Introduction

The conflict environment in which peace mediators operate has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War. The discrete Cold War conflicts between a state and a major ethno-nationalist rebel group, each backed by a Cold War power, have fragmented into complex multilayered and intersecting local communal and national civil struggles. Modern conflict is also characterized by a proliferation of different types of armed groups, including organized crime, rebel groups, gangs and global Islamist groups. The complexity of contemporary intra-state conflicts poses fundamental questions regarding the relevance of the dominant liberal inclusion strategies for peace mediation. ‘Inclusion’ is a major pillar of peace process design. It encompasses the selection of actors to be included at the negotiating table. The term inclusion also refers to issues and themes that should be included in the negotiating agenda to ensure that the grievances that caused the conflict are addressed (Paffenholz, 2015). The traditional inclusion/exclusion framework views violent non-state actor inclusion strategy as a trade-off between liberal norms and pragmatic considerations of power. Norm-driven peace process design aims to include as many state-level representatives in dialogue in accordance with the norm of political participation and excludes criminal actors from political dialogue on the basis of their illegality. Pragmatic peace process design permits the inclusion of criminal actors necessary for efficient conflict resolution and promotes the pragmatic exclusion of extraneous political actors who may prevent a speedy settlement (Lanz, 2011: 275). Both liberal and pragmatic inclusion strategies are based on the liberal normative binary between legitimate political actors and illegitimate criminal actors.

This chapter argues that the traditional inclusion/exclusion framework, derived from the norm of political participation in state institutions and the norm of legality, and based on an analytical distinction between the ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ methods or motives of armed groups, is inadequate to manage the complex array of actors and national and local grievances that inform modern conflicts. To overcome the limitations of normdriven inclusion strategies in addressing micro local governance drivers of conflict, this chapter sets out a sociology of inclusion strategies – liberal, pragmatic and social – deployed by different mediators to manage the conflict.