New order, new norms, new peace?

The last decade has seen a noticeable shift in the prominence of peacemaking actors, with Qatar and Türkiye playing the most prominent roles and China having created a mediation institute to boost its peacemaking profile. Norms also emerged as to how peace should be made, and what peace should look like. With this shift, the question arises whether the newly prominent actors feel bound by those post-Cold War norms. Is there still a norm according to which disputes are ideally settled through peace negotiations? Do the norms that were propagated by, among others, the UN and the EU, merely amount to norms in the international-relations sense of ‘collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors with a given identity’ or have they also solidified as international law?

This research explores how the shift in peacemaking actors relates to peacemaking norms, and it is led by the following three research questions:

1. Which norms guide the peacemaking efforts of the newly prominent actors?
2. Have (some of) the peacemaking norms promoted by the traditionally prominent peacemaking actors in the 2000s and 2010s solidified into international law?
3. How do the norms that guide the efforts of the newly prominent peacemaking actors relate to international law?

This research innovates in at least three ways:

• It connects old and new, thereby making it possible to identify rupture, continuity, adaptation and change. 
• It studies peacemaking processes by finding out from mediators what norms guide them and uses political-science methods to identify political norms and legal, doctrinal, methods to assess whether these norms are also legal norms. It builds an interdisciplinary framework that enables differentiation between legal and political norms, differentiating between disagreement on political norms and disagreement on legal norms and thus, potentially, to identify common ground in an increasingly fractured world. 
• It considers practitioners as both knowledge resources and repositories, and co-creators of knowledge and disseminators of findings. The connection with peacemakers is facilitated by the PI’s active collaborations with three peace mediation organizations: the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue; the Institute for Integrated Transitions and Fundacion Acordemos.