David Gorman knew early on he wanted to help resolve conflicts and make peace, but he was wary of becoming a diplomat tethered to the interests of a single country. Instead, he entered an expanding sector of non-governmental organisations and independent actors serving as peace mediators around the world. “If you are not attached to a government, you can be impartial, you don’t have to subscribe to a certain policy view,” said Gorman, regional director for Eurasia at the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD). “You are more independent, and you can be more creative,” the 50-year-old, one of nearly 60 peace mediators at HD, told AFP. With the United Nations often restrained by competing interests and many governments treading cautiously, independent actors are increasingly taking over. There are cases where you realise that “the UN can’t do this, states can’t do this, they need something else”, Gorman said. ‘Like a laboratory’ As a teenager growing up in an Irish-Catholic family in the US city of Boston in the 1970s, Gorman was keenly aware of conflicts in Northern Ireland, as well as in the Middle East, and the 1979 Iran hostage situation. He said he realised early on that “grave misunderstandings” could lead to “unnecessary conflict” and had a “sense it did not have to be this way”. After training as a mediator in Washington, he went on his first mission to Israel at just 24. He has been globe-trotting from conflict to conflict ever since and joined the HD Centre in its infancy two decades ago. The centre has been involved in mediating around 40 conflicts and while most of its work is behind the scenes it has several significant public wins. Two years ago, HD’s small headquarters in an idyllic park on the shores of Lake Geneva was the scene of the official disbanding of Basque separatist group ETA after nearly six decades of armed struggle. HD mediators had been quietly working on resolving the conflict for 15 years before finally acknowledging their role and declaring success. Gorman said the public triumph was important to demonstrate “that these types of processes can work”. And yet, before a process reaches the final stage, the greatest value HD mediators add is discretion, he said. Mediators unattached to a specific policy agenda or the UN can host informal discussions between people who might not be ready to acknowledge publicly they are in contact. “It can almost be like a kind of laboratory,” Gorman said. But HD and its peers are considered “weak mediators” as they have less leverage than someone with the weight of a state or the UN behind them.