Pakistan is generally seen more as a source of geopolitical problems rather than a solution to them. Yet in the past few months it has done more than any other country to end the war between the US and Iran. And he is not the only unlikely peacekeeper to intervene in recent conflicts. In the last five years alone, Türkiye has mediated between Russia and Ukraine, Ethiopia and Somalia, and Pakistan and Afghanistan. China is also trying to bring about reconciliation between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Qatar has acted as a mediator between Hamas and Israel and the US and the Taliban, as well as played a role in the US deal with Iran.
Around the world, peacekeeping by autocratic regimes is becoming the norm. According to the School for a Culture of Peace (ECP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, 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 the 53 peace processes recorded worldwide. At the same time, established peacekeepers of the post-war era – the United Nations and democracies far from the battlefield such as Norway, Sweden and Switzerland – are either less involved, or less prominently involved (see Chart 1). This change does not mean that more or less deals are being made than before. Like their democratic counterparts, autocratic rulers often come up empty-handed. But the compromises they manage to make vary in both style and substance.
First, consider the incentives. Autocratic rulers are attracted to mediation for at least three reasons. One is reputation and domestic prestige. Pakistan’s military leaders have discussed its role in talks between the US and Iran to project Pakistan’s image as an indispensable ally. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has used successful mediation abroad to shore up support at home and present himself as a champion of the global South.
Another reason to get involved is to put out neighborhood fires. This century, Turkey has had to grapple with refugee crises, energy supply disruptions, economic recession and incidents of terrorism as a result of several wars on its borders. “Turkey cannot have full security or prosperity until our region is settled,” says Timur Soylemez, former head of international mediation at Turkey’s Foreign Ministry. “This is a far more cost-effective strategy to manage these disputes, to prevent them from flaring up.”
I have interests in your fights
Commercial or geopolitical goals are a third factor. China has intervened in Myanmar’s civil war largely to protect its investments. Turkey has also used mediation to protect its economic interests in places like Iraq or Libya and to pursue new interests like Somalia. Pakistan’s heavy reliance on energy imports from the Gulf helps explain its prominent role in Iran, as well as its desire to curry favor with the US, whose relations with Pakistan’s foe India have warmed in recent years.
New arbitrageurs have some advantages over older arbitrageurs. Pinar Tank, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, says Turkey is relying on its Islamic identity to position itself as a more trustworthy intercessor for Muslim countries than Western powers. Qatar is willing to talk to Hamas, Iran and the Taliban, groups with whom many Western governments do not want to talk directly (or for whom sanctions regimes and political considerations may make direct negotiations more difficult).
The resulting deals also vary. When Western democratic powers made agreements in the past, they mostly emphasized things like human rights, power-sharing and democratic reforms, says Allard Duursma, a researcher at ETH Zurich. Autocratic rulers have replaced that liberal framework with a focus on stability, business opportunities, and trade.
One of the clearest signs – and perhaps accelerators – of this change is the waning influence of the United Nations. The share of conflicts in which the UN has been involved as a mediator has remained stable over the past decade. But its influence, defined by the number of instances where it has played a leading role in arbitration, is rapidly declining. The last time the United Nations played a notable role was in 2022, when it co-crafted an agreement to allow Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea.
It has long been the case that some countries—notably the US, Russia, and Israel—bypass the UN and pursue different mediation paths when their interests are at stake (as is now the case in the wars in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Ukraine). But the United Nations has also become accustomed to sidelining itself. Its Secretary-General Antonio Guterres did not appoint a special envoy to Iran until March 25, as the war raged and regional diplomats had been working by phone for nearly a month.
A senior UN official admits that because the UN leadership is afraid to spend its limited political capital on hopeless conflicts, it often does not even attempt to mediate. “This is a very low bar for us right now, largely because of the extreme caution we have exercised over the last decade,” he laments. “It’s OK to fail, but it’s more important to try.”
The United Nations is also less capable of maintaining peace. The number of UN blue helmets on the ground has declined from 107,000 in 2016 to 47,000 today, while UN peacekeeping operations have also declined from 16 to 11 over the same period (see Chart 2). Such missions are now becoming a thing of the past. The last time the United Nations launched a new war was in 2014 for the civil war in the Central African Republic. It doesn’t help that funding for such missions has been cut on US orders.
America, a traditional peacekeeper, is as active as ever, involving itself in conflicts from Cambodia to Syria. Donald Trump often claims with characteristic hyperbole that he ended eight wars in the first eight months of his second presidency. But his transactional style of peacekeeping is more like that of his predecessors as autocratic mediators, helping to upend the old model of mediation. He often demands commercial gifts for the US, such as mining concessions, and has shown no interest in human rights, democracy, or the rule of law.
The result is a different form of peacekeeping. For starters, newcomers have routinely taken up the task of mediating and sidelining others in wars in which they are participants or strong supporters of one side, as Sarah Helmuller and Bilal Salameh observed in a paper published last year. Saudi Arabia has largely sidelined the United Nations in Yemen. Iran, Russia and Turkey made several ceasefires during Syria’s long civil war, without any outside involvement, to avoid incursions into each other’s spheres of influence. Turkey has rejected UN mediation in its peace talks with Kurdish rebels. In Myanmar, China has alternately promoted rebels and forced them into ceasefires, thereby enhancing its own influence.
we have ways to talk to you
While all this may seem reprehensible, coercive diplomacy is not without its benefits. (Nor is it new; for example, in Bosnia, the NATO bombing campaign paved the way for the 1995 Dayton Agreement.) Studies have shown that this kind of mediation can help create ceasefires more quickly than more theoretical types. In some cases an autocratic regime with economic or geopolitical interests at stake is the only party that has much interest in bringing peace. For example, China has been a powerful 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 pressed both sides to attend talks in China in April. It has also tried to use economic leverage to force both sides to make concessions, although with no results so far.
The no-nonsense, head-shaking school of diplomacy has made some remarkable achievements. Fear of angering Mr Trump appears to have helped bring ceasefires to conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand and Congo and Rwanda. Although India was stunned by Mr Trump’s interventions, they appear to have helped stoke hostilities between it and Pakistan last year.
The hitch is that the tactics adopted by autocratic regimes and Mr. Trump, largely out of respect for fairness and human rights, have actually made the ceasefire more durable. Permanent peace agreements have always been rare; They are becoming rarer still. According to Mr. Duursma, between 1989 and 2013, the share of negotiations ending in conclusive agreements, as opposed to ceasefires or other stopgap measures, was 3.9%. This is expected to fall to 2.1% between 2014 and 2023.
Half-hearted deals are giving way to the longer, more difficult work of peacebuilding. “It looks like the era of these big peace agreements is over,” Mr. Duursma says. In other words, Pakistan’s services may be needed again soon.
