International Negotiation and Mediation in Violent Conflict

The Changing Context of Peacemaking

Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, Pamela Aall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351785013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection of essays situates the study and practice of international mediation and peaceful settlement of disputes within a changing global context.

The book is organized around issues of concern to practitioners, including the broader regional, global, and institutional context of mediation and how this broader environment shapes the opportunities and prospects for successful mediation. A major theme is complexity, and how the complex contemporary context presents serious challenges to mediation. This environment describes a world where great-power rivalries and politics are coming back into play, and international and regional organizations are playing different roles and facing different kinds of constraints in the peaceful settlement of disputes. The first section discusses the changing international environment for conflict management and reflects on some of the challenges that this changing environment raises for addressing conflict. Part II focuses on the consequences of bringing new actors into third-party engagement and examines what may be harbingers for how we will attempt to resolve conflict in the future. The third section turns to the world of practice, and discusses mediation statecraft and how to employ it in this current international environment. The volume aims to situate the practice and study of mediation within this wider social and political context to better understand the opportunities and constraints of mediation in today's world. The value of the book lies in its focus on complex and serious issues that challenge both mediators and scholars.

This volume will be of much interest to students, practitioners, and policymakers in the area of international negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution and international relations.

Part I

Changing environment for conflict management

1 Systemic change and conflict management¹

Students of conflict management and international negotiation processes are keenly aware that the international system is changing in profound ways. These changes have enormous implications, not just for the way we “do” conflict management, but also for the institutions that were crafted after the Second World War and the actors involved in maintaining global peace and security. We are living in an era marked by the diffusion of power and influence in the international system, growing populism, rising nationalism, rapid technological change brought on by the internet and the era of “big data,” and a world where religion has supplanted ideology as a major driver of conflict. Global inequality between states, which is a still a prominent feature of the international system, is now accompanied by growing inequality within states, and these inequalities are not confined to the states of the global south. Many also believe that Western societies are losing internal coherence and a sense of social purpose in this new environment.

The central issue addressed in this book is the role of diplomacy, negotiation, and mediation in addressing the vital issues of global peace and security as we approach the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

At a time when some believe that these tools of soft power have lost much of their cutting edge, because they require a certain kind of leadership and institutional coherence at the national and international levels to be effective, we argue that they are just as relevant if not more so today to promote stability and avert conflict at both the international, regional, and local levels. Hard power—or the “big stick” (Cohen 2017)—is an unwieldy and blunt instrument when used to manage and resolve conflict in many situations. That is not to say that diplomacy should not be backed by credible threats of force when required. But there is ample historical evidence to demonstrate that “using it” without carefully thinking through the long-term consequences of military intervention may well mean “losing it” when it comes to achieving political objectives and securing long-term security and stability. The aftermath of American-led interventions in Iraq and Libya point to some of these dangers.

As March and Olsen (1998) explain,

The history of political orders is written in terms of changes in domestic and international political relations. At some periods in some areas, political life has been rather well organized around well-defined boundaries, common rules and practices, shared causal and normative understandings, and resources adequate for collective action. At other times and places, the system has been relatively anarchic. Relations have been less orderly; boundaries less well-defined; and institutions less common, less adequately supported, and less involved.

(March and Olsen 1998: 943–944)

The second decade of the twenty-first century is one of those times. The global environment is in flux and experiencing much greater turbulence than the Cold War era or its immediate aftermath when the US was the world’s last remaining superpower. The next chapter in this book discusses in greater detail the evolution and adaptation of the different tools of conflict management from the end of the Second World War to this century. In this chapter, we discuss how the international system is changing and the opportunities and risks some of these changes present for diplomacy, negotiation, mediation and the peaceful settlement of disputes.

A more unstable world

In retrospect, the Cold War—despite a number of crises, of which the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was the most dangerous—was a remarkably stable period in recent world history. The nuclear standoff between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, forced them to be prudent and to manage their rivalry in a way that avoided direct armed confrontation. A succession of military confidence-building and arms control agreements contributed to that stability.

The world today is much less stable. Russia and China are challenging the global order by trying to redraw territorial maps and establish new spheres of influence. Terrorism is on the rise, but its shape is also changing. The institutions of the liberal international order that were built at the end of the Second World War—the UN, NATO, and the Bretton Woods trade and investment regime—are compromised by challenges to their legitimacy from various quarters. Democratic values are also under attack, even in so called “Western” countries, with the emergence of a new brand of authoritarian leadership driven by chauvinism, racism, nationalist zeal and a desire to close borders. Mr. Trump’s stunning political upset is also part of that phenomenon.

