I have sat across from men who command armies, knowing that some of them 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. It is the silence of moral tension — the unspoken awareness that peace, if it is to be achieved, may require engaging those whose actions have made peace necessary in the first place.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of modern conflict mediation. It is what Pierre Hazan described as “negotiating with the devil.” In the Horn of Africa today, it is not a metaphor. It is a daily reality.

Yet the challenge confronting mediators today extends beyond the moral dilemma of negotiating with armed actors. What we are witnessing across Sudan and the wider Horn is something more profound and more consequential: a growing structural mismatch between mediation as it is currently practiced and the realities it is meant to address.

Mediation in a fragmented geopolitical landscape

The world in which modern mediation evolved has fundamentally changed.

The assumptions that once underpinned international peacemaking — shared norms, coherent multilateral leadership, and a broadly agreed international order — are steadily eroding. In their place is a far more fragmented and competitive geopolitical landscape, one in which conflicts have become increasingly regionalized, internationalized, and economically embedded.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Horn of Africa.

The region is no longer experiencing isolated national crises. It is increasingly evolving into an interconnected regional system of conflict shaped by cross-border armed networks, external intervention, fragmented sovereignties, war economies, ideological polarization, and intensifying geopolitical competition along the Red Sea corridor.

Sudan illustrates this reality in its starkest form.

Sudan is no longer simply a country at war. It is a state and society being hollowed out. Its institutions are collapsing, its cities are being destroyed, and millions have been displaced by a conflict whose consequences increasingly transcend Sudan itself. The war has become deeply entangled with broader regional rivalries and international strategic interests.

And yet, for all the urgency surrounding Sudan, the path to peace partially runs through the very actors who are sustaining the war.

The uncomfortable moral realities of ending conflicts

This remains the central dilemma of mediation. The men who can stop the war are often the same men fighting it.

It is tempting to believe that peace can be built by excluding such actors — that legitimacy alone can substitute for power. But experience suggests 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.

This is not a comfortable proposition. Nor should it be.

Every mediation effort forces a version of the same question: Is it better to engage and risk legitimizing violent actors, or to refuse engagement and risk prolonging the war?

There are no clean answers. Only consequences.

In much of the Horn of Africa, power is not exercised primarily through formal institutions. It is embedded in networks of patronage, coercion, economic extraction, and armed mobilization. Alex de Waal has described this as a “political marketplace,” where loyalties are transactional, alliances are fluid, and violence itself becomes a tool of political bargaining.

Peace processes that fail to engage these underlying realities often collapse under the weight of their own assumptions. Agreements may appear coherent on paper while remaining disconnected from the actual structures that sustain conflict.

This is one of the defining weaknesses of much contemporary mediation.

Too often, mediation has shifted from shaping political outcomes to managing diplomatic processes. Meetings proliferate. Statements multiply. Tracks expand. Yet leverage weakens and coherence declines.

The result is the paradox increasingly visible across many conflicts today: more mediation, but less peace.

The Horn of Africa vividly illustrates this crisis.

Different actors pursue different initiatives through overlapping and sometimes competing tracks. Regional organizations, international institutions, bilateral powers, and external geopolitical actors often engage simultaneously without strategic alignment. The multiplication of forums has not necessarily produced greater effectiveness. In some cases, it has deepened fragmentation.

This is not merely an operational problem. It reflects a deeper transformation in the international system itself.

Mediators must negotiate a fiercely contested diplomatic environment

The era in which mediation could rely on relatively coherent multilateral consensus is fading. What is emerging instead is a far more contested diplomatic environment shaped by geopolitical rivalry, transactional partnerships, declining trust in institutions, and the growing influence of middle and regional powers.

For mediators, this creates a new level of complexity. It is no longer enough to navigate the conflict itself. One must also navigate the competing interests of those seeking to shape the conflict’s outcome.

The Red Sea corridor has become one of the clearest manifestations of this emerging reality. Gulf powers, global powers, regional actors, and non-state networks increasingly intersect across the Horn in ways that blur the line between domestic conflict and wider geopolitical competition. Proximity to the Middle East has transformed the Horn into part of a wider and deeply interconnected security arena.

Mediation frameworks, however, have often failed to evolve accordingly.

Many still operate according to assumptions rooted in an earlier era — one in which conflicts were more localized, mediation tracks more centralized, and multilateral authority more coherent. But today’s wars are different. They are fragmented, networked, economically sustained, digitally amplified, and externally entangled.

This demands a fundamental rethinking of mediation itself.

The challenge is not simply to improve mediation processes. It is to redefine mediation politically, strategically, and institutionally for an entirely different era of conflict.

Three deficits increasingly define contemporary mediation efforts.

