This article first reviews briefly the contemporary world order in its historical perspective, showing that globalization and multipolar cooperation were historically contingent achievements rather than as a matter of course. It then examines the current strain on various aspects in the international arena, arguing that the urgent task is to manage differences, preserve dialogue, and avoid undesirable outcomes.
Against this background, the article considers how the newly established International Organization for Mediation (IOMed) may contribute to the sterling efforts of other existing and indispensable institutions, perhaps not to resolve every structural conflict initially, but by providing an affordable and viable institutional mechanism for mediation, enabling communication, and creating workable settlement that ultimately will lead to a broader consensus.
International Order in Historical Perspective
The nineteenth-century western international order took shape after the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna. It was organized less through universal institutions than through great-power consultation, diplomatic congresses, shifting alliances, and a shared concern with preserving the European balance of power.
Another feature that has emerged was international arbitration. The Alabama Claims arbitration, decided at Geneva in 1872, required Britain to compensate the United States for losses caused by Confederate cruisers fitted out in British ports. The Venezuela Boundary Arbitration of 1899 showed that arbitration could be used even where boundary disputes were entangled with imperial interests and great-power pressure. These cases made arbitration a viable method for converting diplomatic conflict into legal procedure. The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 then gave these accumulated practices a more visible institutional form. The 1899 Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes created the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) as a standing facility through which consenting states could conduct their arbitrations.
The post-World War I order represented a more ambitious attempt. The League of Nations sought to place diplomacy, treaty obligations, arbitration, and judicial settlement in a more public and institutionalized multilateral framework. The establishment of the Permanent Court of International Justice reinforced the idea of standing judicial settlement mechanism with judicial judgments and advisory opinions rendered contributing to the development of international law. Yet, these efforts ultimately failed to prevent the descent into another world war.
The international order after World War II rested on two connected but distinct foundations. The first was the geopolitical settlement among the victorious powers, symbolized by Yalta Conference and later institutionalized through military alliances and the division between the Western and Soviet blocs. The second was a dense layer of multilateral institutions: the United Nations for global politics and security: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alongside PCA and later the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), for adjudication; the GATT for trade; and the World Bank and IMF for finance and development. Together, these institutions created a more public, legalized, and organized framework for international cooperation.
This universal multilateral architecture was gradually supplemented by regional and treaty-based arrangements as well. In Europe, post-war integration moved from sectoral economic communities to the European Communities and, after the Treaty of Maastricht, to the European Union. In Southeast Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations began as a relatively loose framework for regional cooperation in 1967, before acquiring a more formal legal and institutional basis through its Charter and later economic-community projects. In Africa, the Organization of African Unity, created in the decolonization era, was replaced by the African Union, giving continental cooperation a more ambitious institutional form.
Alongside these regional organizations, trade and investment relations were increasingly governed through free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties, and regional economic arrangements. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) organized North American trade from the 1990s until it was replaced in 2020 by the Agreement between the United States of America, the United Mexican States, and Canada; Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation developed as a flexible forum for economic coordination across the Pacific; and the China–Association of Southeast Asian Nations Free Trade Area grew out of early twenty-first-century agreements on goods, services, and investment. These arrangements added regional and issue-specific layers to international governance, making the order more plural and densely institutionalized.
Yet, the world remained divided by ideology, military alliances, economic blocs, and competing models of development as a result of the Cold War. Bretton Woods and GATT, for instance, mainly structured the capitalist world economy. The socialist bloc, by contrast, developed its own representative institutional arrangements for economic coordination, investment finance, and dispute settlement: Comecon for economic cooperation and intra-bloc coordination, the International Investment Bank for development finance and joint investment, and the 1972 Moscow Arbitration Convention for disputes arising from economic, scientific, and technical cooperation within the socialist bloc. The Cold War order was therefore global in institutional form but divided in substantive operation.
After the Cold War, multi-polarization and economic globalization began to gain momentum. States began to be engaged in market transition, removal of trade barriers and participation in existing financial institutions. The post-Cold War moment therefore did not create international economic institutions from nothing: it transformed existing postwar institutions into the infrastructure of a high-globalization order. The WTO, established in 1995 out of GATT, brought trade, dispute settlement, and trade policy review into a single institutional framework. China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, followed by Russia’s accession in 2012, further showed that major economies, formerly outside the central structures of the multilateral trade order, join in a common legal framework for global commerce. As to international investment protection, multilateral and bilaterial investment treaties multiplied and the investor-state arbitration framework turned foreign investment protection into a more legalized and transnational field of dispute settlement.
