Authors: Neophytos Loizides and Michael Raff *
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Introduction
International arbitration is typically understood as a method of commercial dispute resolution, for individuals, investors, corporations and states that often serves as a desirable alternative to traditional court proceedings.
Yet, there is growing recognition of the broader role that international arbitration has historically played in respect of stabilising global geopolitical crises. As far back as the 19th century, the Alabama arbitration channelled a potentially explosive post–Civil War dispute between the United States and the United Kingdom into law rather than retaliation. A century later, the Beagle Channel arbitration between Chile and Argentina helped reduce tensions in a dispute that had brought the parties close to armed conflict, buying time for eventual diplomatic settlement.
Perhaps the clearest illustration comes from the Dayton peace negotiations ending the Bosnian War in 1995. Talks nearly collapsed over Brčko, a strategically vital and ethnically mixed corridor linking two parts of Republika Srpska and claimed by both entities. Rather than resolve the issue politically, the parties agreed to carve it out and submit it to arbitration. The tribunal ultimately created the Brčko District, a self-governing unit formally belonging to both entities, backed by compliance incentives and the threat of forfeiture for non-performance. In doing so, it removed a deadlock that might otherwise have derailed the entire settlement.
The aim of this piece is to look forward at how similar principles might assist fragile negotiations or post-conflict implementation in several contemporary contexts. The argument is not that arbitration can resolve conflicts in their entirety. Nor is it to suggest that external mechanisms can substitute for political choice, as it is ultimately for the people of the nations and entities concerned to determine their futures. Rather, the claim is that arbitration may, in certain circumstances help manage the disputes that political processes cannot easily absorb, allowing negotiations to continue where they might otherwise fail.
Key principles
Before looking forward, it is necessary to highlight extensive practitioner consideration of the principles that derive from the historic examples mentioned above, which make arbitration particularly adaptable to conflict settings. First, parties can select neutral decision-makers that they trust (or agree on an appointing authority to do so on their behalf), addressing legitimacy concerns that would otherwise block engagement.
Second, the ability to define tribunal powers. Mandates can be drawn as narrowly or as broadly as the politics require, from binary “baseball” determinations (where the tribunal must choose one side’s proposal) to flexible, equitable mandates that permit creative, non‑zero‑sum solutions, as in Brčko.
Third, the capacity to resolve disputes without admissions of liability, allowing parties to submit sensitive questions without conceding political ground.
Fourth, the accommodation of non‑state actors; arbitration can potentially include parties that lack formal statehood or international legal personality, a recurring feature of intra‑state conflicts.
Fifth, and perhaps most critically, the availability of post‑decision implementation tools: self‑executing awards, continuing jurisdiction, compliance benchmarks and forfeiture conditions can convert paper commitments into credible, enforceable obligations. It is these features (amongst a host of others) that make the mechanism worth considering in the contemporary settings discussed below.
A further point, which cuts across all these features, concerns legal form. The mechanisms discussed below sit on a spectrum. Some (such as technical boundary or resource-allocation disputes) are amenable to binding arbitration in the conventional sense. Others, particularly process backstops designed to incentivise negotiating behaviour, are better understood as sui generis mechanisms, binding on the parties by political agreement rather than through any international arbitration convention and deriving their force from the consequences built into the settlement architecture rather than from external enforcement regimes. This flexibility is, in fact, one of arbitration’s central advantages in conflict settings. It allows mechanisms to be calibrated to the political constraints of each situation without requiring parties to submit to a jurisdiction whose legitimacy they contest.
Cyprus: backstopping a frozen conflict
The “Cyprus Problem”, arising from the island’s division since 1974 between a Greek Cypriot south and Turkish Cypriot north, has resisted resolution for decades. Successive UN-led efforts have aimed at a bi-communal, bi-zonal federal settlement, but negotiations have repeatedly stalled, most recently at Crans-Montana in 2017.
A central difficulty lies in the structure of the process itself. Talks have long been conducted on the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, creating a high-risk environment in which a single unresolved issue can derail the entire settlement. It means that interim progress is difficult to bank; gains made in one area remain vulnerable to collapse elsewhere.
