Conflict Management and African Politics

Ripeness, Bargaining, and Mediation

Terrence Lyons, Gilbert M. Khadiagala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415609395
• eBook ISBN: 9781134068494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume builds on a core set of concepts developed by I. William Zartman to offer new insights into conflict management and African politics. Key concepts such as ripe moments, hurting stalemates, and collapsed states, are built upon in order to show how conflict resolution theory may be applied to contemporary challenges, particularly in Africa. The contributors explore means of pre-empting negotiations over bribery, improving outcomes in environmental negotiations, boosting the capacity of mediators to end violent conflicts, and finding equitable negotiated outcomes. Other issues dealt with in the book include the negotiation of relations with Europe, the role of culture in African conflict resolution, the means to enhance security in unstable regional environments, and the strategic role of the United States in mediating African conflicts.

This book will be of much interest to students of international conflict management, peace/conflict studies, African politics and IR in general.

1
Conflict management and African politics

Framing the links

Terrence Lyons and Gilbert M. Khadiagala

This book investigates a series of diverse but interconnected questions that are inspired by the work of I. William Zartman. In an era when tenuous boundaries persisted between studies of international relations and comparative politics, Zartman’s scholarship has always sought to create conceptual and analytical linkages between the sub-disciplines. A brief illustration of this academic straddling: he has deployed realist/neorealist assumptions to the study of African international relations, elite theories to understanding leadership in North Africa, and bargaining theories to analyses of Panama Canal negotiations and the Oslo peace process. More critical, he has bridged the gaps between North and Sub-Saharan Africa at a moment when most scholars invoke linguistic and cultural differences to build walls between the two regions. Over the years, with a remarkable intellectual energy, Zartman’s academic bridge building has coalesced around the fields of bargaining and conflict management. Conflict management culminated Zartman’s efforts to reconcile the sub-disciplines, but at the same time has allowed Zartman to transcend the narrow confines of political science by probing the contributions of social psychology and economics.

Grounded solidly in the Africanist and international relations domains, Zartman’s work has drawn inspiration from both, creatively moving back and forth from the two arenas, in an intellectual excursion that has been matched by few of his peers. For instance, from analyses of the rich empirical materials relating to the protracted negotiations between Europe and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, Zartman crafted the preliminary parameters of what became his long-standing interest in bargaining and negotiations. From a modest study of negotiations under conditions of structural asymmetry, this work on Europe and Africa mushroomed into a significant contribution to bargaining theory. Similarly, in the mid-1980s, Zartman’s Ripe for Resolution, used cases from Africa’s sub-regions to propose hypothesis that were instructive in building the foundations for theories of conflict management that have found global resonance. In the late 1990s, Zartman’s conceptual interest in the tripartite structure of grievances—need, creed, and greed—helped inform the sources and courses of African civil wars, but has equally been relevant in comparative studies in other civil war contexts.

For Zartman, Africa has always been a laboratory for teasing out big comparative ideas in international relations and political science in general. This is partly because Africa’s diversity offers a wider menu of empirical data that is relevant elsewhere. But more important, Zartman has often counseled against the fallacy of uniqueness, insisting on appraising African events within the frame of conventional ideas and theories. It is by this conviction that he has moved comfortably between the two arenas, defying the standard bureaucratic boundaries (particularly between “area studies” and “theoretical studies”) that dominate the study of political science. By bridging these arenas, Zartman’s work has also spoken to larger policy audiences. The essence of Zartman’s ability to reconcile the sub-disciplines and traverse geographical boundaries is the conception that he derives from David Easton and other system analysts that views the art of government and politics as conflict management:

Governing is conflict management. In the long-established systemic understanding of governing, demands emerge from the body politic and are brought to the attention of the governors, who then handle them as best as they can and will. But these demands are never harmonious and are often downright contradictory, so that interest aggregation and policy choice become the crucial exercise of governing … . Conflicts among domestic demands and demanders are rarely eliminated; they are only reduced, satificed, downgraded, contained, at best, until the demanders get new ammunition, new evidence, new pressure, new followers, or until new issues and demands break up their ranks and overshadow their earlier appeals. Issue realignment then causes new demands and demanders to enter into new conflicts for the governor’s attention, but that does not prevent old demands from remaining or reemerging. Management of conflict means reacting responsively to reduce demands in a manner consistent with human dignity so that the conflict does not escalate into violence.¹

Zartman’s vast body of work has contributed to the development of a number of key concepts, including ripe moments, the diagnosis–formula–details sequencing of negotiations, mediator roles and questions of leverage and timing, state collapse, and regional subsystems. The significance of these tools of analysis may be seen by their flexibility. As demonstrated by the authors included in this volume, Zartman’s conceptual framework continues to be used and added to by a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines. Ripe moments and the related concepts of mutually hurting stalemates and mutually enticing opportunities, for example, have been applied to illuminate diverse cases beyond the initial international negotiations and African case studies Zartman used in developing the concept. Scholars have used quantitative methods, game theory, and other forms of investigation beyond Zartman’s comparative case study approach. The elasticity of the concept of ripeness has generated an enduring body of research across the social sciences.