This historical development shows that economic globalization and multi-polarization was not as a matter of course. Global institutions operated alongside deep geopolitical and economic fragmentation. Yet, it is a delicate balance struck between war and peace over centuries, and it can be fragile without concerted efforts by all nations and a more just and equitable global governance order in which all states are to participate.
From Current Challenges to Viable Conflict Management
The world has entered into a new period of turbulence and transformation. Unilateralism, protectionism, and hegemonic practices have become more visible in global affairs, weakening confidence in multilateral cooperation and structured, fair and orderly coordination.
In politics and security, the authority of the Security Council’s collective decision-making system is increasingly under strain. In the reports of the Secretary General on various subjects have highlighted the challenges. These difficulties also reflect the Council’s growing struggle to reach the consensus needed to advance common purposes.
In transnational trade and investment, the strain is equally visible. The WTO’s capacity to deliver authoritative dispute settlement measures has been weakened by the paralysis of the Appellate Body. This institutional weakness has coincided with a broader transformation of the world trading order. Tariff wars, trade-restrictive measures, export controls, and technology protectionism have increasingly moved trade policy away from liberalization and advancement for the future of humankind. Treaty-based investment protection faces a parallel challenge. Investment disputes shaped by geopolitics and sometimes guised as security concerns increased, especially in sectors such as telecommunications, semiconductors, ports and logistics, and critical infrastructure.
Further, some economies have shown a growing reluctance to preserve original form of substantive protections, and others have adopted alternatives to dispute resolution mechanisms for investment-protection in addition to arbitration. The USMCA both narrowed the investor-state arbitration model previously associated with NAFTA and, following the 2026 joint review, the U.S. declined to renew the USMCA in its current form pending further negotiations. These developments suggest that on the one hand, globalized trade liberalization and treaty-based investment protection have become increasingly conditional, fragmented, and subordinated to national industrial policies, and domestic regulatory measures, and on the other, new alternative mechanism and infrastructure to safeguard investment protection emerged.
This weakening of institutional confidence has unfolded alongside deeper changes in the international community. China’s rise has made the global order less unipolar and more competitive. The United States has increasingly turned toward unilateral and hegemonic approaches in trade, technology, finance, and security policy.
Globalization Requires True Multilateralism
The deeper cause for this fragmented international order is the transformation of globalization from a shared order into a selective entitlement. For instance, in the trade regime, some states comply with the global trading system when it serves their interests but denounce the same as unfair when competitive pressure increases. A structural imbalance between rights and obligations of states has manifested. Once double standards become embedded in the globalization system, it begins to fail as a common order.
To maintain globalization at a more fundamental level, it is necessary to reaffirm that national interests, including development and security, shape every state’s participation in international affairs. Yet these interests must be understood as the interests of all states, not only those of a few powerful actors. This requires abandoning double standards in the formulation and application of international law. On the one hand, global governance should reflect not only the preferences of a few powerful states, but also the interests and demands of the broader community of developing states. On the other hand, it requires a more serious commitment to the authority of international law in practice. Rules must not be invoked only when convenient, ignored when costly, or reinterpreted whenever they constrain powerful actors. These are essential attributes to true multilateralism and reflects international rule of law: equality of states, fair and universal application of rules, fair and orderly multi-polarization and inclusive economic globalization, all with the United Nations at its core. Global governance can only be maintained in a fair and equitable manner if true multilateralism, sovereign equality and rule of law are observed and mutual respect practiced.
Nonetheless, it seems a fundamental reconstruction of the international order is unlikely to be realized quickly under current political conditions. The more urgent task is therefore to prevent disagreements from becoming uncontrollable conflicts. Where existing rules and practice cannot immediately resolve disputes, law and institutions must at least help manage them. Where imminent full consensus is unavailable, channels for dialogue must be preserved, restraint exercised, and viable compromise explored. Without such concerted efforts, political rivalry may escalate into armed confrontation, financial coercion, technological decoupling, trade wars, and other forms of direct conflict that further weaken the foundations of international cooperation. Borrowing from the China-U.S. vocabulary of constructive strategic stability, the immediate focus is not to resolve every underlying disagreement, but to prevent direct confrontation from escalating and producing intolerable and undesirable outcomes that may have broader adverse impact. In such an environment, international order needs to be dynamic, provisional, and relational.
