Autocracies are taking over conflict mediation. The deals they are making look different
Illustration: Ben Hickey
PAKISTAN IS TYPICALLY viewed more as a source of geopolitical problems than as a salve to them. Yet over the past few months it has done more than just about any other country to bring about an end to the war between America and Iran. And it is not the only unlikely peacebroker to have interceded in recent conflicts. In just the past five years Turkey has mediated between Russia and Ukraine, Ethiopia and Somalia, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. China is also trying to reconcile Afghanistan and Pakistan. Qatar has served as a go-between for Hamas and Israel and America and the Taliban, as well as playing a role in America’s deal with Iran.
Chart: The Economist
Across the world, peacemaking by autocratic regimes is becoming the norm. In 2025 one or more of China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates were involved as mediators in at least 20 of 53 peace processes recorded worldwide, according to the School for a Culture of Peace (ECP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. At the same time, the established peacemakers of the post-war era—the United Nations and democracies far removed from the field of battle such as Norway, Sweden and Switzerland—are either involved less, or less prominently (see chart 1). This shift does not mean that more or fewer deals are being struck than before. Much like their democratic counterparts, autocrats come up empty-handed more often than not. But the accords they do manage to bring about are different in both style and substance.
First, consider the incentives. The autocrats are drawn to mediation for at least three reasons. One is prestige and domestic standing. Pakistan’s military leaders have parlayed their role in the talks between America and Iran to project an image of Pakistan as an indispensable ally. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has used successful mediation abroad to shore up support at home, and to pose as a champion of the global south.
Another reason to get involved is to put out fires next door. In this century Turkey has had to contend with refugee crises, disruptions to energy supply, economic downturns and incidents of terrorism as a consequence of multiple wars on its borders. “Turkey cannot have complete security or prosperity unless our region is settled,” says Timur Soylemez, a former head of international mediation in Turkey’s foreign ministry. “It’s a much more cost-effective strategy to manage these disputes, to stop them from flaring up.”
Your conflicts have my interests
Commercial or geopolitical goals are a third factor. China has mediated in Myanmar’s civil war largely to safeguard its investments. Turkey too has used mediation to protect its economic interests in places like Iraq or Libya, and to pursue new ones, as in Somalia. Pakistan’s overwhelming dependence on energy imports from the Gulf helps explain its prominent role in Iran, as does its desire to curry favour with America, whose ties with Pakistan’s nemesis, India, have been warmer in recent years.
The new mediators have some advantages over the old guard. Turkey leans on its Islamic identity to position itself as a more trustworthy intermediary for Muslim countries than Western powers, says Pinar Tank, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Qatar is willing to talk to Hamas, Iran and the Taliban, groups many Western governments do not want to speak to directly (or for which sanctions regimes and political considerations can make direct negotiations more tricky).
The resulting deals are different, too. When Western democratic powers brokered pacts in the past they mostly tended to emphasise things like human rights, power-sharing and democratic reforms, says Allard Duursma, a researcher at ETH Zurich. The autocracies have replaced that liberal template with a focus on stability, business opportunities and trade.
One of the most visible signs—and perhaps accelerants—of this transformation is the UN ‘s withering influence. The share of conflicts in which the UN has been involved as a mediator has held steady over the past decade. But its clout, defined by the number of instances where it has taken the lead in mediation, is rapidly diminishing. The last time the UN played a notable role was in 2022, when it co-produced a deal to allow Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea.
It has long been the case that some countries—notably America, Russia and Israel—bypass the UN and pursue separate mediation tracks when their interests are at stake (as now in the wars in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Ukraine). But the UN has also got into the habit of sidelining itself. Its secretary-general, António Guterres, did not appoint a special envoy for Iran until March 25th, after the war had been raging, and regional diplomats had been working the phones, for nearly a month.
Because the leadership of the UN fears spending its limited political capital on seemingly hopeless conflicts, it often does not even attempt to mediate, a senior UN official acknowledges. “It’s a pretty low point for us at the moment, mainly because of an excess of caution over the last decade,” he laments. “It’s OK to fail, but it’s much more important to try.”
Chart: The Economist
The UN is also less able to keep the peace. The number of UN blue helmets on the ground has plummeted, from 107,000 in 2016 to 47,000 today, while UN peacekeeping operations over the same period have also decreased, from 16 to 11 (see chart 2). Such missions are becoming a thing of the past. The last time the UN created a new one, for a civil war in the Central African Republic, was in 2014. It does not help that funding for such missions has been cut, at the behest of America.
America is the one conventional peacemaker that remains as active as before, inserting itself into conflicts from Cambodia to Syria. Donald Trump often asserts, with typical hyperbole, that in the first eight months of his second presidency he ended eight wars. But his transactional style of peacemaking is much more like the autocratic intermediaries’ than his predecessors’ was, helping to scrap the old model of mediation. He often demands commercial goodies for America, such as mining concessions, and has not shown interest in human rights, democracy or the rule of law.
The result is a different form of peacemaking. For starters, the newcomers have regularly taken charge of mediation and pushed others aside in wars in which they are participants or strong supporters of one side, Sara Hellmüller and Bilal Salaymeh observed in a paper published last year. Saudi Arabia has largely bypassed the UN in Yemen. Iran, Russia and Turkey brokered several ceasefires during Syria’s long civil war, without any outside involvement, to avoid intruding into one another’s respective areas of influence. Turkey has rejected UN mediation in its own peace talks with Kurdish insurgents. In Myanmar, China alternates between abetting rebels and coercing them into ceasefires, thereby increasing its own clout.
