In his first-ever podcast, veteran mediator and head of the UN Mission in South Sudan Nicholas Haysom retraces three decades of peacemaking in Sudan, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. He recalls how his activism against Apartheid led him to become Nelson Mandela’s Chief Legal Adviser and launched his career in mediation. He reflects on why the time when peacemakers chose to talk to some and not to others has long passed. While drawing lessons that can be applied to current peace efforts, he explains how the internationalisation of intra-state conflicts has complicated conflict resolution processes.

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The time when we would choose not to talk to some and talk to others has gone. We're now really required to talk to everyone. How you talk to them, of course, that is different. I'm not necessarily pushing for soft lines and turning a blind eye to breaches of international humanitarian law.

Welcome to the Mediator’s Studio, a podcast about peacemakers, bringing you stories from behind the scenes. I'm your host, Adam Cooper, and I'm coming to you from the Oslo Forum. Having started out as a small gathering in 2003, the Forum is now entering its third decade, bringing together the world's leading figures in peacemaking. Participants from around the world have come to discuss how to resolve some of the major conflicts of our day, from Gaza to Myanmar, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the war in Ukraine. My guest today was actively involved in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which propelled him into a 30-year career in peacemaking. His work has taken him to Burundi, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. Currently, he's a Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for South Sudan and Head of the UN mission there, UNMISS. Nicholas Haysom, better known as Fink, welcome to the Mediator’s Studio.

Thank you, Adam. Pleasure to be here.

I want to start with apartheid South Africa. In 1976, you're a law student, and you become president of the National Union of South African Students, many of whose members, including its presidents, were arrested and killed for their part in the struggle against white rule. You were arrested, too. What were you doing and what were the circumstances of your various detentions?

You had to appreciate that in South Africa, the security legislation really allowed this, the security agencies, to detain people without trial. So, it was very much an unaccountable regime. But eventually there was a toll of suicides and deaths in detention, which forced them to recalibrate that. And that would normally be a good thing, except, in my view, it was accompanied by extra-legal actions, which then arose in number and in proportion to the attempt to play a more legal game.

And what was the point at which you started to become politically active?

Well, I think I grew up in a politically thoughtful household, and I don't think in South Africa you can grow up without being, having apartheid thrust in your face. So, although there were many who feel they didn't have moral issues, I think for most people with some sensitivity, you were kind of confronted with the raw humiliation of it all.

And it's one thing to be politically active, it's another to take that activism to a point where the state is arresting you. What was it in your case that prompted them to come after you?

I think consistently it was basically suspicion of being a sympathiser to the ANC.

Which you were.

Which you were. Yeah. Which I was, yeah. Yeah. But it also occurs in the context of the organisational work we did. And I must say, when I look at my sort of background influences and what allows me to look at social problems and deal with them, I give a special place to the period in which I was an activist. Because I think you learn all kinds of schools’ capacities to make judgments as an activist that you don't do as a lawyer necessarily, or as a public figure or a politician in the normal course.

And some of those times you were detained, I understand you were also held in solitary detention. Is that right?

Yes, mostly detention. Then under security legislation, I was in solitary confinement. And I did one stretch of six months. But, you know, there were people who did much more than that. So, I don't boast about it. The fact that I was white, and a rugby player as well probably gave me some protection.

And you also worked closely with Nelson Mandela, who brought you in to draft the South African constitution. How did you come to his attention? And do you remember your first meeting with him?

Yes, I did. I was very involved in the ANC's negotiating team. So right from the outset to the beginning of the nineties, right through into the middle of the nineties and until the adoption of the new constitution, I was in the mix with the ANC's team trying to think through what a post apartheid South Africa would look like and should look like. So it was really in that capacity, as a member of that team, that I was picked and asked if I’ll be the legal and constitutional adviser in his office. He was a great man to work for. He was truly gracious at home with people, committed to his convictions. And an inspiration in that regard. Not necessarily a softy, a sort of Uncle Madiba, because he could be tough as well in negotiating issues of principle.