There is widespread recognition that the international system is fracturing and that power is becoming more widely diffused, not only in terms of the distribution of power between states, but also in the relationship between states and their citizens with the rise and engagement of civil society in many corners of the globe. Many see a fracturing of regional and global systems, especially when it comes to the management of scarce resources and the environment. Conflict managers increasingly have to contend with a growing dispersion and fragmentation of political will and authority in the international system.

An emerging typology of conflicts

The diffusion of agency, authority and action may be characteristic of the new global environment, but it does not describe the kinds of conflicts that can be anticipated in the near future. Are there patterns that can be discerned about the nature and dynamics of conflict over the next decade? While prediction, especially in international relations, is a risky business, we describe five kinds of conflict patterns. In offering our own typology of extant and emerging conflict patterns, we recognize that there are many different ways to parse the world of international conflict. Some studies focus on the intrastate-versus-interstate dimensions to such conflicts (Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer 2003; Yilmaz 2007), although we believe that this dichotomy is somewhat artificial, because today’s conflicts have a tendency to “spill into” as well as “spill over” porous national boundaries (see, for example, Toft 2004). Other studies stress the role of variables such as ethnicity (Gurr 1993, 1994), “greed, creed and need” (Berdal 2005) horizontal inequalities (Stewart and FitzGerald 2001) social marginalization and injustice (Petersen 2002), relative deprivation, “the financial viability of rebel organizations” (Collier 2000, 2001; Collier et al. 2003) and “acute poverty combined with critical failures of governance” (Fearon and Laitin 2003).

The goal here is not to rehearse the extensive list of sources that are offered in the conflict literature, but to demarcate a few simple patterns that are especially salient to policymakers and that need to be considered in different strategies and tools of conflict management. We believe that any new typology of conflict must be sensitive to the changing dynamics of the global order and the fact that political identities and the perceived legitimacy of institutions (and the norms, intersubjective understandings and rules, and the behavioral expectations associated with them) are changing in ways that greatly complicate life for decision-makers and conflict managers. In such a world, it is wrong to simply assume that negotiations among so-called “rational” actors are based on what March and Olsen refer to as “stable, consistent, and exogenous preferences” (March and Olsen 1998: 950). Such preferences are no longer stable because hitherto accepted rules of behavior and identities that define actor roles (what March and Olsen refer to as the “logic of appropriateness” (ibid.: 949)) are being openly challenged on different levels—the domestic and the international. The following typology of conflict patterns highlights these sources of instability.

Conflicts over legitimacy

This is an emergent—or more accurately, reemerging—type of conflict, and its future shape and scope are visible today. It is characterized by competing visions about status, identity, and ownership in the regional and/or global order. Russia, for example, does not see itself as having a privileged place in the NATO- and European Union-led regional order and is actively working to secure its interests by extending its boundaries and “sphere of influence” into the territories of the former Soviet Union. Traditional notions of state sovereignty, territoriality, and the inviolability of state boundaries, which have been the bedrock of the contemporary international order, are also being challenged as countries like Russia and China flex their muscles and challenge prevailing norms of statehood and territoriality in their respective regional neighborhoods.

Issues of legitimacy also play out at the national level where political elites are finding their legitimacy thrown into doubt because the state cannot provide even the most minimal of public goods and/or provide for the basic welfare needs of citizens. Rising levels of inequality are also causing many citizens to question the social and economic foundations of the political order. Legitimacy in fractured states is not simply a question of who holds power and the terms on which they have come to power, but is also affected by the degree to which ordinary citizens see themselves as losing ownership over their own lives and political future. The risk of spillover and regional spread is clear. Unless handled skillfully, this type of conflict risks drawing in those powers on behalf of contending sides, creating a fresh layer of polarization.

Religion

Another source of conflict that plays into perceptions of political identity and legitimacy is religion, although it is not the only source of identity conflict. All theories of contemporary international politics are relatively secular and pay scant attention to religion’s importance as a driver of conflict.² As David Little (2006) argues,

So long as we looked at the conflicts through the lens of the Cold War, we saw them either as functions of east-west rivalry or as unimportant sideshows. However, what is important to remember is that, while the Cold War existed, conflicts like Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, and Northern Ireland, were there all along, but were unnoticed or not taken seriously. It was not that these conflicts suddenly erupted when the Cold War ended; it was that we began to perceive them in a new way.

