Negotiating with the Devil: Inside the World of Armed Conflict Mediation
Pierre Hazan
Hurst, £18.99

IN 1929 from his fascist cell, Antonio Gramsci described epochal changes as Europe tore itself apart — an old world was dying and a new one was struggling to be born. 

It was “a time of monsters,” the Italian Marxist warned, with chilling prescience.

Pierre Hazan uses this metaphor to situate the key dilemmas facing conflict mediators today in a similarly dark landscape in order to ask how they are to fulfil their role in a deeply divided multipolar world where the very idea of an “international community” is redundant.

The context he describes emerging from the decline of Western hegemony is one we all recognise, and is indeed populated by monsters contemptuous of rights, justice and a duty to protect civilians.

But Hazan’s focus in this new environment is specific to his vocation, and teeters on the delicate ethical fulcrum on which the work of those who mediate conflicts has always been balanced — a need to affect strict neutrality, no matter how morally bankrupt the belligerents. 

“What role can mediators play when even minimum standards are flouted?” he asks. “Does their symbolic power and moral authority still carry weight with the belligerents? At what point do they become complicit in policies of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘demographic engineering’?”

Surely there is no better time to ask these questions as we witness, for example, Israel’s catastrophic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and recall atrocities in other conflicts. But even though it might be considered auspicious that Hazan is inquiring right now into the role of mediation in a geopolitical context described as “minilateralism” — multilateralism on the cheap in which contracting parties seek to maximise short-term interests — his reflections are tripped up by the fast-moving pace of events.

That is because, as talks on a second ceasefire to halt Israel’s genocidal rage are mired in the issue of hostages, the timing of this book’s publication has itself become a hostage to fortune. 

Hazan’s decision as the English edition was about to go to print to add a preface about the conflict in Gaza, dated November 23 2023, was particularly unwise, by appearing to prioritise Israeli victimhood over Israeli victimisation. It would be heartening to think that the subsequent ruling of January 26 2024 by the International Court of Justice, on a petition lodged on December 29 — which found it plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide — would have given him pause for thought.

But it is too late: instead, in what is a critically important introduction to the book, he berates Qatar over its links to Hamas as an example of minilateralism that taints the former’s efforts at mediation, while ignoring the rotten offices of the US in this conflict.

One is left, at the very start of a book that is dedicated to finding the neutral sweet spot in conflict mediation, asking whether this is just another example of the default acceptance of Israeli atrocities that appears to be so wired into Western establishment perspectives. Hazan is scathing about Qatar’s double standards — for failing to condemn attacks against Israelis, yet branding their response war crimes — while letting the US and Israel completely off the hook, blind to the fact that they are joined at the hip and the former is the very opposite of a neutral arbiter. 

This is even more unfortunate given how this book argues that the moral compass in the work of mediators has historically been calibrated by the tortuous debates over neutrality in the face of genocide. Hazan discusses these, not surprisingly, in terms of the deliberations of the ICRC on the “Jewish question” during the second world war before the term “genocide” had been coined. If the entire history of mediation in the face of genocide can be grounded by reference to the Jews, it is unfortunate indeed that his book then appears by simple omission to give Israel the benefit of the doubt in visiting upon the Palestinians another genocide.

Perhaps most unfortunate of all for Hazan is that he wrote his “brief, last-minute preface” six weeks into this unfolding tragedy when 15,000 Palestinians had been reported killed by Israel’s ethnocidal slaughter — a figure that has now soared to 30,000 and counting.

While the author is at pains from the outset to delineate the tension between the search for peace and the search for justice, and thereby to map the ethical minefield that mediators must cross to reach realistic destinations, he also warns of “hyper-pragmatism” and the obligation for mediators to maintain a moral compass. Yet it was emphatically clear by November as Hazan had sat down to pen his preface that this moral compass had already tipped definitively away from Israel and its US sponsor.

Nonetheless, one feels for him: the countdown to publication must have been ticking dangerously close to midnight before the publisher could wait no longer for the author’s reflections on the unfolding conflict. And overall, Negotiating with the Devil is an impassioned, informed insight into the complexities facing mediators in an increasingly complex, fragmented world. 

The author makes a reasoned assessment of the decline of Western hegemony and a plea for reform of the international architecture to compensate. Hazan’s conclusion is equally worthy: echoing the need expressed throughout much of the non-Western world for a new international framework  — a reformed UN or something completely different — based upon a new, shared ethos. 

But unless we start by applying these to Gaza, what he recommends is pie in the sky.