International Organizations and Violence Prevention: A Study of Dialogue Orchestration as a Mode of IO Governance in Ukraine

Rooted in the popular formula ‘As long as you‘re talking, you can‘t be shooting’, dialogue has long become an indispensable part of violence prevention and conflict transformation processes. International organizations (IOs), among other actors engaged in conflict management, initiate and support dialogue formats at different levels, ranging from official high-level diplomatic forums to informal expert consultations and civil society meetings to people-to-people contacts at local community level. In a case study of Ukraine, this paper examines IOs’ efforts in commencing and supporting dialogue initiatives beyond high-profile diplomacy, which serve as tools for preventing and mitigating violence at sub-national level. We seek to reveal how and under which conditions IOs engage in dialogue ‘orchestration’ (cf. Abbott et al., 2015) as a mode of conflict governance. We specifically scrutinize and compare the engagements of the European Union and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, two regional organizations with partly overlapping membership and conflict management approaches but different institutional structures and capacities. In doing so, we draw on an original set of expert interviews with the organizations’ officials and Ukrainian dialogue facilitators. The study sheds new light on the role of the EU and the OSCE in violence prevention through dialogue and advances research on IO governance modes by applying the concept of orchestration in the context of an IO functional overlap.