Recent proposals (that remain hypothetical, but which have attracted interest) seek to address this by introducing arbitral backstops into both negotiation and implementation. The aim is not to impose outcomes, but to reshape incentives. One model is a process backstop, under which a neutral tribunal determines responsibility for breakdown in talks, triggering agreed consequences, for example, fallback arrangements concerning Varosha (the fenced-off former resort town of Famagusta, closed since 1974 and whose return has long been a central Greek Cypriot demand) or territorial adjustments. This reframes stalemate as a mutual risk, rather than a unilateral veto.
A second model involves “early-win” arbitration, allowing discrete issues to be resolved at an early stage, with outcomes calibrated in light of each side’s conduct. This enables negotiations to produce visible gains before a comprehensive agreement is reached, helping sustain political support.
A third proposal focuses on security and implementation, particularly disputes over troop withdrawal and guarantees. Rather than requiring these to be resolved upfront, an arbitral mechanism could determine final outcomes based on compliance with agreed commitments. This links outcomes to behaviour, creating a self-enforcing structure.
Taken together, these approaches point to a shift away from all-or-nothing negotiation towards a more modular process, in which arbitration helps manage risk and sustain momentum. As to consent and authority, the relevant parties to such mechanisms would be those already engaged in UN-facilitated negotiations: the two community leaders, together with Turkey and Greece as guarantor powers where security arrangements are concerned. These actors have previously concluded binding interim agreements under UN auspices, and the framework envisaged here would build on that established capacity. Enforcement, meanwhile, would not depend on an international administrator of the kind that supported the Brčko award (where the Office of the High Representative, backed by NATO peacekeepers, had continuing authority to compel compliance and make the threat of forfeiture credible). Rather, it would be embedded in the broader incentive structure, being conditionality, guarantor-power commitments, and the economic costs of continued division, all of which give non-compliance concrete and measurable consequences.
Syria: inclusive governance with an arbitral safety valve
Syria presents a different but equally acute challenge. Following the collapse of the Assad regime, the central question is how to construct a political order capable of holding together a deeply fragmented society while avoiding renewed violence or de facto partition.
Recent work emphasises inclusive democratic governance, often drawing on proportional power-sharing models which can ensure broad participation and reduce fears of exclusion. But they also risk producing decision-making deadlock, particularly in a context of weak institutions, armed legacies, regional autonomy claims and competing external patrons. In this setting, arbitration can function as a constitutional safety valve.
A neutral arbitral panel (triggered when defined political decision-making processes fail) could act as a last-resort tiebreaker within an inclusive governance framework. Such a body could apply both legal and equitable principles to resolve disputes that political actors cannot. Its mandate would need to be carefully limited; clearly, the goal would not be to govern Syria by tribunal, but to prevent defined constitutional or implementation disputes from escalating into institutional paralysis at best and renewed violence at worst. The authority to establish such a mechanism would rest with whatever transitional institutions emerge from the current political process, potentially backstopped by external guarantors. Given that Syria’s post-Assad institutional landscape remains unsettled, the precise form of consent will necessarily evolve with the transition itself; what matters at this stage is that the principle of an arbitral safety valve is built into the constitutional architecture from the outset, so that it is available when needed rather than improvised under pressure.
This logic is beginning to be reflected in practice. Syria has recently announced the creation of a new investment arbitration centre, intended to provide a neutral forum for resolving disputes and supporting reconstruction. While focused on commercial investment rather than governance, the initiative reflects a broader recognition that credible dispute-resolution mechanisms are central to rebuilding trust and economic stability. In a post-conflict setting, attracting reconstruction finance and rebuilding public authority both depend on some confidence that disputes will be handled through rules rather than coercion.
More ambitiously, arbitration could underpin a security backstop, linking legal entitlements to compliance with agreed commitments. In a fragmented environment where credible commitment is difficult, such mechanisms may be essential to making a settlement self-enforcing in practice. The enforcement question is perhaps more acute here than with other examples. Unlike Brčko, there is no Office of the High Representative to compel compliance. The most realistic substitute is conditionality, which would involve linking access to reconstruction finance, and international co-operation to compliance with arbitral determinations. This gives both domestic actors and external stakeholders tools to incentivise adherence, even in the absence of a formal international administrator.