As South Africa transitions, you get your first hands-on mediation experience. Because human rights lawyers were brought in and used to settle labour disputes. Why was that and how did that work?

Well, a lot of the human rights lawyers, by default, ended up being the lawyers involved in industrial disputes, factory floor disputes, and there was a kind of limited pool. Very often parties remember that in a mediation there has to be an agreement on who's the mediator. And the kind of trade off normally was a human rights lawyer that both parties would accept. But for me it was a real learning experience. Because it was a time in which mediation and third-party dispute resolution flowered in South Africa, in community settings, in labour settings and elsewhere, and allowed us to be really quite adventurous, explorative in the ways in which you bring people together to find solutions to problems.

Well, let's talk about mediation at another level in the context of Sudan. I mean, you've been involved in the country for a long time, starting in 2002. And to give our listeners, who might not know the context, some background briefly, the civil war between the secessionist South and the government in Khartoum, mainly over natural resources such as oil, but also centring on religious issues between the mainly Muslim North and the non-Muslim South, has a long history in the 20th century, and as the war ebbed and flowed, various peacemaking attempts came and went. But in the early 2000s, talks between the government in Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the SPLM, which was the main armed group in the south, started to make substantial progress. By that point, 2 million people had died, 4 million had been displaced. And the chief mediator, General Sumbeiywo, then asked you to join the talks in Machakos in Kenya in 2002. And the aim was to produce a single text about the broad issues of a peace agreement on which the parties could agree. What were the main contours of the peace deal that you were trying to forge, and how did you work together with General Sumbeiywo?

They had had a long history of failed negotiation attempts, mostly over the question of what they called the relationship between state and religion. And it was principally about a South which didn't share the kind of national identity of the North and wanted to find a formula. And quite frankly, we did some clever things that they hadn't done before and were able to find solutions which both parties could lock into. And I think, quite frankly, to the surprise of both of them, but also to a wide range of observers, I think there were other things which worked. I think Sumbeiywo was a good mediator. He didn't know much about the substance of the topics, but it only underscored the importance of the mediator, really, as the manager of the process, rather than, you know, the technical brain box.

And you say clever things. What sorts of things?

I did an exercise. It came straight out of conflict resolution 101, which was a basically where two parties look to establish criteria they can both agree on, on a problem that they can't agree on. And we went through this exercise. It's basically how a couple tries to resolve the fact that the one can't sleep with the lights on, and the one can't sleep with the lights off, and how they generate what would form a solution in the context of the relationship between state and religion that they could both live with. And they generated common criteria. And from that, lo and behold, they came to an agreement on a kind of constitutional formula for the application of Islamic law in the South and Christianity in the North.

And so, you managed to find consensus through quite sort of innovative techniques. But at the very last minute, just when you thought you'd arrived at an agreed text, I understand that both parties lost confidence, drew back, and out of frustration, you gave him an ultimatum. You shut them in the room, told them to come up with a solution in an hour. What happened?

With General Sumbeiywo's guidance. I think there was, you know, there's also a bit of, in mediation, there's also a bit of buyer's remorse at the end and fear of the future. And for many parties who've been in conflict for a long time, there's a kind of comfort with being in conflict. And we detected some of that, but also some real problems that we hadn't taken into account. The kind of Mandela analogy that as you climb the mountain and once you get to the top, then you see the next. And in following ranges that lie ahead, suddenly all kinds of new issues began to emerge. How are they going to share the oil money, how they're going to affect an integrated armed force, and issues that have been passed over in the larger constitutional questions. And I and my colleague with whom I worked closely, Julian Hottinger, were quite insistent that they should button down the implementation modalities before they sign off on the agreement. Otherwise, they would go the way of many peace agreements, which is a kind of almost immediate failure at the implementation phase.

