When Conflict Disrupts Commerce: How Mediation Reaches Where Litigation Cannot

War doesn't stop commerce. It complicates it — sometimes catastrophically. When conflict disrupts a region, the businesses, suppliers, and families caught in the middle don't disappear. Their contracts, their obligations, their property, and their relationships remain — often across borders, often without a court that can reach them. Litigation assumes a functioning court system, enforceable judgments, and parties who can appear before the same tribunal. Conflict strips away each of those assumptions, one by one. Mediation does not require any of them. This article examines how mediation operates across three distinct layers of conflict-related disruption — business to business, business to person, and person to person — and why culturally matched mediation is often the only mechanism capable of producing durable resolution when the parties are separated by geography, language, legal systems, and the weight of lived trauma. --- ## The Limits of Litigation in Conflict Contexts Before examining what mediation can do, it is worth being precise about what litigation cannot. A court in Philadelphia cannot compel a counterparty in Beirut to appear. A judgment obtained in London against a party whose assets are in Tehran is, in practical terms, unenforceable. A family inheritance dispute involving property in Gaza, relatives in the United States, and a deceased parent whose will was executed under Lebanese law presents jurisdictional questions that no single court can cleanly resolve. Even where jurisdiction is technically available, the cost, duration, and adversarial structure of litigation make it poorly suited to disputes where the parties share ongoing commercial relationships, family ties, or community bonds that they wish to preserve. Litigation produces a winner and a loser. Mediation produces an agreement — one that both parties have shaped and, critically, one that both parties are more likely to honour. The Singapore Convention on Mediation (formally the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation), which entered into force in 2020, has further strengthened the enforceability of mediated settlement agreements across signatory states, narrowing the practical gap between mediation and litigation as mechanisms for producing binding outcomes. --- ## Business to Business: Commercial Relationships Disrupted by Conflict The first layer is the most familiar to commercial counsel: contracts that cannot be performed because conflict has made performance impossible, illegal, or commercially ruinous. Supply agreements, trade contracts, joint venture arrangements, and distribution relationships all assume a stable operating environment. When that environment collapses — through sanctions, military action, infrastructure destruction, or the displacement of key personnel — the question is not simply whether force majeure applies. The question is what happens next to the relationship, the assets, and the obligations that remain. ### 1. Force Majeure and the Gap It Leaves Force majeure clauses excuse non-performance but do not resolve the commercial consequences of that non-performance. Who bears the cost of inventory already in transit? Who owns the intellectual property developed under a joint venture that has now been suspended? What happens to the deposits, advance payments, and letters of credit that were issued before hostilities began? These are negotiated questions, not legal ones. A mediator can facilitate the structured unwinding of a commercial relationship, the allocation of residual assets and liabilities, and the drafting of a settlement agreement that both parties can enforce under the Singapore Convention — without the years and expense of international arbitration. ### 2. Sanctions and the Compliance Dimension Conflict frequently brings sanctions regimes that create compliance obligations for businesses on one side of the relationship and practical impossibility for businesses on the other. A US-based company that cannot legally transact with a counterparty in a sanctioned jurisdiction still has a commercial relationship that needs to be managed, documented, and — where legally permissible — wound down in an orderly way. Mediation, conducted with appropriate legal guidance on both sides, can produce a structured resolution that satisfies compliance requirements while treating the counterparty with the dignity and fairness that a unilateral termination does not. --- ## Business to Person: Insurance Claims, Property Loss, and Humanitarian Relief The second layer involves the intersection of commercial entities and individuals — typically in the context of insurance claims, property loss, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. When a business's property is destroyed, its supply chain is severed, or its employees are displaced, the resulting claims span multiple jurisdictions and involve parties with fundamentally different levels of sophistication, resources, and access to legal counsel. An insurance company based in London processing claims from policyholders in conflict-affected regions faces a caseload that the courts cannot efficiently handle and that adversarial claims management will only inflame. ### 3. Insurance Claims Across Borders War risk insurance, property insurance, and business interruption policies all generate claims that are factually complex, emotionally charged, and jurisdictionally ambiguous. The policyholder may be in one country, the insurer in another, the loss in a third, and the governing law of the policy in a fourth. Mediation provides a structured, confidential forum in which the insurer and the claimant can present their