While firmly grounded in a range of theoretical approaches as well as the literature and cases of Africa, Zartman also kept one eye on the policymaking world. Through his work at Johns Hopkins University, Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies he has trained a generation of policy makers who have taken up positions of influence in Washington, across Africa, and around the globe. His engagement with policy makers in Washington and elsewhere was based in the belief that good public policies are anchored in good, theoretically informed and empirically tested social science. Zartman has the rare ability to speak to policy makers and tell them something new but in a way that they can understand.

The contributors to this book build on the overarching theme of conflict management to reflect on Zartman’s scholarship in negotiations, mediation, conflict resolution, and African studies. Some of the chapters borrow distinctive themes such as ripe moments, mutually hurting stalemates, and the tripartite process approach of diagnosis–formula–details to explain a specific problem. A majority of the chapters, however, draw conceptual inspiration from some aspect of Zartman’s work to lend deeper understanding to a given subject.

Part I of the book begins with three chapters on negotiation theory that refine and expand on elements of Zartman’s core conceptual framework. Alan Kuperman takes on one of Zartman’s most important contributions, his concept of “ripeness.” Kuperman wants to refine the analytical value of the concept by delimiting its boundaries more distinctly than Zartman has done. Ripeness theory also has a prescriptive implication and Kuperman recommends that external parties should “ripen” conflicts so that sincere negotiations may commence. Kuperman uses the example of Bosnia to point out the potential for the use of leverage to bring parties to accept a peace agreement. While this use of leverage helped create the conditions for the Dayton agreement in Bosnia, Kuperman argues that mistaken efforts to use brinkmanship to ripen conflicts in Rwanda and Kosovo backfired with devastating consequences.

Bert Spector’s chapter probes the links between Zartman’s notion of ripeness and efforts to combat bribery. He argues that Zartman’s extension of the ripeness theory to include incentives and mutually enticing opportunities permits policy makers more room to engineer negotiated settlements. In an innovative conceptual venture, Spector contends that since bribery involves negotiations about benefits and incentives, the policy puzzle in anti-corruption efforts needs to be the creation of conditions that minimize such benefits and, thereby, obviate the attractiveness of such illicit bargains. Spector, thereby, demonstrates that Zartman’s core insight regarding ripe moments can be developed further and applied in efforts to combat bribery that are far beyond Zartman’s initial focus on international negotiations. Zartman’s standpoint that politics and negotiations are two closely related ways of understanding more universal processes of conflict management suggests that concepts developed in one sphere, such as the roles of ripe moments, may be applied over a vast range of cases.

Chasek and Wagner revisit one of Zartman’s earliest contributions to negotiation theory, the conceptualization of negotiations as a sequence that tends to move from diagnosis to formula to details. Chasek and Wagner demonstrate the continued importance of this insight through correlation and content analysis methods. Using thirteen cases of multilateral environmental negotiations, they pinpoint key phases and turning points in their modified six-phase continuum to explain the complexities of arriving at outcomes. While negotiations rarely move in a strictly linear series of steps, Chasek and Wagner’s study finds that sequencing and turning points do shape the environmental conflicts they investigate. These conflicts enable them to enrich and broaden Zartman’s initial typology in ways that are instructive to policy makers steeped in international negotiations.

The next two chapters probe how the international system shapes outcomes of negotiations and conflicts in Africa. Khadiagala uses Zartman’s ideas on Euro-African relations to trace the major evolutionary phases in the relationship. He argues that Zartman’s contributions inhere in elaborating a consistent thesis of change and continuity that has stood the test of time. In reflecting on Europe’s role in Africa, Zartman articulated the vision of gradual reduction of postcolonial responsibilities, particularly, as Europe ceded some of these responsibilities to multilateral actors and agencies. The challenge for Africa, Zartman maintained, was how it would seize the opportunities incumbent upon residual European presence and attention to build a capacity for self-responsibility. Khadiagala argues that the monumental task of translating postcolonial privileges into responsibilities that Zartman identified continues to inform the contemporary African institution building at national, regional, and continental levels.