So, you recognize that need then, to kind of think ahead, not repeat the mistakes of other agreements. But what was the dynamic that you saw between the kind of people you had locked in the room and, in a way, their political masters?

Let me just sort of thinking back on, recognize that parties who work hard for an agreement develop a kind of chemistry between them, and that it becomes a resource that you have to rely on. There's a kind of trust. I was involved for a long time in the Burundian peace talks, and it was widely predicted that they would fail in implementation. And there were reasons for it. There'd been some real arm twisting to get parties to sign on, but it worked. And I was often asked, well, why did it work? It shouldn't have worked. And it worked because the very processes and machinery that you create so that people can live in harmony generates common structures, common perspectives, and they develop a kind of resilience. They can walk on the edge, which they couldn't do before.

Did you also feel the need at certain points to sort of complement the bond in a way between the people who were doing most of the negotiating, to kind of also, when it became crunch time, right, as they scaled that mountain, to also, you know, on the SPLM side, reach out to their leader, John Garang, and on the Sudanese government side, the Vice-President and so on.

To be sure, you've got to keep herding. You know, in the Sudan case, right at the last minute, one of the parties suddenly tabled a fresh set of demands. And that's really when the issue of arm twisting came in and Mandela was able to bring Clinton and others to the talks in a way which really got the parties to recognise that there was no turning back.

And how did you gauge your own role as things sort of hit a real crunch moment in terms of playing a very active engagement, perhaps at the earliest stage in the shaping of ideas, but then how active were you in that sort of very final stage and the sort of agreement that was reached in 2005 and did you judge it more necessary to be involved in the thick of it or kind of let the parties, in a way, do that work as well?

Well, there are kind of two schools of thought. My colleague who I mentioned earlier, Julian Hottinger, firmly believes if you negotiate an agreement you don't implement, don't play a part in the implementation. I'm more agnostic on that question because you also carry with you the background and understanding of the kind of fine points of difference. But I think in either way, you still have to keep shepherding people through to the end and beyond.

So, the comprehensive agreement for Sudan is signed off on the 9 January 2005, and you then head off to join the UN. For ten years, you work in Iraq and Afghanistan, which we'll come back to later. And a decade on, you return to Africa as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan and South Sudan, which became an independent country in 2011 and head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, UNMISS, in 2016. But let's talk for a moment about your work in Khartoum. In 2019, the year in which President Bashir is ousted by a military coup after more than 30 years in power. You're sent to Sudan by the UN secretary general to support the African Union's mediation efforts between the transitional council in Khartoum and Sudanese society. What did you find when you arrived? Kind of paint the picture for us.

Well, I tell you what was quite encouraging and animating was really the street politics in Khartoum. Really, it was an encounter with the people who decided to change things. And of course, there were a lot of sceptics, particularly outside the country, who believed this was not possible, that the dice were all loaded against street politics and so on. But in fact, it kept rolling on and I was tremendously impressed with just the levels of courage and commitment of young people, notably women, public engagement in the issue. And I think that's what kept the thing rolling and moving and eventually, I think, toppled Bashir.

And I can imagine that the power of the street and seeing so many young people motivated for change would have been an inspiration to some, but to the military and security establishment, a very daunting thing. So, what were they telling you when you arrived and what they saw?

The most common observation that I heard at the time was that many of the military were quite confused by it because their children had joined the street, and they really didn't feel like waging a war against their children and against ordinary Sudanese.

And you had met President al-Bashir at that time as this was unfolding?

Yes, I had, from time to time. The Secretary-General has quite determinedly sort of thrust me into this position, being an intermediary and advisor to Bashir, although Bashir kept saying, I don't need any intermediaries or advisors. But the thing rolled on and I won't claim any credit for that, but at least some gratitude for having been there throughout that moment in Sudan's history.

