The following are statistics about the use of mediation, its impact on crisis management and long-term tension reduction, and the effectiveness of various mediation styles and organizations. This is by no means a literature review but just a few numbers I found interesting.

Please feel free to respond by sharing the statistics you’ve found in your research, of course including appropriate references so sources can be verified.

Mediation Frequency

• Mediation occurred in only 20% of crises during the bipolar era between 1945 and 1962; during the polycentric era (1963-1989), 34% of crises were mediated; in the post-cold war, unipolar era (1990-1996) 64% of international crises involved mediation efforts [1].
• Mediation is more likely to occur the more geographically proximate actors are to each other [2].
• Mediation is less likely to occur in non-violent crises [3].

Mediation Impact

• When crises are mediated, agreements occur in 62% of the cases, compared to 27% of un-mediated cases [4].
• Mediated crises are more likely to involve concessions from actors (rather than having a clear winner or loser), are more likely to end in an agreement, and show a tendency towards a positive relationship between mediation and long-term tension reduction [5].
• The likelihood of a crisis being followed by tension reduction doubles when mediation occurs (44.28%), then when mediation does not occur (22.19%) [6].
• Mediation interventions that help enable the parties themselves to secure and maintain peace are more likely to be sustainable in the long-run [7].
• Conflicts in which disputants are pressured into an agreement will be less stable after settlement than other conflicts [8].

Mediation Styles (i.e. facilitative, formulative, or manipulative)

• 90% of post-crisis mediation efforts for violent intra-state ethnic crises in post-Cold War Africa used a manipulative mediation style [9].
• The probability of reaching a formal agreement is more than 9x higher for a case where manipulation is the dominant mediation style, compared to an unmediated crisis [10].
• Civil conflicts appear to lend themselves to communication-facilitation strategies, whereas more directive modes of intervention are employed in inter-state conflicts [11].
• The style used by the mediator is mostly irrelevant for bringing about long-term peace [12].

Mediating Organization

• International and regional mediators are effective crisis managers but less successful at achieving a post-crisis reduction in tensions, regardless of what styles they use [13].
• Regional mediators have an excellent track record of agreement achievement, but success in that realm simultaneously dooms their prospects of achieving long-term peace [14].
• Domestic mediation increases the probability of tension reduction by 49 percentage points [15].
• There is emerging evidence of an important role for domestic mediation in intra-state peace processes in Africa, most notably as a contributor to long-term conflict resolution [16].

-----

SOURCES