This challenge prompts the research question: How do peacemakers mediate durable ceasefires in civil war peace processes?A power balancing mediation framework is proposed to address this issue. I argue that mediator tactics achieve durable ceasefires when they contribute to disputant power becoming more balanced. Peacemakers – explicitly or implicitly – use a variety of tactics that affect the dynamic power balance between disputants. These tactics are used regardless of a peacemaker’s willingness to acknowledge the power they bring to bear on peace processes. Using a qualitative research design, I highlight these power dynamics. Comparative case studies provide a solid basis for assessing the central causal hypothesis that power balancing mediation contributes to enduring ceasefires.The study confirms the framework. Parties accepted mediation and continued participation in peace processes when mediation tactics balance disputant power in the conflict and negotiation process. Parties abandon violence when peacemakers establish a power balance in the agreement and maintain it during implementation. In contrast, when peacemakers fail to promote a power balance between disputants or disrupt an existing one, the peace process falters or the ceasefire collapses.The study finds that ‘light’ preliminary ceasefires that do not disrupt the power balance endure, while ‘heavy’ ones disrupt the military power balance before a political settlement collapses. Definitive ceasefires last when the disputant power balance is maintained during implementation by compensating the armed group’s loss of military power with a gain in institutional power established in the political settlement. This demonstrates that ceasefires and political settlements in civil wars are intrinsically linked and need to be designed and implemented together. Counter-intuitively, the study found that preliminary and definitive ceasefires were unnecessary in civil wars. Preliminary ceasefires often delay final settlement, while definitive ceasefires can be an integral part of the peace agreement’s security provisions.This thesis makes significant new contributions to mediation and peacemaking literature and to debates on mediating a durable end to violence in civil wars by recognising the previously neglected importance of peacemaker-driven power balancing during peace processes. The granular knowledge about the timing and content of enduring civil war ceasefires also fills an existing gap in current literature

Lacustrine Shales and Oil Shales from Stellarton Basin, Nova Scotia, Canada: Organofacies Variations and Use of Polyaromatic Hydrocarbons as Maturity Indicators

The Post-Acadian Stellarton Basin is a small pull-apart basin in northern Nova Scotia. The Coal Brook Member, which is the main focus of this study, contains the thickest and most extensive development of oil shales within the Late Carboniferous Stellarton Formation. Bulk and molecular geochemistry indicate that the organic-rich oil shales and black shales contain Type I/II kerogen with a mixed assemblage of aquatic and terrestrial organic matter that is dominated by the former. Biomarker evidence indicates that these sediments were deposited under deep, anoxic and fresh-to-brackish water lake conditions. Organofacies distinctions were made on the basis of several parameters that are independent of maturity and therefore suggest organic matter changes. The organofacies identified are the result of water-level fluctuations that are climate controlled. All of the aromatic compounds evaluated as maturity parameters were seen to experience alterations in proportion to temperature in the form of either depth or geologic age, that can be correlated with maturity. These alterations are believed to result from changes in molecular composition. Maturity parameters based on the alkylbenzothiophenic and alkylnaphthalenic compounds are shown to be effective maturity parameters in lacustrine sequences, particularly over the higher maturity ranges where standard maturity parameters based on steranes and hopanes are not effective