A SMART golf course hotel in southern Norway is not where you would expect to bump in to a couple of Afghan Taliban. But at the Oslo Forum Network of Mediators no one batted an eyelid. For once, an earnest discussion on “Talking to the Taliban”—scheduled on June 23rd, the day after Barack Obama announced he would be pulling 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by next year—actually meant talking to real-life Taliban.

The forum, now in its ninth year, is hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD). It brings together high-powered professional peace negotiators to swap ideas about current conflicts and learn from past successes and failures. More fundamentally, the existence of the forum marks a shift in the way diplomats and others go about trying to solve conflicts that shatter lives and communities in different parts of the world.

The United Nations, still widely seen as the go-to organisation for peacemaking, is hobbled in what it can do by competing political agendas, while America's appetite for elbow-twisting diplomacy has waned. Smaller countries that have specialised in mediation, such as the Scandinavians and Switzerland, have become more risk-averse about engaging with armed groups. The result is that certain types of diplomacy are becoming privatised. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), some with roots in aid-giving and disaster relief are playing an ever greater role in conflict resolution.

In what has become a crowded field, the biggest players are: the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) based in Helsinki and founded in 2000 by Martti Ahtisaari, a former president of Finland; the Carter Centre's Conflict Resolution Programme, which helped win Jimmy Carter the Nobel peace prize in 2002; the Congress-funded but independent United States Institute of Peace (USIP); and HD, which was established in 1999 by Martin Griffiths, a British diplomat and former UN assistant secretary-general.

HD started out with the idea of promoting innovation in humanitarian interventions, but quickly decided to concentrate on mediation and conflict resolution. Its first engagement was an attempt to mediate between the government of Indonesia and Free Aceh, a movement fighting for the region's independence. After mapping out a peace process and presiding over many months of negotiations, HD succeeded in getting both parties to Geneva in 2002 to sign an agreement to stop hostilities. It lasted for less than six months. In the aftermath of the tsunami in December 2004, HD tried again, eventually handing over the process to CMI, which managed to secure a peace agreement eight months later.

The setback in Aceh—which HD's Asia director, Michael Vatikiotis, says was partly due to underestimating the pressures on the Indonesian government from the army—was followed by a fallow period for HD. Its only main projects were a long, frustrating attempt to pave the way for reform and dialogue in Myanmar and a more successful mission to initiate talks between the government of Nepal and the Maoist guerrillas that eventually led to an India-brokered peace agreement in 2006. Yet since 2005 HD has been busy working in many of the world's most violent places, including the Philippines, Somalia, the Central African Republic and Sudan. Asked by Kofi Annan to support his reconciliation efforts in Kenya after the disputed 2007 election, HD helped bring about the power-sharing agreement that put an end to the inter-tribal violence that had claimed over 1,000 lives.

Judging the achievements of HD and its peers is inherently difficult. In many cases they take on long-running arguments between parties that have not previously shown much interest in finding a solution to their differences. Successes are often fleeting. Ceasefire agreements can lead to more far-reaching dialogues or they can quickly break down. When there is success, as Mr Vatikiotis points out, clients prefer to take the credit themselves rather than acknowledge the role of the mediation. Secrecy is a condition of many of the engagements HD takes on.

Making things even more difficult, private conflict-resolution outfits—unlike states or even the UN—are “weak” rather than “strong” mediators. They cannot impose sanctions on warring parties, except by walking away (which is not easy if this means losing funding). And to get adversaries to implement what has been agreed, mediators have nothing other than the reward of peace itself as encouragement. Another concern is the effect of competition between mediation organisations. The scramble to be involved in Darfur meant duplication of effort and accusations of unseemly touting for business. The job of reconciling tribal factions in post-Qaddafi Libya is likely to be contested with equal vigour.

Yet private mediators also have substantial advantages over their state equivalents. They lack the political baggage that diplomats carry, which sometimes means warring parties are more willing to talk to them. They are not bogged down by official caution and bureaucracy, so they can move fast and be creative. Above all, they can take bigger risks over whom they will talk to and in what circumstances. Often state officials are not allowed to have contact with armed groups or terrorists, either for legal reasons or because of fears that this would confer legitimacy (American and European diplomats do not talk officially to Hamas, for example). HD started out working mainly on so-called “Track One” mediation involving diplomacy at government level. But Mr Vatikiotis now thinks that “Track Two” initiatives, which work through other channels when official ones are blocked, can smooth the way to more formal peace talks.

The Norwegian government is HD's biggest donor, providing nearly half its annual funding of around $15m. Norway had a torrid time trying to mediate between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government. It ended up being criticised for clinging too long to a process that had become discredited by the Tigers' lack of serious negotiating intent.

“If you are not prepared to take risks, you should stay out,” Jonas Gahr Store, Norway's foreign minister, says of the conflict-resolution business. But he argues that reputational risks can be reduced by working with organisations like HD, which he regards as a “highly skilled strategic partner”. About a third of the $100m a year his department spends on conflict resolution goes to NGOs. He dismisses the idea that mediators have become too numerous or that the money may not be well spent. “There is enough conflict and suffering for all,” he says. “We have a system that measures progress and which holds our interlocutors to account.”

One nagging worry, however, was shared by many of those at the Oslo Forum. Last year the American Supreme Court upheld a contentious section of the Patriot Act that outlaws giving “material support” to designated terrorist groups, including “expert advice or assistance”. Since the law applies outside America, this means that contacts with proscribed organisations could leave mediators open to prosecution. More than 40 NGO bigwigs, who fear that the court's decision is chilling the efforts of peacemakers, have already petitioned Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state. Mr Vatikiotis is more sanguine, arguing that it is not really in America's interest to come down hard on mediators. “It's just another risk that has to be managed.”