PAKISTAN IS TYPICALLY viewed more as a source of geopolitical problems than as a salve to them. Yet over the past few months it has done more than just about any other country to bring about an end to the war between America and Iran. And it is not the only unlikely peacebroker to have interceded in recent conflicts. In just the past five years Turkey has mediated between Russia and Ukraine, Ethiopia and Somalia, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. China is also trying to reconcile Afghanistan and Pakistan. Qatar has served as a go-between for Hamas and Israel and America and the Taliban, as well as playing a role in America’s deal with Iran.
Across the world, peacemaking by autocratic regimes is becoming the norm. In 2025 one or more of China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates were involved as mediators in at least 20 of 53 peace processes recorded worldwide, according to the School for a Culture of Peace (ECP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. At the same time, the established peacemakers of the post-war era—the United Nations and democracies far removed from the field of battle such as Norway, Sweden and Switzerland—are either involved less, or less prominently (see chart 1). This shift does not mean that more or fewer deals are being struck than before. Much like their democratic counterparts, autocrats come up empty-handed more often than not. But the accords they do manage to bring about are different in both style and substance.
First, consider the incentives. The autocrats are drawn to mediation for at least three reasons. One is prestige and domestic standing. Pakistan’s military leaders have parlayed their role in the talks between America and Iran to project an image of Pakistan as an indispensable ally. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has used successful mediation abroad to shore up support at home, and to pose as a champion of the global south.
Another reason to get involved is to put out fires next door. In this century Turkey has had to contend with refugee crises, disruptions to energy supply, economic downturns and incidents of terrorism as a consequence of multiple wars on its borders. “Turkey cannot have complete security or prosperity unless our region is settled,” says Timur Soylemez, a former head of international mediation in Turkey’s foreign ministry. “It’s a much more cost-effective strategy to manage these disputes, to stop them from flaring up.”
Your conflicts have my interests
Commercial or geopolitical goals are a third factor. China has mediated in Myanmar’s civil war largely to safeguard its investments. Turkey too has used mediation to protect its economic interests in places like Iraq or Libya, and to pursue new ones, as in Somalia. Pakistan’s overwhelming dependence on energy imports from the Gulf helps explain its prominent role in Iran, as does its desire to curry favour with America, whose ties with Pakistan’s nemesis, India, have been warmer in recent years.
The new mediators have some advantages over the old guard. Turkey leans on its Islamic identity to position itself as a more trustworthy intermediary for Muslim countries than Western powers, says Pinar Tank, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Qatar is willing to talk to Hamas, Iran and the Taliban, groups many Western governments do not want to speak to directly (or for which sanctions regimes and political considerations can make direct negotiations more tricky).
The resulting deals are different, too. When Western democratic powers brokered pacts in the past they mostly tended to emphasise things like human rights, power-sharing and democratic reforms, says Allard Duursma, a researcher at ETH Zurich. The autocracies have replaced that liberal template with a focus on stability, business opportunities and trade.
One of the most visible signs—and perhaps accelerants—of this transformation is the UN’s withering influence. The share of conflicts in which the UN has been involved as a mediator has held steady over the past decade. But its clout, defined by the number of instances where it has taken the lead in mediation, is rapidly diminishing. The last time the UN played a notable role was in 2022, when it co-produced a deal to allow Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea.
It has long been the case that some countries—notably America, Russia and Israel—bypass the UN and pursue separate mediation tracks when their interests are at stake (as now in the wars in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Ukraine). But the UN has also got into the habit of sidelining itself. Its secretary-general, António Guterres, did not appoint a special envoy for Iran until March 25th, after the war had been raging, and regional diplomats had been working the phones, for nearly a month.
Because the leadership of the UN fears spending its limited political capital on seemingly hopeless conflicts, it often does not even attempt to mediate, a senior UN official acknowledges. “It’s a pretty low point for us at the moment, mainly because of an excess of caution over the last decade,” he laments. “It’s OK to fail, but it’s much more important to try.”
The UN is also less able to keep the peace. The number of UN blue helmets on the ground has plummeted, from 107,000 in 2016 to 47,000 today, while UN peacekeeping operations over the same period have also decreased, from 16 to 11 (see chart 2). Such missions are becoming a thing of the past. The last time the UN created a new one, for a civil war in the Central African Republic, was in 2014. It does not help that funding for such missions has been cut, at the behest of America.
America is the one conventional peacemaker that remains as active as before, inserting itself into conflicts from Cambodia to Syria. Donald Trump often asserts, with typical hyperbole, that in the first eight months of his second presidency he ended eight wars. But his transactional style of peacemaking is much more like the autocratic intermediaries’ than his predecessors’ was, helping to scrap the old model of mediation. He often demands commercial goodies for America, such as mining concessions, and has not shown interest in human rights, democracy or the rule of law.
The result is a different form of peacemaking. For starters, the newcomers have regularly taken charge of mediation and pushed others aside in wars in which they are participants or strong supporters of one side, Sara Hellmüller and Bilal Salaymeh observed in a paper published last year. Saudi Arabia has largely bypassed the UN in Yemen. Iran, Russia and Turkey brokered several ceasefires during Syria’s long civil war, without any outside involvement, to avoid intruding into one another’s respective areas of influence. Turkey has rejected UN mediation in its own peace talks with Kurdish insurgents. In Myanmar, China alternates between abetting rebels and coercing them into ceasefires, thereby increasing its own clout.
We have ways of making you talk
As cynical as all this might sound, coercive diplomacy is not without its benefits. (Nor is it new; in Bosnia, for example, a NATO bombing campaign paved the way for the 1995 Dayton Agreement.) Studies have found such mediation can help produce ceasefires more quickly than the more principled sort. In some cases an autocratic regime with economic or geopolitical interests at stake is the only party with much interest in bringing about peace. China, for instance, has been a vigorous mediator in the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March China’s foreign ministry urged restraint after the Pakistani bombing of a hospital in Kabul. It then dragooned both sides to attend talks in China in April. It has also tried to use economic leverage to force both sides to make concessions, albeit so far without results.
The no-nonsense, knocking-heads school of diplomacy has chalked up some notable achievements. A fear of annoying Mr Trump seems to have helped bring about ceasefires in conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand and Congo and Rwanda. Although India was aghast at Mr Trump’s intervention, he also appears to have helped quell a flare-up in hostilities last year between it and Pakistan.
The hitch is that all the hand-wringing about fairness and human rights with which the autocrats and Mr Trump have largely dispensed may actually have made ceasefires more durable. Lasting peace deals have always been rare; they are getting rarer still. Between 1989 and 2013, according to Mr Duursma, the share of negotiations which ended in conclusive agreements, as opposed to ceasefires or other stopgap measures, stood at 3.9%. Between 2014 and 2023, that has dropped to 2.1%.
Half-baked deals are replacing the longer, more tedious work of peacebuilding. “The age of these big peace agreements appears to have ended,” says Mr Duursma. In other words, Pakistan’s services may soon be required again.