(Little 2006: 95–96)

Religion can serve as a form of “soft” or “hard power.” In its “hard power” form it is a source of conflict and a driver of conflict processes. However, it is typically intermingled with other factors and tied to broader struggles about political legitimacy, power, and statehood. As David Smock (2008) explains,

Throughout the world, no major religion is exempt from complicity in violent conflict. Religious conviction certainly was one of the motivations for the September 11 attacks and other violent actions by Muslim extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan…. Yet we need to beware of an almost universal propensity to oversimplify the role that religion plays in international affairs. Iran’s international assertiveness is as much due to Iranian-Persian nationalism as it is to the dictates of Shiite clerics…. Similarly, in Iraq, conflict between Sunnis and Shiites rarely stems from differences over religious doctrine and practice, but rather from historical and contemporary competition for state power.

(Smock 2008: 2)

At the same time, religion as a kind of “soft power” can play an important constructive role in promoting peaceful change and the formation of new political identities. As noted by Little (2006), “religious actors in places like East Germany and Poland” played a critical role

in bringing about the nonviolent transformation from authoritarianism to democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The transformation was also linked to successful nonviolent action by more secular groups in places like former Czechoslovakia, and by religious groups in places outside the West, such as the Philippines, where…nonviolent religious groups, aided by the inactivity of the army, overthrew President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

(Little 2006: 96)

Conflicts arising from weak states

A third, more familiar category of conflict results from state fragility or failure leading to political collapse, a vacuum of authority, and humanitarian crisis. Such scenarios emerged with a vengeance after the Cold War ended and bipolarity came to a sudden end. Numerous factors contribute to the weak-state phenomenon, including the spread of criminal networks that undermine legitimate state authority, trade in arms and looted commodities, economic stagnation, the politics of greed and corruption that hollow out state institutions, and the manipulation of sectarian and ethnic diversity by political entrepreneurs. As a result, state weakness takes many forms and can descend into conflict along several pathways, some of which are more threatening to international order and the interests of major powers than others (Patrick 2011). A major share of such conflicts is recurrent cases, in which peace agreements break down (such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan), and intractable cases, in which peace efforts fail to get at the underlying sources of violent strife (such as the Naxalite conflict in India, the Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand, or the Tuareg rebellions affecting Mali and Niger). But as we are seeing in the Middle East and North Africa, some states have more or less collapsed (e.g., Libya) and are exporting their troubles as millions flee their homeland at great peril to themselves and their families in their quest for a better life and a more secure existence.

There is little reason to expect a decline in the number of conflicts flowing from fragile states with weak institutions. Many of the affected polities are still relatively “new,” and a period of time may be needed to build durable political institutions and to reduce the impact of personalized rule through patronage networks. External actors may be drawn into these largely internal conflicts selectively when there are overwhelming humanitarian arguments for applying some version of the responsibility to protect principle, or when there is a risk of a weak state falling into the hands of criminals, pirates, or terrorist groups. The latter is increasingly a more compelling logic for some states when it comes to intervention than the former. Cases such as northern Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, the southern Thailand insurgency, and the Mindanao conflict in the Philippines illustrate the risk that strictly “local” conflict dynamics can be hijacked by extremists and other external actors. Regional bodies, to the extent they have the political will and/or resources, will be the default responders in this category of conflicts. No major powers want to “own” them, which helps to explain why the United Nations is often drawn in to dampen things down and manage or mitigate the turbulence.

Existential conflicts

A fourth category of conflicts revolves around the perception of existential threats; in other words, threats to the existence or viability of one group due to the actions or attitudes of another group or groups. Because of the zero-sum nature of the dispute, these conflicts often become intractable. These existential conflicts are often found in turbulent zones that result from the collapse of empires and other complex multiethnic structures during or after major wars. They also feed into perceptions about the legitimacy of the regional and/or global order. A substantial portion of the most intractable cases derives from the circumstances ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Changing environment for conflict management
• Part II Rise and significance of complex models of third-party engagement
• Part III Implications for practitioners
• Bibliography
• Index