The nature of war and warfare has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War. The battles and proxy battles—fought between armed troops—that characterized the Cold War have given way to intercommunal conflicts in diverse places all over the globe and to the accentuation of national and religious identities. Since the end of the Cold War, the types of actors involved in the major hot-spots of violent conflict in the world have changed; the issues in dispute have shifted; the methods and technologies of warfare have evolved. Clearly the above has important implications for the ways actors in the international system behave in conducting, and no less importantly, in resolving their disputes. One dominant feature has been the increase in the frequency in the use of mediation as a conflict resolution method in global politics.
Due to these dramatic changes, we argue that many of the questions that have traditionally stood at the core of studies on conflict resolution processes warrant reformulation and reexamination, with a focus on the unique attributes of civil conflict. In this paper we focus on mediation in intrastate violent conflicts, specifically on the impact of the goals of rebel groups and of internal processes within rebel groups on the prospects for mediation in civil wars. We ask whether the goals that rebel groups fight for (such as, independence, autonomy, greater political rights, control over resources, secessionism) have any impact on the propensity of these groups to accept/request mediation efforts by third parties? Furthermore, do these probabilities change when there is a leadership change in the rebel group? To test these questions empirically we use a new data set of all leadership changes in all rebel groups during the period of 1946-2010