I mean, later on, President Bashir was ousted and there was a power-sharing agreement. Looking back on that agreement, which was, in a way, different parts of the elite, is one of the problems that the mediation community cut a deal between different parts of the elite and didn't quite reflect the interests of the street that drove that movement for change?

The Sudanese agreement can be looked at from many angles. It can also be looked at from exactly the opposite, that in fact, it wasn't a sufficiently grounded elite pact to work. Eventually, at the end of the day, it was the military, as distinct from Bashir, who decided to chart their own course, I'm sure influenced by their own intellectuals.

And what advice were you trying to give them at the time on how they should accommodate the desire for change?

Well, by that stage, I was really working on other files. So, I'd moved off to Somalia briefly for a while. I was also engaged in the South Sudan attempt. Bear in mind that during this period, South Sudan, which had been an equally an important part of my focus when working on the Sudanese thing, had undergone two civil wars in a decade in its immediate post independence period. So, it was really struggling to both find a form of a peace agreement which would allow them to go forward and to try and overcome the tremendous bloodshed and bitterness which had arisen out of their own conflict. So that all is taking place at the same time.

As you said, there's different views on the legacy of the agreement that was forged, the power-sharing agreement in Khartoum. Some people reflect that if there was a desire to involve the street more, there would have been very hard in practice to know how to do so. So, what are your reflections on the ability of mediators to forge inclusive processes which are driven by the population at large?

I don't think you can give the mediator too much more power than he has in those circumstances. You know, Sudan has its own long history of state formation and backwards and forwards military coups and military juntas. So, a lot of the positioning and posturing is also in relation to the question as to whether they can move Sudan off its traditional path, which is basically a restoration of military rule on each and every occasion that there has been a coup of some kind or some reversal.

And looking at the state of Sudan today with renewed civil war, that's proving very hard to resolve. What are the mediation lessons there?

One thing we didn't mention was that some of the blame has to go to the civil society because of the sheer inability of the Sudanese to find a format within which they could work together, and they could leverage the quite considerable influence and power that they had. And the history of the South Sudanese is not only about the two armies waging war against each other, but really it's about the inability, firstly, of the international community to have any impact on that, but also the history of a very divided political class unable to kind of exercise the strength that it should have been able to exercise.

I'd like now to focus on South Sudan. In 2021, you begin the role you now fill, a Special Representative of the Secretary-General for South Sudan and Head of the UN mission there, UNMISS. We'll talk later about the election scheduled for this December, but first describe for the listener where the country is now, nearly two decades after the peace agreement you helped forge in 2005.

As I mentioned, it's undergone two civil wars, and those civil wars were largely brought to an end by a peace agreement that was signed off in 2018. And it's a peace agreement which spells out a kind of path to a democracy, and it culminates in an election, which we'll talk about in a moment. But it also envisages other important rites of passage. The creation of a new constitution, which is supposedly a new social contract, and which attempts to resolve the underlying issues which had been factors in the first two civil wars. And it has to find a form of government of national unity which can manage the country through that period. And I think through all of that, we are conscious that it's all taking place in a society in which there's been an inadequate transition from a military culture to a political culture. And so many of the players still think primarily through a kind of military lens.

That's an incredibly hard thing to shift. So, when one looks back to the agreement that was forged in 2005, it's very hard to apply hindsight and to judge what one could have done differently. But do you think that you would have designed that 2005 agreement differently? Having seen these two civil wars unfold in South Sudan.

Both in the case of Sudan and South Sudan, we should have given more attention to the question of security sector reform and what would drive it and what would work. Incomplete security sector reform, certainly it's a lesson that South Sudan should be taking from Sudan as we watch that country unfold, unravel, is a difficult issue. It's a difficult issue everywhere and it can never be minimised. And South Sudan is going through it right now as we speak, as a precondition for the elections. It’s difficult.

Because it's so difficult and such a hard thing to negotiate. Do you think that's why it was left off the table in 2005, that people knew this is just too thorny, let's deal with it later?

