Drawing upon the Bayesian persuasion literature, I show that a mediator can provide conflicting parties strategically with information to decrease the ex-ante war probability. In a conflict between two parties with private information about military strength, the mediator generates information about each conflicting party's strength and commits to sharing the obtained information with the respective opponent. The conflicting parties can be convinced not to fight each other. The conflicting parties benefit from mediation, as the ex-ante war probability is reduced. The benefit is taken up by weak conflicting parties. This benefit is larger when war is costlier and when the war probability absent mediation is higher. | INTRODUCTIONUnderstanding conflict resolution and prevention is a central concern of international relations. Mediation is one of the most widely used techniques in international crises management. Mediation occurred in 37 out of the 84 conflicts registered by the International Crisis Behaviour Project in the period from 1990 to 2015. For 27 out of these 37 cases, mediation was named as either an "important" or the "most important" factor for easing tensions (see Brecher & Wilkenfeld, 1997;Brecher et al., 2017). This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of effective mediation by showing how a mediator can use research and intelligence to reduce the ex-ante war probability. Specifically, a mediator can convince conflicting parties not to fight each other by strategically providing them information about their respective opponent.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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