Peace negotiations are often driven by an urgent imperative: stop the violence. But when those accused of war crimes remain indispensable to reaching an agreement, efforts to secure peace can collide with demands for accountability.
That tension has become increasingly visible as governments, private mediators, and other diplomatic actors seek negotiated solutions to conflicts while international justice mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), pursue accountability for alleged atrocities. The result is a difficult question for mediators and courts alike: when does flexibility in the pursuit of peace complement international criminal justice, and when does it become impunity?
Professor Johannes Langer has examined this longstanding dilemma through the lens of conflict resolution and human rights. In his article “Peace vs. Justice: The Perceived and Real Contradictions of Conflict Resolution and Human Rights,” he considers the apparent choice between prosecuting perpetrators and granting varying degrees of amnesty to make peace agreements possible. His work also distinguishes between “negative peace” — the cessation of direct violence — and the more ambitious goal of “positive peace,” in which the conditions that produced the conflict are addressed.
Langer is program manager for the Programme for the Social Inclusion of People Seeking Refuge in Europe, which promotes integration through dialogue between refugees and host communities. Before joining the International Dialogue Centre (KAICIID), he worked with Initiatives of Change Switzerland and the Universidad de San Buenaventura in Bogotá, Colombia. He studied political science, history, and international peace and conflict studies at the University of Vienna, Uppsala University, and American University.
In this interview with JURIST’s Divyabharthi Baradhan, Langer discusses whether private mediation strengthens or undermines formal international criminal justice, the limits of pursuing accountability while accused perpetrators remain in power, and how mediators can preserve the possibility of transitional justice even when prosecution is not immediately achievable. Drawing on examples from Colombia, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, he argues that the central divide is not simply between peace and justice, but between pragmatic compromise that leaves a path to accountability and political accommodation that closes it off.
JURIST: In this conflict-laden global state of politics, how would you define sustainable peace, particularly in the context of negative peace and positive peace that you have expounded in your article?
Professor Johannes Langer: I’d stand by the distinction I drew ten years ago, and if anything, the current moment sharpens it. Negative peace is the absence of direct violence, e.g., a ceasefire holding on paper. Positive peace means the structural conditions that produced the violence have actually been addressed: institutions rebuilt, grievances dealt with, some form of accountability in place.
Colombia’s Paz Total is an illustration I can offer, because it shows both halves of the problem in one country. When Colombian President Gustavo Petro declared simultaneous bilateral ceasefires with the main illegally armed actors, including the National Liberation Army (ELN), the Clan del Golfo [Colombia’s largest drug-trafficking armed group], and dissident groups of the the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) at the end of 2022, that was negative peace by the book. For a period, violence decreased across several fronts. But without matching pressure on the illicit economies funding these groups (e.g., drug corridors, illegal mining, territorial control), the ceasefires became breathing room for these groups to further expand rather than an off-ramp. Analysts now count more than 27,000 combined members across these armed structures, and Colombia today has more armed actors and open conflicts than when the policy began in 2022. The state lost a lot of influence, social leaders have been killed and persecuted and extortion is highly present.
Gaza shows the same pattern internationally: a ceasefire took effect in October 2025 and was endorsed by the UN Security Council, yet attacks have continued and the humanitarian situation remains dire. Some commentators now describe the situation as “neither war nor peace,” and critics argue that Israeli government policy has prolonged the conflict. In contrast, sustainable peace needs both—negative and positive peace at once — and the latter one is always the one everyone is tempted to skip, because it is often messy and contradictory and it requires financial support in the long run without being able to necessarily show results right away.
JURIST: There is a trend of private mediation/diplomacy being increasingly used in resolving war conflicts, where legal accountability is often compromised. Does this undermine or complement the function of the ICC?
Langer: First, a quick definitional note, since “private mediation” covers real ground: I’ll take it to mean diplomatic efforts operating outside formal, treaty-based justice mechanisms, from classic NGO-run Track II work to the more personalized, deal-making diplomacy we’ve seen lately, brokered by individual envoys or state patrons rather than multilateral institutions.
Regarding your question, it does both, depending on how it’s used. At its best, private mediation creates political space that formal justice mechanisms cannot. My examples in the article (Libya, Sudan) showed how ICC warrants can close off talks with actors you still need at the table. Quiet diplomacy buys room to negotiate; formal justice can follow once there’s something to build on. Timing matters: do it too early and you foreclose the talks you need.
However, the tension today seems less “peace vs. justice” and more raw power politics. Following the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli leadership, the US imposed sanctions on ICC officials in August 2025, including judges directly involved in the case, and the Court has faced a broader backlash including Hungary’s intent to withdraw that was only reversed in May 2026; but the Sahel countries Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali are indeed exiting the Rome Statute. When the ICC itself is under this kind of pressure, private mediation stops complementing formal accountability and starts substituting for it. Not because parties chose peace over justice, but because justice was pushed off the field entirely. Private mediation genuinely complements justice when it’s a bridge to it; it undermines justice when it becomes a permanent substitute enabled by the weakening of the courts themselves.
