This report examines how artificial intelligence could reshape conflict mediation at a time when wars are becoming more frequent, longer lasting, and harder to resolve. Mediation teams face rising demands while often remaining small, time constrained, and short on secure analytical support. Their core tasks, however, remain unchanged. Mediators must manage fragmented information, build trust among conflict parties, track shifting negotiation space, design confidence-building measures, anticipate spoilers, and create verification mechanisms that make agreements more durable. These pressures have intensified as conflicts move further into the digital realm, where disinformation, compressed decision timelines, and amplified audience costs can destabilize shared understandings and complicate negotiations. AI tools could help by supporting information synthesis, translation, scenario exploration, and post-agreement monitoring, but they could also create new risks if they undermine neutrality, confidentiality, or mediator control.
Drawing on a CSIS Futures Lab and Doha Forum workshop with more than 45 mediators and technology experts, this report identifies where AI can realistically support mediation and where safeguards are required. The workshop found that mediators face the greatest pressure from complex actor environments and fragmented information, while concerns about trust, confidentiality, and misrepresentation remain central to AI adoption. The report argues that AI’s most credible role is not to replace mediator judgment, but to augment mediator-controlled workflows. To that end, the report identifies potential AI use cases for pre-mediation, during mediation, and post-mediation phases. Furthermore, CSIS recommends building mediation-specific AI evaluations; investing in mediator training and operational rules; creating partnerships for secure adoption among NGOs, international organizations, and foreign ministries; and beginning with a narrow pilot scenario simulation tool. Taken together, these steps offer a practical path for using AI to expand mediation capacity while keeping political judgment, trust building, and process ownership firmly in human hands.
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