positions, exchange documentation, and reach a settlement that reflects the actual facts rather than the outcome of an adversarial process designed to minimise the insurer's exposure. Where the claimant is an individual or a small business, culturally matched mediation — with a mediator who understands both the commercial norms of the insurer's jurisdiction and the cultural context of the claimant's — is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for a fair process. ### 4. Humanitarian Relief and Organisational Disputes NGOs, international organisations, and government agencies operating in conflict zones generate their own category of disputes: procurement disagreements with local suppliers, employment disputes with locally engaged staff, and disagreements over the allocation of relief resources between partner organisations. These disputes are rarely suitable for litigation — the parties need to continue working together, the reputational stakes are high, and the applicable law is often unclear. Mediation, conducted by a neutral with experience in both international humanitarian operations and cross-cultural dispute resolution, can resolve these disputes quickly and confidentially, allowing the organisations involved to return their focus to the mission. --- ## Person to Person: Families, Inheritance, and the Disputes That Courts Cannot Follow The third layer is the most personal and, in many ways, the most urgent. Conflict displaces families. It separates parents from children, siblings from siblings, and heirs from the property they have inherited. It creates inheritance disputes where the deceased's assets are in one country, the heirs are in three others, and the applicable law — if it can be determined at all — is the law of a jurisdiction that no longer functions in the way it did when the will was executed. ### 5. Inheritance and Property Disputes Across Diaspora Communities The Lebanese, Iranian, Syrian, Palestinian, and Ukrainian diaspora communities each contain families navigating inheritance disputes that span multiple legal systems. A family home in Beirut, a bank account in Paris, and heirs in the United States, Canada, and Australia presents a jurisdictional puzzle that no single court can solve — but that a mediator can help the family resolve through a negotiated agreement that all parties sign and that can be registered in the relevant jurisdictions. These disputes are not merely legal. They carry the weight of grief, displacement, and — often — decades of family tension that the conflict has brought to the surface. A mediator who understands the cultural norms around inheritance, family hierarchy, and the expression of loss in the relevant communities is not simply a procedural facilitator. They are a bridge between worlds that the conflict has forced apart. ### 6. Custody and Family Matters Where Courts Cannot Follow When one parent is in a conflict zone and the other has fled with the children, the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction may apply — but it may also be unenforceable in practice. Mediation cannot replace the legal framework, but it can create the conditions for a negotiated parenting arrangement that both parents can honour, that protects the children's relationship with both sides of their family, and that does not require either parent to appear before a court in a country they cannot safely enter. --- ## Why Culturally Matched Mediation Makes the Difference In every category described above, the parties are not simply separated by distance and legal systems. They are separated by language, cultural norms, and — in many cases — by the direct experience of violence, loss, and displacement. A mediator who does not understand the cultural context of both parties cannot build the trust that mediation requires. A process conducted entirely in English, by a mediator trained exclusively in Western commercial mediation practice, will not reach an Iranian family navigating an inheritance dispute, or a Lebanese supplier trying to recover from a US counterparty, or a Syrian family seeking to resolve a custody arrangement across three jurisdictions. IMADRI's Culturally Matched Mediation™ model addresses this directly. The five-role bridge team — primary mediator, two cultural liaisons, and two language translators, each matched to the cultural and linguistic background of their respective party — ensures that every participant in the process is heard in their own language, understood in their own cultural frame, and represented by someone who can bridge the gap between their world and the mediator's. This is not a premium add-on. It is the foundation of a process that can actually work. --- ## Taking the First Step If your business, your organisation, or your family is navigating a dispute that conflict has made more complicated — whether the issue is a broken contract, an insurance claim, a property loss, or a family matter that spans borders — IMADRI can help. The first step is a confidential intake consultation. There is no obligation, and no information shared in that consultation will be disclosed to any other party. *[Submit a confidential inquiry through our Conflict-Affected Families intake form](/conflict-families), or [book a consultation directly](/book) to speak with a mediator.* --- *Daniel L. Glennon is the founder and principal mediator of IMADRI Global Mediation, LLC. He holds a JD, an LLM in International Law, and a Master of Publishing and International Law, and has completed executive education in AI in Business Strategy at Johns Hopkins University. IMADRI provides international mediation and alternative dispute resolution services to corporations, law firms, NGOs, and individuals worldwide.*