Lyons takes two concepts from Zartman, the idea of regional subsystems and the model of a collapsed state, to see if West Africa may be understood as a region in collapse. While West Africa is clearly a regional conflict system, Lyons suggests that viewing collapse as a process that results in a power vacuum misses the alternative power structures that develop as the formal state and regional structures recede. Non-state actors such as militias and criminal networks thrive and sustain collapse at both the state and regional levels. Analysis of regional systems, Lyons argues, is important to understand the nature of contemporary conflicts but conflict resolution and the reconstruction of order and authority must begin at the state level.

The final three chapters focus on issues of conflict and conflict resolution in Africa. Donald Rothchild provides a deeply detailed and empirically rich treatment of two major conflicts in Africa and the relative success of US initiatives to manage them. He finds that a number of Zartman’s concepts, including ripe moments and issues relating to the importance of mediator leverage, help us understand US foreign policy toward Liberia and Sudan in the early 2000s. Rothchild further builds on Zartman’s framework to suggest that Washington’s policy toward conflict in Africa represents “indirect mediation” as the United States seeks to encourage African leaders and institutions to take the lead.

Fadzai Gwarazimba revisits the theme of mutually hurting stalemate, underscoring its significance in understanding the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. But she contends that while a mutual hurting stalemate characterized the moment of the transition, the hasty nature of the transition allowed the parties to gloss over the key bone of contention—landlessness of Zimbabwe’s Africans, an issue that reemerged with virulence in the 1990s. As Zimbabwe’s totters on the brink of collapse, Gwarazimba ponders whether the moment is ripe for a transition with justice and respect for the downtrodden.

Fred-Mensah reflects on Zartman’s interrogation on the role of culture in conflict resolution. Zartman has been a skeptic with regard to the influence of culture in negotiations and once suggested that “culture is to negotiation what birds flying into engines are to flying airplanes or, at most, what weather is to aerodynamics—practical impediments that need to be taken into account (and avoided) once the basic process is fully understood and implemented.”² In the edited volume Traditional Cures for Modern Conflicts, however, Zartman goes beyond Western models of conflict resolution to examine African models. Fred-Mensah argues that “indigenous” rather than traditional is a more useful way of understanding the principles and values that support conflict resolution in Africa and concludes that the indigenous has a distinctive capacity to promote resolution.

Building on Zartman’s work and moving into new and innovative territory, this book aims to encourage future generations to stretch the conceptual envelope in lending insights to international relations and Africanist scholarship. How and when does mediation work in such disparate arenas as large environmental negotiations and illicit deals relating to bribery? How and in what ways does the international system shape how African states access trade and financial flows from Europe or how do regional systems collapse into violent warfare? How do policies of indirect mediation by great powers, the need to address issues of justice to sustain peace, and indigenous values shape the fundamental challenges of war and peace in Africa? This book is both rooted in conceptual frameworks developed by Zartman but builds and expands this point of view to explore new puzzles and suggestive new models.

Notes

1 I. William Zartman, “Governance as Conflict Management in West Africa,” in Zartman (ed.), Governance as Conflict Management, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1997, p. 9.

2 I. William Zartman, “A Skeptics View,” in Guy Olivier Faure and Jeffrey Z. Rubin (eds), Culture and Negotiation, Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 19.

Part I
New research on negotiation theory

2
Ripeness revisited

The perils of muscular mediation

Alan J. Kuperman

Among Bill Zartman’s many contributions to the literature of conflict management, his most prominent is the concept of “ripeness.” It argues that violent conflicts cannot be ended by negotiation unless they are “ripe for resolution”—meaning the contending parties perceive themselves in a painful deadlock from which the only plausible escape is negotiation. Among academics, the theory is, hardly, uncontroversial. Indeed, Zartman’s harshest critics deride it as “tautological”—an unfair charge, as he demonstrated in a 2,000 essay that helpfully clarified his argument.¹ Nevertheless, the concept would benefit from further refinement to clarify the following three points: ripeness is necessary only for equitable settlements of protracted violent conflicts; mediators can sometimes ripen a conflict without inducing a hurting stalemate; and if not done carefully, mediator attempts at ripening can backfire terribly.

Ripeness theory

The implicit assumption of Zartman’s theory is that parties to violent conflict are not fully rational due to the passions of war. This explains why, in the midst of such conflict, they ordinarily will not negotiate sincerely with each other to explore potential negotiated outcomes that could benefit all parties. Instead, they typically seek victory through escalation. So long as they perceive victory as attainable, any participation in negotiations will be insincere and only for instrumental reasons such as...

Table of contents

• Conflict Management and African Politics
• Security and conflict management
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Conflict management and African politics
• Part I New research on negotiation theory
• Part II The international relations of Africa
• Part III Conflict and conflict resolution in Africa
• Index