Violent conflicts have been erupting at a brisk frequency, getting bloodier, and more protracted. In the past year alone, we witnessed pitiless fighting in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, the Sahel, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. India and Pakistan came to the brink of a war. Border clashes erupted between Thailand and Cambodia and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Fears of violent conflicts—continuing and erupting—across the globe haven’t ebbed as the year begins. And on Saturday, President Donald Trump resorted to military force to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power.

Consistent and energetic efforts at peacemaking and mediation are urgently required but the primary peacemakers and mediators of the post-World War II order—the United States, the United Nations, and various European states and bodies—have either lost the political will, the normative drive, or the capacity to lead and support the necessary work of ending or reducing global conflicts.

In the past two decades, the United States and Europe have stepped back from peacemaking and mediation, and the United Nations, while still irreplaceable, isn’t as effective as it used to be. The logic of power politics or great power rivalry is further diminishing the appetite of major powers for peacemaking. Geopolitics abhors vacuum and the old addresses of peacemaking and mediation are being replaced by new ones in the Global South: Doha, Ankara, Riyadh, and Muscat, to name a few.

Qatar, which won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1971, wove in mediation and peaceful resolution of international disputes into its 2004 constitution and emphasized it as a pillar of its foreign policy. Since then, Qatar has come to play the most prominent role in mediating between warring countries and factions within countries, willing itself into a mediation powerhouse spanning the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  

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Doha has mediated in the peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban to help end the war in Afghanistan; between the Colombian government and the Gaitanista Self-Defence Force, the powerful organized crime group; between Israel and........

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