2025 was the year the world relearned a fundamental truth: conflicts are not confined within discrete borders. A war in one region now pushes migration across continents, disrupts food and energy markets, strains humanitarian systems, and reshapes global alliances. If the battlefield is local, the shockwaves are global.

Two small states, Norway and Qatar, have in this environment made mediation not an instrument of goodwill, but a core instrument of security policy. Diplomacy is, for both of us, not a matter of public ritual or symbolic gesture: it is a strategic responsibility in a world where unresolved conflicts return inevitably through different channels. Stability is achieved by means of access, credibility, and the capacity to keep adversaries engaged in political dialogue even when trust has collapsed.

“Time has its revolutions”, as an old phrase goes, and as the world turns toward 2026 a different mindset of truly transformative scale is urgently needed. The international system has for too long normalized disruption. 2026 must normalize peace. Mediation is no longer merely the moral option: it is the strategic one. It is the only means of dispute settlement capable of truly disrupting escalation before escalation truly disrupts the world.

For Norway and Qatar, 2025 has delivered harsh but invaluable lessons in what effective mediation actually requires — not sweeping diplomatic triumphs, but the disciplined, often unseen work of keeping crises from consuming entire regions.

Four examples of effective mediation

Few conflicts have shocked the world’s conscience more than the war in Gaza.........

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