No, I think it's because the SPLM thinks that it'll deal with it within the party. And I think at least one of the criticisms in regard to the agreement in 2005 is that there's too great a willingness on the part of both parties, by the way, both Bashir side, and to try and negotiate an agreement without the involvement, a broader involvement, a broader more inclusive approach to the problems of the country, including Darfur and other issues. But their natural response to the challenge is to say, we'll deal with it within our ranks. We'll solve the question of the South Sudanese military as an SPLM/A issue.

And that's something I assume that's quite difficult for mediators to challenge. It becomes a question of internal security, effectively.

Yeah. And I think, you know mediators are frequently people who look at agreements, and of course we mediators get credit for stuff that really comes from the parties, but to a large extent agreements are forged by the parties, and it reflects their own political cultures and so on. Bear in mind that the SPLM/A had had at least one attempt to relook at its transition to a political party and try and reamend some of the fault lines that had erupted within the party.

At a personal level, was it difficult for you to see newly independent country go through those travails and for ordinary people to suffer when it was such an optimistic moment?

Yeah, it's always. You obviously take pride when you believe you've created a platform for stability and progress and to see it all unravel. But unravelling in the Horn is also tough because it's bloody, and it's cruel. There's, you know, high degrees of conflict-related sexual violence. There's, you know, such a distinctly tribal element manifests. Once the political conflict morphs into a kind of tribal conflict, it takes on a really ugly character.

Is that something that you're confronted with in your role now at the UN and brought sort of face to face with?

Well, I think so. I mean, I think, you know, one of the major recognition, what we would like to see the parties recognise is a kind of decision-making which reflects a sense of national identity, a sense of national purpose, a country in the making, a kind of level of patriotism which doesn't involve tribal region or whatever, but looks at how do we stabilize this country and how do we create institutions which express the interests of the whole, not just the part.

Which you would say isn't there at the moment, that common vision?

Yeah, I think that's what most commentators would share. Some would say, well, it's a young country, it never had an opportunity to go through the nation building moment that other countries went through. But just even as we approach the elections now, I'm so conscious that in South Africa our first elections were really a nation building moment and how difficult and rare that is. Because what the literature shows is that when countries who are emerging from conflict go through the first election and democratisation process, they tend to split along the very fault lines that had been the very cause of the conflict in the first instance. So, you've either got to have leadership and there are question marks about the adequacy of the leadership in South Sudan, or you've got to have a society that's sort of driven by a bigger picture, a long-lasting picture which recognises they're all in it together, they're all going to survive together or they're going to sink together.

Adam Cooper 25.06

It strikes me that it puts you in quite a difficult situation. If sort of leadership is in question, that common vision isn't necessarily there yet. I recall my own brief time in Myanmar where the military and Aung San Suu Kyi's party had very different views on the vision for the country. And it's not an issue which it seems to me is amenable to outsiders, saying you need a common vision. So, what is then sort of left for someone like you to do if, in a way, the most fundamental questions are unanswered, aren't you sort of left with just kind of technocratic bits of support?

You can be. Generally, mediators would be reluctant to get into it, and host countries or the kind of the countries involved would generally want to construct their own military model, sort of close to their sense of national sovereignty. In the case of South Sudan, strangely, there had been a history of relying on Sudan to provide a kind of mediating role on military questions. The military colleges had been Sudanese. There were linkages. They sort of seemed to trust them. And initial issues around ranks and allocation of ranks, the Sudanese had played a role in. We're now dealing with the kind of more difficult question of the middle ranks and struggling because we can't find somebody who can step in, accepted by the parties. And yet, evidently, the parties are struggling to apportion ranks as between each other, partly because, you know, the allocation of ranks is a critical part of building your own party. You've got to reward your own generals. There's been, South Sudan attracted an enormous amount of criticism for the number of generals that have been appointed and somehow need to be accommodated in any new military structure.

