ABSTRACT
For an Irish-woman of my vintage, pondering peace and reconciliation inevitably calls to mind Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which followed decades of war, violence, and entrenched attitudes. 1 While the Good Friday Agreement was engendered by the interested parties themselves, the midwives were a trio of international mediators led by Senator George Mitchell of the United States. 2 Mitchell’s memoirs of the period reveal the tenacity, delicacy, and cajoling required of well-resourced, government-supported mediators in difficult circumstances. 3 How, then, could a single individual, without the backing of governments, and without extensive resources, impose a solution on two warring sides in the intra- and inter-polis conflicts of Ancient Greece? This is all the more puzzling as arbitration differs from mediation: mediators facilitate the finding of a solution by the disputants themselves; arbiters impose their own decision. Unlike mediation, arbitration is binding for the disputants, and the stakes are thus higher for all involved. According to Emerson, who notes that the two types of mechanism can often be confused, arbitration is ‘the voluntary agreement of states or persons to submit their differences to judges of their own choice and to bind themselves in advance to accept the decisions of judges, so chosen, as final and binding’. 4 In international arbitration, it follows that outsiders are chosen to occupy a position of great power, responsibility, and opportunity.
