The Conditional Effectiveness of Directive Mediation

This research re-examines the effectiveness of directive mediation in interstate rivalries. To do so, highlighting the importance of disputants’ willingness for successful directive mediation, this study identifies four conditions that affect the levels of disputants’ willingness to engage in mediation talks and proposes that the presence of such conditions improves or worsens the efficacy of directive strategies. We expect heavy-handed mediators will be less effective in a dispute involving highly interdependent or power-imbalanced rivalries while directive mediation performs poorly when it is led by unbiased mediators or when it is employed for long-running rivals. Our empirical findings, based on two existing rivalry datasets, suggest that directive mediation fares well when mediators are biased, when rivals are power-balanced, and when rivalries are protracted, and that the efficacy of directive mediation improves in disputes involving highly interdependent strategic rivals but decreases in the cases between highly interdependent general rivals.