Description
The 2025 Global Peace Index depicts an era of “Great Fragmentation,” marked by record levels of conflict and a diversification of mediators. Existing scholarship interprets this fragmentation through three main lenses—overlapping, confrontation, and disaggregation—each portraying it as a threat to effective peacemaking. This paper challenges such decline narratives and introduces Modular Mediation as a generative framework for understanding the evolution of mediation in a fragmented order. Drawing from complexity theory and international relations, the paper conceptualizes mediation as a self-organizing modular system composed of distinct actors—great powers, international organizations, and middle or niche powers—each leveraging different sources of influence: power, legitimacy, or expertise. These “mediation modules” interact through dynamics of alternation, complementarity, and sequentiality, forming context-specific modular equilibria that enable adaptive coordination without central control. Empirical illustrations from the Ukraine Grain Deal, the Gaza negotiations, and the DRC show how modular configurations emerge through the combination of muscular, normative, and niche mediation styles. Rather than producing duplication or disorder, such modularity fosters flexibility, specialization, and innovation, allowing diverse actors to contribute according to their strengths. By viewing mediation as a modular and heterarchical system, the study offers both a descriptive and prescriptive contribution: it captures how peacemaking adapts amid fragmentation and outlines a model for designing more resilient, scalable, and effective peace architectures. Ultimately, the paper reframes fragmentation not as a symptom of decline but as a catalyst for systemic adaptation and creative reconfiguration in global peacemaking.
