For eight months, a small mediation office that most residents of either country have never heard of has been quietly trying to keep a slow-burning border dispute from becoming something worse.

The disagreement, over a sparsely populated highland region along the Solenne frontier, has produced no violence and rarely makes the news. But fictional regional security analysts describe it as exactly the kind of unresolved dispute that can escalate quickly if either government needs a distraction at home.

“Nobody is going to war over this ridge line next month,” said a former negotiator involved in early rounds of talks. “But five years of neglect is how you get a crisis nobody planned for.”

Mediators have proposed a joint resource-management zone that would let both countries continue existing grazing and mineral-survey rights without formally resolving the underlying border question — an approach one participant described as “solving the problem by agreeing not to solve it yet.”

Officials from both governments have publicly downplayed the dispute even as they continue sending delegations to closed-door sessions. Neither side would confirm whether a framework agreement is close.

“The fact that they keep showing up to the room is itself the news,” the former negotiator said. “Nobody sends a delegation eight months running to a dispute they don’t take seriously.”