Dr. Christina Horváth-Stenner
Mediation Support Officer
OSCE Secretariat - Conflict Prevention Centre
Mediation Support Team
Previous stations
- Senior mediation expert with over 15 years of professional experience in the field of political conflict resolution and negotiation, including for the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the CSSP - Berlin Center for Integrative Mediation, the Center for International Peace Operations as well as teaching activities at various universities and numerous publications on peace mediation
- Co-founder and co-coordinator of the Women Peace Mediators Network Germany
- M.A. “Mediation in Peace Processes” (ETH Zurich), certified mediator and trained peace and conflict consultant
- Degree in economics and doctorate in political science (Witten/Herdecke University) and degree in communication sciences (Tokyo Kezai University, Japan)
In my position as...
OSCE Mediation Support Officer, I support the OSCE Special Representatives in their engagement in peace processes - mainly in Moldova, Ukraine and partly in Georgia. I also advise Heads of Mission of OSCE field missions in their dialog activities. I prepare conflict analyses and individual thematic briefings, for example on ground rules, ceasefires, security guarantees or the inclusion of women in peace processes. I am asked to comment on proposals made by participating states, e.g. on new negotiation formats or confidence-building measures. I also observe the negotiating sessions themselves. Based on these observations, I then advise on process design, the expansion of my own scope for action or specific negotiation tactics. In this way, I support the OSCE mediators at the highest political level (Track 1) in identifying destructive developments, developing alternatives and, if necessary, triggering new dynamics in a targeted manner.
The biggest challenge of my job is...
the coordination work in the background. “This is high-power politics-there is no space for mediation.” - I have come across this view time and again in the course of my work. For me, however, mediation is one of the most important instruments for dealing with different interests, even or especially in highly political contexts. Rather, this view confirms the need to continue to strengthen mediation as a crisis prevention method and to integrate mediation expertise more energetically into government conflict management.
In concrete terms, this means, for example, that...
all mediation activities take place in a political environment that is strongly influenced by the interests of individual states and actors. Every conflict context is different and deals with different issues: The spectrum ranges from the division of mobile phone networks across divided conflict areas to the recognition of diplomas from breakaway territories or the transfer of pensions for senior citizens in crisis areas. This makes my work varied and always a new challenge. It is particularly important to understand these diverse topics from a mediation perspective - i.e. interest-based - and to prepare them in this sense for the parties involved. Addressing these different interests in strategy and action recommendations is the major area of tension in my work. It can be frustrating to have to coordinate interests that are largely unrelated to the conflict before working on the actual conflict context. This political coordination work can be described as necessarily walking on raw eggs. Nevertheless, it is precisely this political aspect that particularly appeals to me in my work.
Through my role in the Mediation Support Team, I have been able to...
further develop the OSCE Mediation Support Team (MST) from a pure training provider to a valued and established process consulting capacity together with my colleagues. Thanks to the great mediation expertise in the team as well as the close exchange with other mediation actors and academic institutions, we were able to contribute to the fact that the MST is continuously used as a strategic consulting actor.