Israel/Palestine: technical arbitration at the limits of politics
The Israeli Palestinian conflict remains one of the most politically entrenched disputes in international relations. The two sides are further apart than at any point in recent memory, and the core political questions (sovereignty, borders, security and statehood) are so vast and so deeply contested that immediate progress on those issues is difficult to envisage. Yet precisely because those questions are so intractable, there may be value in identifying narrower, more technical disputes that could be submitted to neutral determination. Examples could include equitable allocation of shared water resources (particularly the Mountain Aquifer and Jordan River basin) and the demarcation of specific boundary segments where competing claims have practical daily consequences for movement and access. None of these questions are simple, but each is potentially amenable to structured, evidence‑based determination by agreed experts in a way that the larger political questions are not. If even a small number of such issues could be resolved through arbitration, the resulting habits of cooperation (and the concrete benefits flowing from resolution) could begin to rebuild a measure of trust and, over time, create conditions in which broader political engagement becomes less unthinkable.
The selection of neutral arbitrators in such a setting represents just one of a host of difficult questions that would need to be answered in this context. Direct party appointment of arbitrators may be unrealistic, and the more promising model may be indirect appointment through an agreed institutional authority (such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration or the ICJ President), combined with requirements for subject-matter expertise and demonstrable neutrality.
This is not an entirely untested idea. Akin to the Syrian example above, efforts to institutionalise this approach have been attempted, but with limited success. The proposed Jerusalem Arbitration Centre (JAC) sought to provide a neutral forum for resolving disputes involving Israeli and Palestinian parties. Its failure to gain traction illustrates the limits of arbitration in this context. Legal mechanisms clearly have the potential to support cooperation at the margins but cannot substitute for political agreement where such extreme polarisation renders that agreement absent.
Conclusion
The examples above are not exhaustive; similar principles could inform bespoke arbitral agreements to address countless other situations, including technically complex Greek–Turkish maritime and airspace disputes, or the design of asset‑backed mass‑claims mechanisms for Ukrainian reparations building on the existing Register of Damage in relation to the Russia/Ukraine war. In respect of the latter example, it is notable that even active armed conflict has not prevented arbitration from functioning between the parties: in April 2026, the Permanent Court of Arbitration issued its award in Ukraine v. Russia concerning coastal state rights in the Black Sea, Sea of Azov and Kerch Strait, following full written pleadings and a merits hearing in which both states participated. This represents a remarkable demonstration that rules‑based mechanisms can operate even in the most hostile of circumstances.
Armed conflicts ultimately require political solutions. Arbitration cannot create peace, and none of the applications sketched in this piece are guaranteed to succeed. Each operates in a context of deep mistrust, fragmented authority and competing interests where even well‑designed mechanisms may falter. But the historical record shows that arbitral backstops have, at critical moments, kept settlements from unravelling and absorbed disputes that might otherwise have reignited violence.
*Neophytos Loizides: Neophytos Loizides is Professor in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Warwick. He has previously taught at Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Kent and Princeton University and held fellowships at the University of Essex, the University of Pennsylvania (Solomon Asch Centre) and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Neophytos authored several books and more than fifty academic articles and book chapters in the areas of forced displacement, nationalism, and conflict regulation in deeply divided societies. He currently leads the ERC/UKRI advanced grant PEACERETURN that focuses on the study of voluntary return across seven countries and the Inclusive Peace project on citizen preferences in power-sharing settlements funded by an Open Research Area (ORA7) in collaboration with the ESRC (UK), SSHRC (Canada), ANR (France/New Caledonia) and JSPS (Japan).
Michael Raff: Michael Raff is an associate at Travers Smith LLP, where he advises clients through complex, high value disputes and negotiations. He has acted for both defendants and claimants on a range of cases before various courts and tribunals.