Third Parties

4 Key excerpts on "Third Parties"

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  eBook - ePub

  Ending Wars

  • Feargal Cochrane(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  There is a recognition here, of course, that Third Parties have often made wars worse, fanning the flames of violence by providing weapons and other resources to the direct actors due to vested political, economic or other strategic interests in keeping these wars going. William Zartman has noted that Third Parties have provided resources and sanctuary to conflict actors and have been used to provide leverage in war itself, as well as at the negotiating table. 2 While this chapter will point to occasions where Third Parties have had a destructive impact, the central focus will be on the efforts made to bring armed conflicts to an end. Third-party agencies have both constructive and destructive elements to them and the question to address is not so much can they help in the difficult task of ending war, but, rather, when and how can they do so? What is Third-Party Intervention? Like many other concepts in international relations, the precise meaning of a third party is potentially vast. In their handbook for political negotiators, the NGO International IDEA have provided a useful working definition of third-party intervention that is sufficiently broad to be used here. A third party – a person, group, institution or country that is not identified directly or indirectly with any of the parties or interests to the conflict – can be very effective in chairing or facilitating the talks process. And a long-standing conflict, especially where there is considerable stalemate or just staleness of view, can benefit from the fresh perspective of newcomers. The first two important questions are: Do we need a third party? And, if so, who? 3 A further question could be added to this list, namely what should the third party do when they intervene? The story of external third-party intervention at the transnational level is bound up with the changes that took place at the end of the Cold War period during the early 1990s

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  eBook - ePub

  Social Conflicts And Third Parties

  Strategies Of Conflict Resolution

  • Jacob Bercovitch(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Outcome objectives figure much more prominently in the respondents’ replies. This is to be expected. International conflict can have such destructive consequences, that if it were not to be defused, limited, or regulated, it could threaten the very existence of some of the parties involved. Amongst the primary objectives of a third party is the need to convince the parties to accept a peaceful settlement of differences. Count Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator in Palestine in 1948, in considering his mediatory efforts, described his objective thus:

  What is my role as a mediator…I have but one purpose, to leave no stone unturned in my efforts to bring about a peaceful adjustment of the situation. (U.N. Doc. A/648)

  Granted that Third Parties intervene in a conflict with a view to controlling or arresting destructive, conflict and achieving a desired outcome, the basic question which comes to mind concerns the ways by which they achieve their objectives. How do Third Parties condition the process of intervention and the nature of their behavior in a manner which corresponds to their overall objective? The achievement of their objectives is made possible by specific behavior. It is to this aspect that I now turn.

  Third Party Behavior

  The nature of third party objectives, the issues at stake, and the conflict context are of crucial significance to understanding the types of behavior which may be undertaken by a third party. A third party may be an individual, an organization, or another state which is in some way external to a conflict. A third party enters an existing relationship and attempts to induce a change in this relationship. How can it do so? What is the nature of its inputs and the types of behavior congruent with its objectives? How can a third party lead to the development of more productive conflict management?

  The behavior of Third Parties in international conflicts can vary in terms of (a) the resources committed to its intervention, (b) its degree of penetration, (c) formality of intervention, and (d) intensity of intervention. Here I wish to adopt a different scheme and suggest that the behavior of Third Parties in the context of international conflict management can be best described in terms of two broad categories relating to the process of decision making and negotiation; these are (a) information-search (e.g. establish communication, search for common principles), and (b) social influence, (e.g. persuading the parties to converge on an acceptable outcome).

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  eBook - ePub

  Criminal Justice and Regulation Revisited

  Essays in Honour of Peter Grabosky

  • Lennon Y.C. Chang, Russell Brewer(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Third Parties in regulatory systems have been primarily studied from an ahistorical and state-centric perspective and the extent to which they aid regulatory efficiency and effectiveness. They have been viewed as a means of centralising the virtue or public good that lies at the heart of the regulatory system. This chapter has looked beyond the centre to explore Third Parties as legal, social and political actors energised by a meld of private and public interests. These have acted as both collaborative and co-producing prosecutors when authorities (or the state) have been unable or unwilling to do so (Bartley, 2007). These Third Parties have acted whether the state was weak or strong. Rather than strong regulator and regulatee choreographing inclusion, of deciding ‘who should be involved and how’ (Black, 2008: 141), democratic interests were empowered under their own will (Grabosky, 2013).

  The chapter’s examples, drawn from domestic and international criminal justice, have focused on Third Parties stepping up to request, demand, press for or conduct prosecution of wrongdoing. They have done so on the basis that all are equal before the law and the law’s protection applies equally. These are legal claims but are also the political activity of citizens; demands made on state authorities. As directly-affected individuals, mutual associations of those victimised, public interest groups and in their more recent formally or statutorily established forms, these Third Parties have sought to end impunity of perpetrators and to produce the ‘good’ of justice. While these activities may be described as ‘politicising’ accountability, arguably they are demonstrations of a shared interest in the normative content of the regulatory system.

  In setting out different levels at which Third Parties take action, from individual to collective, it is clear that the ‘empowerment’ envisaged in tripartism emerges differently in the regulatory system of criminal justice. For directly-affected individuals there is the symbolic, albeit transitory, power of prosecution in their situation. However, for staying power, the accrued knowledge of repeat players, amassing resources, development of experience and capacity (Ayres and Braithwaite, 1991) and the deepening of normative authority, then a stronger place lies in some collective form. Victimised individuals and groups find strength in mutualities, but they are stronger still in a third party space deliberately structured as an independent and integral component of the institutional design of the regulatory framework of criminal justice.

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  The Intermediaries

  Third Parties in International Crises

  • Oran R. Young(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  It is hoped that local crises can be prevented from taking on the character of system-wide crises with the consequent implications for stability. THIRD-PARTY INTERVENTION Crises of various kinds are virtually certain to be promi- nent occurrences in the future. The problems of regulating them and facilitating their termination are, therefore, im- portant subjects for analysis and study. This section focuses on the nature of third-party intervention and the various functions a third party can perform in facilitating the termination of severe international crises. Particular atten- tion is devoted to the underlying sources of the roles in the bargaining processes characteristic of two-sided inter- national crises, the variety of functions involved, and special characteristics of the international arena which are likely to create problems for an intervenor. The materials on the sources and functions of third-party actions tend to merge, but a partial separation will be made along these lines for the purposes of discussion. A. Sources of Third-Party Roles It is extremely difficult in the contemporary world to hypothecate an international crisis which is, strictly speak- ing, a zero-sum situation in the sense that the gains of one side are exactly equal to the losses of the other side. On the contrary, international crises tend to have a very distinct competitive-cooperative flavor 29 and they may sometimes even take on the quality of positive-sum situations. The re- 29 On competitive-cooperative conflict see in general Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1960), chap. 4. 25 THE INTERMEDIARIES lationship between the two sides is basically a constant bargaining process carried on through a wide variety of declaratory moves and concrete actions. And there are few cases, even between the bitterest of enemies, in which significant rules and limitations are not observed.

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