Journal of Conflict Resolution
Blueprints and Blind Spots: Sixty Years of Mediation Scholarship and the Design of Peace Processes
2026-07-16
This article reviews 60 years of academic research on peace mediation. Drawing on 395 academic articles published between 1966 and 2025, we assess the field through six core mediation process design questions: why, when, who, how, what, and where . We show that scholarship has generated important insights but has often addressed design questions in isolation, with limited attention to how they interact in practice. The literature on peace mediation is therefore marked by blind spots and conceptual fragmentation, not fully capturing the integrated nature of mediation processes. Organizing existing research through a process design framework allows us to identify key gaps and connections across strands of scholarship. We argue that research should more explicitly address the interdependence of design factors. This perspective clarifies priorities for future mediation research by identifying analytically promising questions and highlighting opportunities for more systematic and comparative inquiry.