The Nature of the Dispute and the Effectiveness of International Mediation

Abstract

The literature on mediation focuses largely on experimental laboratory studies or descriptions of single cases. This article goes beyond such approaches by analyzing systematically how dispute characteristics affect mediation outcomes. A theoretical framework for studying mediation behavior is developed and its central variables are evaluated against the mediation patterns of 97 international disputes in the postwar period. Using multivariate analysis and loglinear methods, the results indicate that dispute features such as fatalities, complexity, nature of the issue, and duration of dispute are most predictive of mediation outcomes. The authors use those results to specify a causal model that explains the data and to consider how best to evaluate the fit of alternative models of mediation to their data.