Recent practice also reflects this modest logic. When major interests are directly at stake, states increasingly manage disputes through viable negotiation to restore contact, preserve dialogue, manage differences, and search for workable arrangements. This logic can be seen at different levels of conflict. In non-military interstate confrontation, such as the tariff, trade, and technology disputes between China and the United States, leader-level communication and high-level economic and trade consultations have produced partial understandings, reopened channels of communication, and helped prevent further uncontrolled deterioration. In interstate relations, the Saudi-Iranian agreement reached in Beijing in 2023 showed that even long-standing regional rivals may move from confrontation to restored diplomatic relations when a credible platform for dialogue is available. The significance of these examples lies precisely in that modesty.
IOMed and the Institutionalization of Viable Dispute Settlement
This basic logic of preserving dialogue and exploring viable compromise between the parties concerned is at the heart of mediation. The Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation (IOMed Convention) provides that the purposes and objectives of the IOMed shall be to promote and facilitate peaceful settlement of international disputes and to develop friendly relations and cooperation among States through mediation. The IOMed is the first inter-governmental international organization that promotes exclusively mediation with 45 signatory states, 16 of which have ratified or acceded to the IOMed Convention at the time of writing.
The IOMed focuses on mediating disputes to resolve conflicts and serves as an important mechanism that safeguards the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. It complements and creates synergy with litigation, arbitration, and other existing mechanisms to resolve international disputes, and provides a new platform for their peaceful settlement. The establishment of the International Organization for Mediation fills an institutional gap in the international dispute resolution mechanism.
The IOMed Convention caters for mediation for a broad scope of disputes: international commercial disputes between private parties, disputes between a state and a national of another state such as international investment disputes, and disputes between states submitted by mutual consent. This design of providing services for these three types of disputes addresses the realities of a fragmented international order. The IOMed offers a procedural space in which concerned parties may restore communication, reduce confrontation, and search for workable and performable arrangements without having to wait for universal consensus. Its ambition is therefore not to replace existing settlement mechanism, but to provide a viable and equitable alternative.
The establishment of a multilateral and inclusive institutional forum for stakeholders provides a platform that offers a structured process for disputants to continue to negotiate facilitated by a Mediation Commission. Inclusivity of IOMed is achieved not just by its open membership where all states are encouraged to join, but also its administration of cases whether they are from Member or non-Member States or their nationals. As such, it serves as an international public good and practices the fundamentals of global governance: sovereign equality, genuine multilateralism, international rule of law and mutual respect.
Mediation as an Affordable and Viable Alternative
The practical value of mediation lies first in its ability to move disputes from a contest over legal entitlement to a search for workable arrangements. Judicial settlement and arbitration remain indispensable where authoritative legal determination is required. But many international disputes do not arise simply because the applicable rules are unclear. They are culminated because parties disagree over facts, distrust each other’s intentions, face domestic political constraints, or cannot publicly make concessions without strategic or reputational costs.
Mediation is useful in such circumstances because it does not force the dispute into a binary structure of winner and loser. Instead, a neutral or mutually acceptable third party, mediator, can help clarify the parties’ actual constraints, reduce informational asymmetries, identify possible trade-offs, and sequence commitments in a way that makes settlement more acceptable and executable. Mediation is therefore most valuable when parties are trapped in a mutually damaging impasse, lacking in mutual trust and in need of a credible and feasible way out. Its logic is practical and stakeholder-oriented: it asks not only who is legally right, but what arrangement can actually be accepted, implemented, and sustained.
Recent practice illustrates how mediation can perform this conflict-management function in different settings. Mediation can sequence commitments and keep dialogue alive even when final political settlement remains distant. In the confrontation between the United States and Iran, the role of regional intermediaries such as Oman and Pakistan demonstrate a different value of mediation: actors with cultural, religious, and regional familiarity may better understand the sensitivities of the parties, maintain indirect channels where direct trust is absent.