One of the other issues that the parties have struggled to find agreement on is ahead of elections in December, where there isn't yet agreement on the sort of fundamentals of the electoral process. What are you doing to make sure that the vote isn't delayed?

Well, we're doing a lot. We're doing virtually everything that requires that falls within the broad bracket of planning, thinking through, sharing experiences. This is a country which has never had an election. So, its nine election commissions have never managed an election. When they stepped into office a few weeks ago, you know, they had no electricity, no water, no staff, no typewriters, and no structures in the states. So, they have a long way to go, particularly if they're going to have to deal with the complexities of an election in a contested country like South Sudan. You know, whether it's establishing a voters register, whether it's doing the planning around delivering and collecting ballots and counting them and announcing them and dealing with complaints. It's a complex process, the electoral one, and it's particularly complex in a country that's logistically challenged, like South Sudan, with its mud and its rain and its rainy season and so on. So, you know, we've really had to step in and quite frankly, have stepped in, together with the African Union and IGAD. But most of the electoral experience, there's a huge reservoir of electoral experience in the UN which we're bringing to bear and ready to bring to bear.

But you can't move faster than the people themselves. They have to write their own constitution. It's quintessentially a sovereign act. They have to run their first election. And we've made it clear, certainly from the UN's point of view, that that's their choice. We will help them, but they have to make some decisions. They haven't decided whether it will be a presidential election or a parliamentary election. How do you begin the task of preparing budgets and raising funds and support and allocating resources? So, it's a long road ahead.

I'd like to conclude our conversation with some reflections on your long career. Amidst your many achievements and high points, I imagine there were some difficult moments, too. I don't know what springs to mind first, Fink, when I say a phrase like that. What comes to mind first?

My own approach has been to say how lucky I've been to be able to work on such challenging, meaningful issues.

But despite, I guess, those best efforts, sometimes you're facing headwinds which are sort of political issues beyond your control. I'm thinking of Somalia in 2019, when you were the UNSG's Representative and only after four months, the government accused you of threatening its sovereignty after you challenged the arrest of Mukhtar Robow, a former al-Shabab leader who had tried to take part in elections. Without getting into the details, what did that episode teach you?

Well, there was an element of it. I was not in the country at the time, and so there was questions of tone and so on in regard to the communications with government that I would probably address differently now. But by and large, I mean, I think the role of the SRSG, he has to stand firm. And I say that in a context in which it's becoming more and more difficult to stand firm, particularly in the broader Sahel, the Horn of Africa region, where there's a kind of prevailing attitude of defiance towards the UN, towards the Security Council, and our peacekeepers run real risks there.

Let's talk about that defiance for a moment. Is it your view that mediation is fundamentally more difficult today than it was when you first started this work?

Yes, certainly. I mean, I think it is more difficult. In what way is it more difficult? I don't think the internal logic behind mediation has been affected. I think it still works. And if you go to look at national systems of domestic resolution of marital disputes or industrial disputes, mediation is still the preferred and most effective way of doing it. And I'm talking about the way in which compromises are generated through a particular discipline. What has changed is basically the international setting in which intrastate conflicts are resolved. And the most distinctive feature has been the internationalisation of conflict. Almost. You can hardly think of a conflict that isn't dominated by neighbourhoods and regional power blocs and sometimes superpowers as well, and that makes it really difficult to mediate the disputes. The practice up till now has been to sort of look at it from a process design point of view as requiring concentric rings of negotiation. The first one, the old fashioned one, you bring the national stakeholders together and you try and fashion a social compact. Then you bring in the neighbourhood to shore it up and then you bring in the regional powers to confirm it. And at a time in which there was some coherence and unanimity in the Security Council, it was possible to have some effect. That no longer exists, and it has eroded the authority of mediators everywhere.

