Eighty years ago, the United Nations was created as a guardrail against catastrophe – a rules‑based scaffold strong enough to restrain the powerful and give voice to the weak. Dag Hammarskjöld captured that mission with blunt realism. For the late Secretary General, the UN “was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” Yet in 2025, the measure of success in far too many conflicts has become the mere announcement of a ceasefire and often celebrated as though it were peace itself.

This is not only a symptom of geopolitical pessimism; it is evidence that the global imagination of peace is shrinking.  Africa — more importantly the Horn of Africa, a region exposed to proxy rivalries and beset by internal ruptures — shows how principled, inclusive multilateral mediation has been displaced by transactional bargains that manage violence without resolving its root causes. Against this backdrop, the UN at eighty must decide whether to reclaim political mediation as its vocation — or concede the field to fast deals and performative “peace.”

The UN is no longer a global anchor of multilateralism and mediation 

The UN was established as the anchor of multilateralism, tasked with safeguarding peace and mediating disputes before they escalated into disaster. Today, however, its credibility and capacity as a central actor in mediation have diminished and multilateralism itself is under threat. Yet, despite its weakening role, the vast majority of states, governments, and citizens continue to affirm that a world without the UN — or without a multilateral order at its core — is inconceivable. The question is not whether multilateralism is needed, but whether the UN can reclaim its leadership in mediation and global public goods.

The decline of mediation is starkly visible in today’s devastating wars. In Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, the UN and other multilateral bodies are either marginalized or relegated to peripheral roles, while transactional approaches and ad hoc deal-making displace principled, politically led mediation. Africa illustrates this erosion vividly: neither the UN, the African Union, nor sub-regional organizations are in the lead, as mediation platforms are crowded out by warring parties in favor of short-term bargains.

Part of the problem lies in the politics of the UN Security Council, where pen-holders — particularly the P3 (France, the United Kingdom and the United States) — interfere in the selection of envoys, rewarding politically safe mediators of limited effectiveness, resulting in short tenures and revolving-door diplomacy. Libya, with ten envoys in a decade, is emblematic of this dysfunction.

However, even the normative foundations of mediation have been weakened. Where once mediators were guided by international law — tasked with averting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide — today the global security agenda is increasingly reduced to migration management, particularly as viewed through Western priorities. This shift in focus has hollowed out mediation’s moral core, leaving it diminished at precisely the moment the world needs it most. What lessons can we learn from past eras of modern mediation that could help uphold the principles of genuine multilateral mediation?

Why the first generation of multilateral mediation efforts worked

For most of its history, multilateral mediation had a hard‑earned reputation as the gold standard of peacemaking. It was transparent, authentic, fair, and — crucially — accountable to collective bodies such as the UN Security Council and, in Africa, the Peace and Security Council of the African Union (AU). Parties could safely state their case without coercion. Mediators were consensus‑builders selected through consultation to command trust, and neutrality meant principled engagement, not passivity.

The UN’s stewardship of Namibia’s transition to independence from South Africa (1978–1990) illustrates this ethos. During the transition there was consistent reporting to the Security Council, adherence to self‑determination, and monitoring by United Nations Transition Assistance Group produced a legitimate independence. Early “first‑generation” mediations were predominantly inter‑state, in which organized governments could negotiate and deliver, according to templates that involved armistices, demilitarized zones, peacekeeping, and proved effective. Even where bilateral leverage was decisive, such as in the Egypt–Israel disengagements in 1973, UN presence conferred legitimacy and accountability, anchoring fragile settlements in a universal frame.

Second generation mediators required patience and political imagination

By the late 1980s and 1990s, the conflicts of focus were civil wars — deadly, protracted, and layered with identity fractures, state collapse, and driven in part by external proxies. Mediation now required patience, political imagination, and long arcs of trust‑building. The Rome General Peace Accords for Mozambique (1992) and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) for Sudan (2005) showed how multilaterals — UN, the African Union, Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) — could align diverse actors behind political outcomes, including constitutional redesign, security arrangements, power‑and wealth‑sharing agreements and monitored transitions.

But even during this productive period complexity bit back. Darfur (2004–2008) exposed the limits of negotiating with divided rebel groups, state intransigence, and great‑power cross‑purposes, resulting in a 2006 deal that lacked legitimacy. The lesson was not that multilateralism failed — but that mediation is inherently political and succeeds only when it confronts root causes and power realities with craft and courage.

Polarization, patronage and payoffs: a more cynical mediation paradigm

Today multilateralism built is under severe strain. Polarization among great and middle powers such as Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Turkey, has hollowed out the Security Council’s authority. The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) — once the most ambitious regional scaffold for prevention, mediation, and peacekeeping — has withered. The Horn of Africa has been drawn into a wider Red Sea arena, where Gulf monarchies, Israel, Türkiye, and Egypt, project influence with deep political budgets and security leverage. The operating system is transactional hegemony: security pacts, patronage, and cash payoffs purchase temporary quiet at the expense of legitimacy. 