We have ways of making you talk
As cynical as all this might sound, coercive diplomacy is not without its benefits. (Nor is it new; in Bosnia, for example, a NATO bombing campaign paved the way for the 1995 Dayton Agreement.) Studies have found such mediation can help produce ceasefires more quickly than the more principled sort. In some cases an autocratic regime with economic or geopolitical interests at stake is the only party with much interest in bringing about peace. China, for instance, has been a vigorous mediator in the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March China’s foreign ministry urged restraint after the Pakistani bombing of a hospital in Kabul. It then dragooned both sides to attend talks in China in April. It has also tried to use economic leverage to force both sides to make concessions, albeit so far without results.
The no-nonsense, knocking-heads school of diplomacy has chalked up some notable achievements. A fear of annoying Mr Trump seems to have helped bring about ceasefires in conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand and Congo and Rwanda. Although India was aghast at Mr Trump’s intervention, he also appears to have helped quell a flare-up in hostilities last year between it and Pakistan.
The hitch is that all the hand-wringing about fairness and human rights with which the autocrats and Mr Trump have largely dispensed may actually have made ceasefires more durable. Lasting peace deals have always been rare; they are getting rarer still. Between 1989 and 2013, according to Mr Duursma, the share of negotiations which ended in conclusive agreements, as opposed to ceasefires or other stopgap measures, stood at 3.9%. Between 2014 and 2023, that has dropped to 2.1%.
Half-baked deals are replacing the longer, more tedious work of peacebuilding. “The age of these big peace agreements appears to have ended,” says Mr Duursma. In other words, Pakistan’s services may soon be required again.■
논증 분석
유형: diagnosis
핵심 주장
China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE 등 권위주의 국가들이 United Nations과 서방 민주주의를 대체하여 세계 분쟁 조정의 주도권을 장악했으며, 이들이 주도하는 협상은 인권·민주주의 대신 안정과 상업적 이익을 우선시하여 단기 휴전은 늘어나는 반면 지속 가능한 평화협정은 더욱 희귀해지고 있다.
논리구조
- 현상 진단: 2025년 기준 China·Qatar·Saudi Arabia·Turkey·UAE 중 하나 이상이 전 세계 53개 평화 프로세스 중 20개에 조정자로 참여했으며(바르셀로나자치대학 ECP 집계), Pakistan은 Iran War 종전을 사실상 주도하는 역할을 수행했다.
- 유엔의 쇠퇴: United Nations의 조정 참여 비중은 유지됐지만 주도적 역할은 급감했으며, 청색 헬멧 병력은 2016년 10만7,000명에서 현재 4만7,000명으로 반토막났고, 마지막 신규 PKO 창설은 2014년 Central African Republic이었다. António Guterres 사무총장은 Iran War 발발 한 달이 지난 3월 25일에야 특별대사를 임명했다.
- 권위주의 조정자의 동기: 이들은 ①국내 위신 및 국제적 영향력 제고(파키스탄 군부의 ‘불가결한 동맹국’ 이미지), ②국경 인접 분쟁으로 인한 직접적 안보·경제 비용 회피(Turkey의 난민·에너지 공급 불안), ③상업·지정학적 이익 수호(China의 미얀마 투자 보호, Qatar의 서방-무장단체 연결 허브 역할) 등 실용적 유인에 의해 움직인다.
- 조정 방식의 차별성: 서방 조정자들이 권력 분점·인권·민주화를 조건으로 제시한 반면, 권위주의 조정자들은 안정과 사업 기회를 전면에 내세우며 서방이 직접 접촉하기 어려운 Hamas·탈레반·이란 등과도 협상 채널을 열어 속도 면에서 강점을 갖는다.
- 트럼프 방식의 수렴: Donald Trump의 거래적 평화외교(광물 채굴권 요구, 인권·법치 무관심)는 전통적 미국 모델보다 권위주의 조정 방식에 훨씬 가까우며, 이는 기존 자유주의적 조정 규범의 해체를 가속화하고 있다.
- 강압 외교의 제한적 효과: 강압적 조정은 신속한 휴전 달성에는 유효하지만(아르메니아-아제르바이잔, 르완다-콩고 사례), 근본 원인 해결 없이 봉합된 합의는 재발 위험을 내포한다. China의 아프가니스탄-파키스탄 조정 시도는 아직 성과를 내지 못하고 있다.
- 평화의 질적 저하: ETH 취리히의 Allard Duursma 연구에 따르면 협상 중 최종 평화협정으로 귀결되는 비율이 1989
2013년 3.9%에서 20142023년 2.1%로 하락했으며, 임시 휴전이 지속 가능한 평화 구축을 대체하는 추세가 굳어지고 있다.
결론
권위주의 국가 주도의 분쟁 조정은 단기 휴전 달성 속도를 높였지만, 인권과 거버넌스 개혁이 배제된 불완전한 합의가 누적되면서 분쟁의 재발 사이클을 단축시키고 있으며, United Nations과 서방 민주주의의 공백이 메워지지 않는 한 이 구조적 전환은 지속될 것이다.