The Saudi-Iranian agreement reached in Beijing in 2023 shows another function. There, China as a neutral state with trading relations with both sides provided a credible platform for rebuilding trust and restoring diplomatic relations. These examples shows that mediation is not simply negotiation by another name, but a means of making compromise possible where direct dialogue is politically costly, diplomatically blocked, or mutually distrusted.
IOMed’s Value in This Fragmented International Order
The value of IOMed lies in giving such negotiations a more permanent and credible institutional setting. In practice, many sensitive disputes do not begin with a carefully designed legal procedure. They begin with more basic questions: where can the parties meet, who can carry messages, who can be trusted to keep discussions confidential, how can proposals be recorded without turning them into public concessions, and how can one round of talks be connected to the next. In the absence of an institution, these questions must be answered from the beginning each time. States may rely on a friendly government, a regional actor, a personal envoy, or a temporary back channel. Such arrangements can now be enhanced and drawn together to create greater synergy to bring about acceptable and executable compromise in the interim or in perpetuity.
The analogy with the PCA is useful. The PCA does not make arbitration compulsory, but it gives recurring arbitral practice a standing procedural home and helps develop good practices and hence increased use in arbitration. IOMed aims to perform a similar function for mediation. It cannot force consent or guarantee settlement, but it can provide an inclusive and credible forum, procedural rules, administrative support, professional mediators, and confidentiality arrangements. This will in turn promote the use of mediation and help develop a global mediation ecosystem.
International disputes are often complex with multiple stakeholders. The undesirability of segregation of issues being decided or dealt with in different fora is trite. A more inclusive and integrated approach that addresses legal, cultural, political, commercial, and relational dimensions should be adopted to settle the disputes. The broader spectrum of cases and issues that can mediated at IOMed reinforces its relative suitability for such conflicts.
The IOMed is not embedded in a prior adjudicatory or arbitral framework. Should parties choose to mediate outside the framework in which its dispute is subjected to the adjudicative process, mediation at IOMed is an alternative. Its value therefore lies in creating an independent procedural space in which parties can still reach a workable arrangement when the adjudicative processes are proceeding in parallel whilst ensuring that the rights and interests of the parties in the adjudicative process remain unimpaired.
In State-to-State disputes, where a settlement between two States may affect the interests of another State, the IOMed Convention expressly provides that it shall not provide mediation services unless “prior consent is given by the third State concerned.” The same protection is reinforced at the registration stage: the Secretary General shall refuse registration where the dispute involves a third State and that State has not given prior consent. This is fundamental to ensuring fair and equitable settlement whilst respecting sovereign rights of all interested parties. This also shows the sensitivity of IOMed in paying due regard to third state’s interest and practicing the fundamentals of global governance.
Being headquartered in Hong Kong further reinforces this institutional promise. Hong Kong offers more than a convenient seat for an international organization. It provides a mature common-law infrastructure with a robust rule of law, deep experience in international arbitration and dispute resolution, and close access to international commercial and institutional networks. It is also situated within a safe, secure and resilient regional and economic environment, giving IOMed a practical setting in which legal expertise, commercial reality, and stakeholder engagement can be brought together. In a fragmented international order, such embeddedness matters. Effective mediation depends not only on procedural professionalism, but also on safe and easy access, confidence, continuity, and the ability to connect legal process with the actual constellation of interests in the international community.
The IOMed stands alongside the existing international legal order. It cannot nor has it ever been intended for IOMed to replace the vital rule-making and rule-maintaining functions of the United Nations, the WTO, the ICJ, PCA, ICSID, and other international institutions. On the contrary, one of its functions is to foster cooperation and communication with other international organizations and dispute resolution agencies. While remaining aware of its own limits, its significance will be in contributing to the construction and maintenance of international order based on rule of law, the setting of international acceptable norms of peaceful dispute resolution through mediation and assisting commercial parties to amicably resolve their disputes thereby sustaining economic growth.
Availability of mediation cannot by itself fully secure consent between states or guarantee conclusion or implementation of mediated outcomes. Yet, with coordination and cooperation amongst key players in the international dispute resolution arena, channels of communication will be preserved, restraint exercised and amicable and executable compromise will be achieved and implemented. It is through concerted efforts of all states and international bodies that a fair and equitable global governance structure be maintained and sustainable peace achieved.
