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Much of the literature on international mediation draws on a materialist perspective in which the material manipulation of the bargaining environment is understood to be the ticket to mediation success.1 This capacity-based mediation perspective has guided most explanations for the effectiveness of different types of third parties, including African third parties’ effectiveness. African third parties have consistently been considered ineffective because third parties from outside Africa usually command far greater economic and military resources in comparison. For instance, Smock and Gregorian assert that the US and the former colonial powers seem to have a better record of successful mediation than either African organizations or African leaders, and further claim that the “very significant role of the United States and the European states seems related to the assets, resources, and leverage available to these powers.”2 Similarly, Khadiagala claims that “by intervening with only limited tangible and material resources, African interveners have contributed to the widespread perception of being meddlers rather than mediators.”3
While African third parties are relatively weak in terms of the material resources they command, a crucial source of mediation success is usually overlooked when discussing their effectiveness: third-party legitimacy. In this article I show that African third parties are effective in mediating civil wars in Africa because of a high degree of legitimacy flowing from the African solutions norm. This norm prescribes that mediation by African third parties in conflicts in Africa is preferable to mediation by non-African third parties.4
In line with the African solutions norm, I demonstrate, based on unique data on international mediation in civil wars in Africa between 1960 and 2017, that African third parties are indeed more effective than non-African third parties in finding a negotiated solution to the conflict. Moreover, this negotiated solution is generally more likely to terminate the conflict. These findings contrast current materialist explanations on mediation success, since African third parties generally have less economic and military capabilities. If a mediator has legitimacy, it can continue to look for a mutually satisfactory outcome and try to pull the conflict parties toward compliance. But if a mediator loses legitimacy, the mediation effort is likely to fail even if a third party has a high degree of material resources.
I systematically compare...