Within this ecosystem, a ceasefire fetish has taken hold. Humanitarian pauses are pursued as endpoints rather than first steps; monitoring and verification are thin; pathways to politics are absent. Since the outbreak of war in Sudan in April 2023, there have been a proliferation of external mediation initiatives — such as the Jeddah talks, Egyptian tracks, AU/IGAD efforts — that are aimed mostly at truces, while belligerents have exploited pauses to rearm.  

The UN’s New Agenda for Peace diagnoses the problem but lacks courage 

The UN’s New Agenda for Peace recognizes many of these new pathologies — proxy warfare, fragmented actors, and the erosion of norms — and calls for prevention, inclusion, and renewed political strategies. Yet it remains largely diagnostic. Without political backing and institutional courage, the New Agenda risks joining the sad shelves of worthy documents that inform briefings but not outcomes on the battlefield. The uncomfortable truth is that the paradigm has reached its limits: complex conflicts, externalized patronage, and norm erosion have outrun mediation toolkits crafted in an earlier era. 

If there is one cardinal lesson that ought to have been learned in eight decades, it is that mediation is political, not technical. Technical instruments such as ceasefire matrices, Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration programs, election timetables are indispensable, but only if subordinated to a larger political strategy. The proliferation of Track Two efforts, that are useful for ideas and contacts, can mislead when they substitute technical tinkering for political definition. As the the former President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki insisted during the Sudan negotiation conducted under the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel, the first duty of any mediator is to define the problem — to help parties see their conflict politically, step out of identity silos, and begin constructing a shared horizon.

Political competence is therefore the essential skill: mastering history; mapping power; recognizing when a “payroll peace” (stipends and posts for elites) simply entrenches war economies; knowing when a fast‑track pact will collapse for lack of legitimacy; and designing verification and enforcement mechanisms credible enough to bridge mistrust until politics can take root. In times of conflict, societies — not just the elites that run them — must be engaged in order to restore respect for politics as the civic craft of self-determination and managing our collective affairs.

The path of political courage over ‘neutrality’ and siding with the strong

Too often, today’s mediators are chosen for bureaucratic caution rather than political courage. Some are lazy thinkers who avoid history and shun complexity; others mistake neutrality for siding with the strong. In Sudan, rotating envoys and rival formats have become part of the problem. In Somalia, counter‑terrorism imperatives eclipsed the patient coalition‑building needed for a political settlement, while exclusion of the Islamic Courts a generation ago helped incubate the insurgency that followed. Ethiopia’s experience shows both the cost of performative peace and the danger of excluding key belligerents from negotiations.

Thabo Mbeki’s counsel bears repeating: mediation is hard to initiate, harder to sustain, and hardest of all to implement. Each phase demands political courage, institutional backing, and time horizons longer than news cycles. Selecting, protecting, and empowering mediators with those qualities is not a luxury; it is the strategy. 

Reclaiming multilateral mediation in an era of extreme polarization 

Reclaiming multilateral mediation does not mean restoring a vanished unipolar moment. It means clarifying roles and rebuilding legitimacy where it matters:

From ceasefire to settlement

Treat pauses as the first rung of a ladder to politics. Pair them with robust monitoring, complaint mechanisms, sequenced confidence‑building measures such as prisoner exchanges, withdrawal of heavy weapons, and an agreed roadmap to talks.

Re‑center impartial platforms

The UN, AU, and IGAD must stop playing courier for transactional bargains. They should set agendas rooted in universal norms and convene inclusive national dialogues where countries can define problems and futures for themselves.

Address the political transactional hegemony

Map external financiers and leverage transparency to raise the reputational cost of spoiler funding. Where outside patrons are indispensable, multilateralize their roles under clear rules and verification.

Invest in training professional mediators

Select mediators for their political acumen, courage, and ability to listen. Train them to understand history, power dynamics and strategy and to above all remain independent.

Rebuild normative confidence.

Prevention of violence, human rights, humanitarian access, inclusion, and constitutional pathways are not luxuries; they are the load‑bearing walls of durable peace. 

Beyond preventing hell and performative peacemaking

Hammarskjöld’s sage remarks about the role of the UN echo on in our unruly era. The UN was never meant to deliver heaven. Its task is to keep us from hell — not through collecting headlines about ceasefires, but by reconnecting the cessation of violence to the construction of legitimate politics. The Horn of Africa, and the ongoing crisis in Sudan, shows how easily performative peacemaking can slide into negative peace, and how quickly norms can erode when transactional logic reigns. It also shows that experience, institutions, and courageous mediators can still change trajectories.

At eighty, the UN must decide: will it be a bystander to the political marketplace — or a convenor of meaningful political settlements? The answer will depend on whether multilateral leadership can put politics back in command, resist the seductions of fast deals, and insist that every ceasefire is a bridge to a just and durable peace.

Abdul Mohammed is a former United Nations Senior Political Advisor and head of the Sudan Mediation office.