Importance of Peace Diplomacy |
We live in a time when we want to measure and weigh everything. But peace diplomacy cannot be evaluated that way, especially not if it is about helping to prevent conflicts and wars from beginning, reduce escalation when they go on, and help end them and rebuild afterwards.
Professor Johan Galtung (1930-2024), considered the founder of peace research as an academic discipline, said in his many books that both sides must be open-minded and listen to the other side in talks and negotiations, and he underlined that it is necessary to ask if perhaps both parties in conflicts have some good points. We should realise that unless there is communication and a will to listen to each other, the terrible conflicts we witness will go on, as they currently do between Russia and Ukraine, the USA and Iran, Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and Palestine. Wars hardly ever end on the battlefield.
It becomes important that talks take place, often with peace diplomats and brokers, such as what Pakistan is now doing regarding the USA-Iran war, with quite some earlier success. It should be underlined that brokers cannot solve conflicts, but they can play essential roles along the way.
In an essay on 23 July 2026 in ‘Agenda’, a Norwegian online publication on development aid and international affairs, senior social scientist at the CMI research institute in Bergen, Dr Arne Strand, tried to evaluate the importance of peace diplomacy and brokerage – at a time when donors, including Norway and other major actors, are concerned about the high cost of development aid and other international activities, often unable to show good results.
Strand says that it is difficult to measure the results of peace diplomacy. At the same time, when critical voices want to know what it all costs, he argues that peace diplomacy is not at all expensive. What is really expensive is to let conflicts and wars go on, even........