Local Mediation Guide

Yemen is a country in the Middle East and southern Arabian Peninsula area that has been engulfed in a complex and ongoing internal conflict rooted in decades of tribal, religious, economic and political tensions. This conflict has led to widespread instability and violence in the country.
The conflict has severely deteriorated the humanitarian situation in Yemen, where the civilian population suffers from insecurity, instability and a severe shortage of basic services like water, food and healthcare. Humanitarian organizations have reported that Yemen is facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, coupled with severe food shortages, high hunger rates and disease outbreak. 
The nationwide conflict stems from multiple, interlinked local contexts of social and structural disintegration that have jointly resulted in a significant impact. Accordingly, the different roles and need to participate in building community cohesion have emerged as the nucleus of fostering national cohesion. This underscores the importance of local mediation efforts for conflict resolution, peacemaking, stability and security in Yemen. Peacemaking requires joint efforts by local communities, civil society organizations (CSOs) and stakeholders, and the international community should assume an effective role in providing support and assistance. Restoring peace in Yemen is not just a domestic interest, but also has regional implications, as stability in Yemen can secure international shipping, strengthen regional security and sustainable development.
Despite ongoing UN mediation efforts since 2011, significant challenges remain in reaching peace. These include changing the attitudes of youth, women and community leaders towards building capacity, preparedness, response and peace-sensitive approaches to participate in preventing conflicts that have aggravated since 2011. Humanitarian interventions have made multiple efforts to form male and female mediators to enhance community and national safety, to define the guarantees, procedures and characteristics of mediation that can lead to peace, to identify how mediation interconnects with other efforts, to define what contexts/pathways mediation should go through, to define conflict-resolution skills and conflict prevention mechanisms, strategies and methods. 
This guide aims to provide technical and objective frameworks to expand safe spaces in society through civil mechanisms. These involve examining the current efforts and equipping trainees with the knowledge and skills necessary to develop peaceful spaces with reliable peace preparedness and response capabilities. These spaces can help prevent further conflict using peace perception/promoting supplies and social mobility activities, including neutral and impartial behavior values and rules, while stressing the commitment to have preservation and vigilant determination to defend the common ground of all social forces and groups. They can also promote social defense in alignment with public institutions' efforts to achieve sustainable development. 
This guide aims to provide challenges-based content combining elements of awareness about the reality of conflicts, their rules, stages, causes, types and manifestations. The first part of this guide provides stakeholders with guidance to identify trends and capabilities in diagnosing mediation to enhance trainee motivation and sense of belonging. The second part covers the conflict-sensitive approach, conflict contexts, peacebuilding, containment approaches, and elimination of the exception. The guide aims to share practical practices for context analysis and conflict diagnosis as well as mediation experiences as a strategy for conflict resolution in the local context, considering legal frameworks, customs, customary rules and other tools of social control.