It move them beyond entrapment
All parties expect favorable outcome
It reduce risk of unfavorable outcomes since third party is involved
Move beyond own capabilities and do what negotiations are not able to do
It promotes cooperation and increase own image and reputation
Mediators provide guarantees for carrying out agreements
Everything is better than conflict, but they need to suffer conflict to understand that!

3. Institutions and Organizations. The complexity of intractable conflicts is such that states can no longer meet all the mediation requirements, nor facilitate a settlement when conflicts are long, drawn out, and intense. Other bodies and organizations are coming in to offer and deliver different mediation services. We have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of international, transnational and other non-state actors as mediators in the last decade or so. These functional actors, many of them falling under the multi-track umbrella, or track II diplomacy, have become an indispensable adjunct to traditional mediation by individuals and states.
   
   

Two kinds of actors are important here. They are: (a) specialized non-governmental actors committed to conflict resolution, and (b) a wide variety of religious and civic and humanitarian organizations whose main concern is to heal, to deal with some of the basic issues in conflict, and achieve reconciliation, and changed attitudes, not just settlement of a conflict.

All these actors have some decided advantages in intractable conflicts; they operate informally and secretly, thus the parties need fear no loss of face. They offer services that other mediators cannot offer, and they may find it easier to gain access to the parties where formal diplomatsmay be viewed with suspicion if not downright hostility. Such actors can be less inhibited in their approach to a conflict, and can afford the luxury of appealing to the parties by promising them to work on all levels of their conflict and to achieve a long lasting solution to their problems.

They have different tools in their disposal which can be sumirized as following:

Persuasion – alternative future
Extraction - attractiveness of conciliation
Termination – leave negotiation and parties
Deprivation - pressure
Gratification - rewards

As the countries of the world become more closely integrated, they become more interdependent. Greater interdependence gives rise to a greater need for collective action to solve common problems (280).

We may increasingly be part of a global economy, but almost all of us live in local communities, and continue to think locally. It is natural for us to value a job lost at home far more than two jobs gained abroad. Part of the mindset of thinking locally is that we dont often think of how policies that we advocate affect others and the global economy. We focus our attention on the direct effect on our own well-being. To make globalization work there will have to be a change of mindset: we will have to think and act more globally (Stiglitz 278) (as opposed to locally)

At the international level, we failed to develop the democratic political institutions that are required if we are to make globalization work - to ensure that the power of the global market economy leads to the improvement of the lives of most of the people of the world, not just the riches in the richest countries (Stiglitz 276).

Globalization was supposed to bring unprecedented benefits to all. yet it has come to be vilified both in the developed and developing world. America and Europe see the threat of outsourcing; the developing countries see the advanced industrial countries tilting the global economic regime against them. Those in both see corporate interests being advanced at the expense of other values (Stiglitz 269)

INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS ARE FREquently the subject of third-party mediation (Zartman and Touval 437)

It differs from other forms of third-party intervention in conflicts in that it is not based on the direct use of force and it is not aimed at helping one of the participants to win. Its purpose is to bring the conflict to a settlement that is acceptable to both sides and consistent with the third party's interests. (437)

On the other hand, the mediator's (and negotiator's) challenge is to turn nonnegotiable positions into something negotiable, and many demands that start as absolutes turn out to be flexible under negotiation (and mediation). (438)

Mediators are players in the plot of relations surrounding a conflict, and so they have an interest in its outcome; otherwise, they would not mediate

Mediation is a low-risk form of intervention in such situations, helping to protect a government from domestic critics, while also serving its foreign policy goals. (Zartman and Touval 439)

Mediation by International Organizations and NGOs The motives of international organizations are somewhat more complex than those of states. Peacemaking is the raison d'etre of several international organizations and is thus enshrined in their charters. Yet intergovernmental organizations are also subject to the particular policies and interests of their member states. (441)

In this example, most likely done by international organization whos member states are those of nonwestern countries. IMF and WTO would inherently promote western interests, which would be counterintuitive due to the natural balance of power. Agencies such as ASEAN, African Union (AU), Economic Community ofWest African States (ECOWAS), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would better represent underdeveloped less powerful nations and would balance the power dynamic (442)

Globalization means that events in one part of the world have ripple effects elsewhere, as ideas and knowledge, goods and services, and capital and people move more easily across borders (Stiglitz 280)

Mediation is a process in which a third-party neutral assists in resolving a dispute between two or more other parties. It is a non-adversarial approach to conflict resolution. The role of the mediator is to facilitate communication between the parties, assist them in focusing on the real issues of the dispute, and generate options that meet the interests or needs of all relevant parties in an effort to resolve the conflict.

Changes in voting structure at the IMF and World Bank giving more weight to the developing countries (Stiglitz 281)

enhance the ability of developing countries to participate meaningully in decision making by providing them with assistance in assessing the impact on them of proposed changes (Stiglitz 283)

There are two responses to the problem of the democratic deficit in the internation institutions. The first is to reform the institutional arrangements. The second is to think more carefully about what decisions are made at the internationl level (Stiglitz 280)