JURIST: When you mentioned that “Quiet diplomacy buys room to negotiate; formal justice can follow once there’s something to build on,” does this apply to the context of Israel? This is particularly because, as you cited, the situation in Gaza is at “neither war nor peace.” I believe the situation is similar in Sudan. What it appears to me is that, in both these situations, either NGO-led mediators or state-led mediators have been negotiating with alleged war criminals. Would there be any transitional justice in Gaza that would follow if those accused of war crimes remain in power? I am curious to hear your thoughts on how long-term peace could play out in these types of situations.
Langer: My phrase “justice can follow” is tidier than the reality warrants, and your follow-up is right to press on it.
Historically, formal transitional justice has almost always required a prior political transition. Slobodan Milošević [former Serbian and Yugoslav president tried at the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia], Radovan Karadžić [wartime Bosnian Serb political leader convicted of genocide in 2016], Ratko Mladić [Bosnian Serb army commander convicted of genocide in 2017], and Charles Taylor [former Liberian president convicted in 2012 by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a UN-backed hybrid tribunal] were tried after they had lost power. Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) works because the FARC gave up armed capacity as part of the deal. Where accused leaders remain in control of the state and the security apparatus, cases stall or are never brought. [An ICC arrest warrant was issued for then president of Sudan] Omar al-Bashir in 2009, but he was only removed from power in 2019, and even now is not in custody.
Applied to your question: if formal accountability tends to follow, not precede, changes in who holds power, then in situations like Gaza or Sudan quiet diplomacy is not really a bridge to formal justice in the short term. It can end or reduce killing, protect civilians, and keep future options open. That is a more modest claim than my earlier phrasing implied, and I think a more honest one.
Practically, the most useful contribution mediators can make to eventual accountability is to avoid closing it off: no blanket amnesty commitments written into agreements, no dismantling of documentation, active protection of civil society and UN actors doing the evidentiary work. Transitional justice in the fuller sense—truth, reparations, institutional reform, memorialization, and guarantees of non-recurrence—will realistically only follow a political shift, which can take a long time. The documentation gathered during the intervening years is what transitional justice eventually works with. Where perpetrators remain entrenched and unchallenged, the honest answer is that accountability is deferred rather than delivered.
JURIST: When we talk about mediation, we often focus on the future generations and transitional justice, but where do we draw the line between giving implicit amnesty to war crime perpetrators and ensuring that justice is done for victims of war crimes?
Langer: The line is not between prison and no prison. The line is between accountable leniency and disguised impunity. Under the Rome Statute, blanket amnesties for those most responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are very difficult to defend. But States retain room to design sanctions, including restorative or alternative sanctions, if they are tied to truth, victim participation, loss of political or military power, and credible judicial oversight. That is exactly why then-ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda [welcomed] the FARC deal’s text in 2016, while flagging that implementation, not the text, would be what actually mattered. The complementarity principle gives the real test: the ICC only steps in if a state declines to prosecute or runs a sham process. So the line isn’t “amnesty or prison;” it’s whether truth is established, victims have a genuine role, and perpetrators lose power even without a cell.
What makes this concrete rather than academic is a contrast sitting right next to it in Colombian politics now. Under the policy of total peace (Paz Total), the Colombian government suspended arrest warrants for more than 200 individuals as a confidence-building gesture to keep armed groups at various negotiating tables. However, it didn’t come along with the JEP’s obligations: no truth obligation, no victim process, no judicial oversight of the relief granted. Many went back to criminal activity, and the state has since lost track of them. That’s the difference in one comparison: relief from prosecution embedded in a genuine judicial framework with truth and victims attached, versus relief handed out as an unaccountable political favor to keep someone talking. The first can pass the ICC’s test. The second is exactly the “implicit amnesty” your question is pointing at.
JURIST: In your opinion, what is the best way to mediate a peace deal, particularly whether it should be inclusive of the people who are directly affected by the deal, and whether it could potentially steer the progress of the peace deal and justice?
Langer: I lean toward inclusion, but I have also become cautious over time as the design matters enormously. Broadly including victims and civil society tends to produce more durable, legitimate outcomes than elite pacts imposed from above. Yet it also slows things down and can hand informal veto power to spoilers at exactly the moment a deal is “ripe,” to use the term coined by conflict-resolution scholar I. William Zartman. My practical answer: layer it. Keep the core bargaining table limited to those who can actually make or break a ceasefire, but build parallel, structured consultation tracks for victims and civil society feeding directly into transitional justice and reconstruction design. But don’t limit yourself to those with the guns, it is surely the wrong incentive, if that decides if you will be heard at the table or not.
Colombia again complicates this usefully. Paz Total wasn’t short on participatory elements—rural communities were folded into coca-substitution programs, multiple tables ran in parallel. What it lacked was leverage: no credible verification mechanism, no enforcement behind the ceasefires, so several groups used the space to rearm and expand rather than disarm. The lesson isn’t that inclusion backfires, rather it’s that inclusion and pressure are two separate levers, and a peace process needs both. The most participatory table in the world is decorative if walking away from it costs the armed side nothing.
