By Meg Foley Yoder
At at recent event in the Carr-Ryan Conversations series, Neha Sanghrajka shared how ‘peace listening’, patience, and sometimes even physical endurance, can lie at the heart of successful negotiation.
“Building Peace: Lessons from the Frontlines of Negotiation,” brought together Sanghrajka, a Kenyan mediator who played a central role in Mozambique’s 2019 peace accord, and Mathias Risse, Director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. Sanghrajka, now a fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center and a senior adviser at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, spoke about how negotiations proceed when formal processes have already failed and trust between parties has largely collapsed.
Early in the discussion, Risse pointed to the Center’s connection to Mozambique through its founding donor, Greg Carr, who has devoted more than two decades to work in the country. His efforts have centered on Gorongosa National Park, a project he frames as human rights work—bringing together conservation and investments in health care, education, and local livelihoods to support surrounding communities. One of the final agreements in Mozambique’s peace process was reached in Gorongosa, a place Sanghrajka described as central to the process itself. “The places where these processes happen… they become really special,” she said. “Sometimes even more special than the process itself.”
“Eighty percent of conflict resolution is really tough. You often see no hope at all. It’s the 20 percent that keeps me going.”
Sanghrajka did not set out to become a mediator. She studied law and had planned to go into corporate work, but returned to Kenya after her father’s death just as the country descended into post-election violence in 2007, a crisis that left about 1,000 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands. She joined the mediation effort led by Kofi Annan.
“I didn’t want to do anything else,” she said. “Eighty percent of conflict resolution is really tough. You often see no hope at all. It’s the 20 percent that keeps me going.”
When Negotiations Fail
Mozambique’s conflict has its roots in the years following independence from Portugal in 1975, when the ruling Frelimo party and the opposition group Renamo entered a prolonged civil war. Although the 1992 Rome Peace Accords formally ended the fighting, key provisions were never fully implemented, and tensions persisted for decades, with periodic outbreaks of violence.
When Sanghrajka arrived in Mozambique, two mediation efforts had already failed. One, led by Mozambican religious figures, remained largely domestic and struggled to establish neutrality. Another brought in a wide range of international actors, including former heads of state, but failed to secure real commitment from the parties. “It was set up to fail,” she said of that second effort, where she served as the only woman among the mediators.
The approach that followed was smaller and largely out of public view. Working with a group that included the British mediator Jonathan Powell and the Swiss ambassador, Sanghrajka helped establish a backchannel between the Mozambican president and the Renamo leadership in the mountains of Gorongosa. “We made a key decision: no table,” she said. “Trust was below zero. So instead of bringing the parties to us, we went to them.”
Building Trust Before Agreement
The work required sustained travel between the two sides, including repeated journeys into the mountains to meet Renamo’s leadership. Reaching them often meant hours of climbing during an active conflict. “The more I kept going up that mountain, the more it built trust,” she said. “Sometimes just showing up is enough.”
Sanghrajka described mediation as inseparable from negotiation in practice. “Mediation is essentially negotiation,” she said. “You’re negotiating all the time—every day, every minute—with different actors.” But unlike straightforward bargaining, she said, mediation also involves managing relationships, perceptions, and emotions, not just positions.
The process in Mozambique also broke from the usual sequence of negotiations. Earlier agreements had failed because they were never fully implemented, leaving little trust in another formal deal. Instead of moving from talks to a signed accord and then implementation, the order was reversed. “We decided not to focus on signing anything at the beginning,” Sanghrajka said. “Instead, we started implementing first.”
“Most of the time, when we listen, we’re actually preparing to respond. ‘Peace listening’ is different. It’s listening without an agenda.”
In practice, the approach relied on small, reciprocal steps. Each side followed through on limited commitments, building confidence gradually before any formal agreement was in place. The process was risky, Sanghrajka said, but it allowed trust to grow through action rather than promises.
The same approach shaped negotiations over the central issues of the conflict. The government’s priority was disarmament, while Renamo pushed for political decentralization, including the election of provincial governors in areas where it had support. The timelines did not align. In the end, the government moved first, allowing constitutional changes to proceed before disarmament was complete, a decision that depended on the trust built earlier in the process. The parliamentary vote to amend the constitution was unanimous, an unusual outcome in Mozambique’s political history.
Sanghrajka described what she called “peace listening” as central to the process. “Most of the time, when we listen, we’re actually preparing to respond,” she said. “Peace listening is different. It’s listening without an agenda.” In practice, this meant spending long periods listening in informal settings, without immediately trying to negotiate or respond. The aim was to make sure each side felt heard before moving toward solutions.
What Comes After the Deal
In response to a question about Northern Ireland and issues left unresolved after peace was reached, Sanghrajka said not every problem could be addressed at the outset. In Mozambique, questions such as pensions for former combatants were set aside to avoid derailing the negotiations. “Sometimes, you don’t ignore an issue—you just sequence it differently,” she said. Those issues were taken up later, once enough trust had been built to address them.
Asked about what happens after an agreement is reached, Sanghrajka emphasized that implementation depended on coordination rather than new programs. Development projects already underway in Mozambique were redirected to areas where former combatants were returning, so reintegration coincided with visible improvements in infrastructure and services. “Former fighters weren’t seen as a burden—they were part of a broader improvement,” she said.
When an audience member asked how she remained motivated over years of negotiations, Sanghrajka pointed in part to the persistence the work required, including dozens of climbs on foot up Mount Gorongosa to meet Renamo’s leadership, which she recalled with some humor but also as a measure of what the process demanded. “I could leave. They couldn’t,” she said. “So I had no right to give up before they did.”