Key challenges facing modern mediation

First, there is a deficit of political strategy.

Mediation has too often become procedural rather than transformational. Process has become a substitute for strategy. Yet mediation that is disconnected from a clear political understanding of power, incentives, and end states risks becoming performative rather than consequential.

Second, there is a deficit of coherence.

Multiple actors engage without alignment, weakening leverage and creating opportunities for conflict actors to exploit divisions among mediators themselves. Fragmented diplomacy frequently mirrors the fragmentation of the conflicts it seeks to resolve.

Third, there is a deficit of legitimacy.

Formal peace processes often remain disconnected from societal realities and civilian constituencies most affected by war. Inclusion is frequently symbolic rather than meaningful, while local actors capable of sustaining peace remain marginalized.

These deficits are particularly dangerous in contexts such as Sudan, where the collapse of state structures risks generating prolonged fragmentation with regional consequences extending far beyond national borders.

The ongoing tensions between peace and justice

At the same time, mediation confronts another enduring tension: the relationship between peace and justice.

Victims of conflict do not speak in abstractions about stabilization. They speak about accountability, dignity, recognition, and historical grievance. They demand not only the cessation of violence but also justice for the violence already committed.

Yet here too mediation encounters difficult realities.

Actors who fear immediate accountability are often unwilling to negotiate. Insisting on maximalist justice demands at the outset may, in some circumstances, foreclose opportunities to stop the violence itself.

This does not mean justice should be abandoned. It means justice must be sequenced carefully within broader political transitions.

Mahmood Mamdani has long argued that violence in Africa is often rooted not merely in individual criminality but in deeper political structures and historical systems of exclusion. Sustainable peace therefore requires more than prosecutions alone. It requires transforming the conditions that continuously reproduce violent conflict.

In practical terms, this means prioritizing the cessation of violence while preserving pathways toward accountability, institutional reform, reconciliation, and political transformation.

It is not a perfect approach. But in the midst of war, perfection is rarely available.

And this is precisely where African agency becomes indispensable.

Regional ownership of mediation efforts in the Horn remain key

Recently, mediation in the Horn of Africa has been shaped externally, even when formally conducted in the language of regional ownership. African institutions have often been expected to provide legitimacy without corresponding political authority, leverage, or strategic leadership.

This imbalance is no longer sustainable.

Institutions such as the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development remain indispensable not because they are flawless, but because no durable peace architecture can emerge in the Horn without regionally grounded political ownership.

Yet African agency today cannot simply mean defending old institutional formulas. The changing nature of conflict requires a renewed sense of strategic purpose and institutional adaptation.

African multilateral institutions must move forward 

African multilateral institutions must evolve from being primarily conveners of dialogue into shapers of political outcomes.

They must move:

• from process management to political strategy, 
• from fragmented engagement to strategic coherence, 
• from symbolic ownership to operational leadership, 
• and from reactive diplomacy to anticipatory regional statecraft.

This requires acknowledging uncomfortable realities.

The conflicts emerging across the Horn are not merely traditional civil wars. They are increasingly hybrid conflicts shaped by militias, transnational armed networks, foreign intervention, war economies, information warfare, and collapsing social contracts. They unfold across borders and across political, economic, and digital spaces simultaneously.

Mediation frameworks designed for earlier generations of conflict cannot adequately address these new realities without substantial adaptation.

Nor can fragmented international engagement substitute for coherent regional political leadership. African institutions must therefore not only defend multilateralism, but also reinvent it.

This includes building stronger coordination between regional and international actors, developing clearer political strategies, investing in sustained mediation capacity, and grounding peace efforts more deeply within the societies most affected by conflict.

It also requires strategic realism.

Quiet diplomacy, often dismissed as insufficiently visible, remains indispensable in highly polarized conflicts. Some of the most meaningful breakthroughs in mediation still occur away from public scrutiny — in informal conversations where positions soften, trust emerges, and political imagination becomes possible.

But quiet diplomacy alone is not enough.

It must be anchored in a broader strategic framework capable of aligning actors, sequencing incentives, and sustaining political processes beyond temporary ceasefires or elite bargains.

Ultimately, mediation is not about resolving moral dilemmas. It is about navigating them responsibly. It requires engaging actors whose conduct one may profoundly oppose. It requires accepting imperfect outcomes in order to prevent greater catastrophe. And it requires operating in environments where moral clarity and political necessity rarely align neatly.

There is no purity in this work. Only responsibility.

The alternative to negotiation is not moral clarity. It is prolonged war, institutional collapse, regional destabilization, and generational trauma. In Sudan today — and increasingly across the Horn of Africa — the cost of that failure is already far too high.

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