Browsing by Author "Mahne, Matilda Rosalyn"

Peacemakers operate in an increasingly complex global environment. Approaches to peace, including peace mediation, also reflect these changes happening in the surrounding world. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a new Centre for Peace Mediation within the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland (MFA) was established. This thesis conducts a critical inspection of a policy’s seemingly sudden emergence by taking the Centre as its case study. With scarce policy documents, this study collected its data through conducting 10 semi-structured interviews with state and nonstate actors in the Finnish peace mediation field to analyse the way the Centre is perceived to have come about. The interviews lasted around one hour each. In this study, a novel theoretical framework is advanced through inspecting the policy’s problem representations (WPR approach), the forces which affected its establishment (policy diffusion), and the boundaries that are used to demarcate between groups (boundary work) to analyse why the Centre for Peace Mediation was established. The study finds that the Centre for Peace Mediation was not solely a result of a restructuring of MFA resources, but was affected by a multitude of forces on the national, regional, and international planes. By employing the WPR approach and the frameworks of policy diffusion mechanisms and boundary work, the study’s findings point to Finnish efforts to become a credible ‘player’ in the field of peace mediation. Studying how policies and the issues interwoven within them are framed and justified is relevant on many fronts. First, it helps understand governance processes and what groups of people are highlighted at the expense of others. The study also elucidates how civil society can partake in national policymaking. It additionally shows how intergovernmental organisations influence nations through agenda-setting.