Bear in mind, mediators now themselves have changed. Before, it used to be, you know, the brilliant soloist. Now it's a conductor. There's a range of forces and issues which a mediator is required to marshal, including coherence in the mediation effort when you're involving the wide range of superpowers and other powers in the region. So, I think that, more than anything else, has not only made mediation more difficult, but it's made finding remedies by which people can kind of agree arrangements by which they can live together, which made it just about impossible.

And since we're here at the Oslo Forum reflecting on mediation as a field, what would a better version of it look like, Fink?

Well, it would certainly require a Security Council that has both the authority and respect to take decisions, and capacity. At the moment, it doesn't seem to have any of those three. What can be done in the absence of that? Well, the possibility obviously arises of creating another form of international leverage which somehow maximises what limited consent we can pull together across a very divided world. But as we speak, as we conduct this interview, we're looking at just the horrible consequences of that. In Gaza, in Sudan, where the war is really very awful, and, of course, in Ukraine. And no prospects anywhere for a resolution or a mechanism which is capable of affecting some kind of a peace. No ceasefire.

I'd like to also ask you about the broader lessons you've taken from your career on the need to engage with non-state armed groups and the timing around that. And with reference to your time in Afghanistan, where from 2012 to 2016, you worked as the Deputy Representative of the Secretary-General and then as the Special Representative, there's been a lot of debate about when, how and even if to engage the Taliban. What are your thoughts on that?

My view from almost the time I got there was that the Taliban were primarily a nationalist movement, not a religious movement. So, they're not al Shabaab and shouldn't be judged as al Shabaab. They should have been recognised as potentially a nationalist movement, which requires a different kind of approach. And I'm not saying necessarily always a softer approach. And when I think back on Afghanistan and the sacrifices which people made there to stabilise it, and question what was the rationale and plan behind it, sometimes struggle. But I do think a different approach to the Taliban was required.

And do you think there's broader lessons for, say, Gaza or other conflicts in which non state armed groups that have been proscribed are playing a very important role?

Obviously. I mean, I think the time when we would choose not to talk to some and talk to others has gone. We're now really required to talk to everyone. How you talk to them, of course, that is different. I'm not necessarily pushing for soft lines and turning a blind eye to breaches of international humanitarian law. I remember when I first arrived in Afghanistan, certainly the prevailing view was we have to soften them up for talks. That becomes a kind of self-perpetuating delusion. Remember, in Angola, they were trying to push for talks between Savimbi and the MPLA. And Savimbi never wanted to negotiate because he needed a victory to come to the table. And when he did get a victory, the MPLA didn't want to come to the table. And so, you had this cycle of expectation and failure.

Tell me, what's your message to the next generation of mediators who, like the young Fink all those years ago, really wanted to have a transformative impact and change the world?

I obviously have a considerable amount of sympathy for young people who want to get into conflict resolution. And particularly with the proliferation of institutes and think tanks working in the same field, it's become very crowded and very difficult to kind of make an entry and frequently I'm asked, how can I get in the game? You've just got to get in the game. There's only one way to kind of find your feet in it and develop the confidence and the skills, and that's by mediating. And whether you end up practicing in your neighbourhood or elsewhere, or you work in bigger teams at an entry level, I would just encourage young peacemakers in any event, to engage in the practice.

Well, on that note, we must leave it Nicholas Haysom, Fink, thank you so much for being my guest in the Mediator’s Studio.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

And there we end this edition of the Mediator’s Studio. To get more episodes as they come out, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We always love to hear from you. So, if you've views on anything you've heard, please get in touch via the listener survey in the show notes on our website or do drop me a message on Twitter @adamtalkspeace. The Mediator’s Studio is an Oslo Forum podcast brought to you by the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our managing editor is Christina Buchhold, and the producer is Chris Gunness. Research for this episode was done by Oscar Eschenbrenner and Noemi Blome. Big thanks also to Ly Buiduong and Giles Pitts for their support. Hope you will join for the next edition. Until then, from Losby Gods in Norway, this is Adam Cooper saying goodbye, and thanks for listening.