PrintStep 3 - Ensure Conflict Ripeness
Step 3
Ensure Conflict Ripeness testing
In addition to ensuring that he or she is ready to tackle a conflict, the mediator should also ensure that the conflict is ready to be tackled — that it is, in professional parlance, ripe for resolution.
Ensuring conflict ripeness is presented here as the third step in the mediation process, but it actually consists of two activities — assessing ripeness and enhancing ripeness — that will probably be initiated at different times: assessment early on, while the conflict as a whole is being assessed, and enhancement later, once the mediator has determined that he or she is ready and able to tackle this conflict. Once begun, however, both activities will run in tandem, with the mediator adjusting his or her enhancement strategy in line with the conflict's fluctuating level of ripeness.
Phases of escalation, de-escalation, or stalemate in a conflict's lifecycle call for distinct mediation approaches. Some approaches address mounting risks, others address unsustainable burdens or sunk costs. The parties' trust in a mediator pursuing any approach will be colored by the outcomes of previous mediation attempts. Some earlier attempts, even if ultimately unsuccessful, may have established a foundation for future negotiations. Earlier outright failures or abandoned attempts, by contrast, may have left legacies of suspicion and cynicism.
Assess Ripeness
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Many mediation studies give considerable attention to the concept of conflict ripeness. A conflict may become ripe for negotiation when antagonists recognize that they are in a mutually hurting stalemate and sense that a way out is possible. Both sides become aware they cannot defeat the enemy outright and that continued violence not only will be costly and ineffective but will risk weakening their situation. A related conceptualization of ripeness is the moment when antagonists recognize their interdependence and that important goals cannot be achieved without the other side. The two sides must also have a sense that some mutually acceptable settlement formula is available to them.
Parties not only must perceive the stalemate to be painful but also must be strong and coherent enough to make decisions and deliver on them.
Finally, for ripeness to be complete, there must be strong support for a peace process among both internal political actors and the public.
In 1989, the FMLN and the government of El Salvador recognized that their respective military efforts were costly and would be unsuccessful. The outlines of a mutually satisfactory peace agreement also became evident, and serious negotiations mediated by Alvaro de Soto on behalf of the United Nations commenced in 1990.
Enhance Ripeness
A mediator should make judgments about how best to intervene to help ripen the conflict and to create a readiness to negotiate among the parties. Effective mediators convince parties (particularly those actors with decision-making power or influence in the conflict) that goals cannot be achieved through continued violence and that other means are possible and practical. A mediator may follow several paths of persuasion in the effort to induce a change in antagonists' perspectives.
Help Elites Understand Costs and Benefits
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Elites may be relatively insulated from the costs and consequences of violence. Credible third parties can increase elite awareness by providing information and documentation and sharing analyses. Even familiar facts become more convincing or less deniable when presented by a new actor. Patterns of interdependence can also be explored and explained.
Mediators may also educate elites about lost opportunities or potential benefits of conflict termination, offering different scenarios or introducing feasible alternatives and the possibility of sharing burdens. Education can help elites recalculate the costs of continued conflict and see the benefits of searching for peace.
The prospect of losing substantial amounts of international financial assistance was a jointly recognized factor that brought pressure on the two parties to the conflict in Kenya in 2008.
Increase Pressure on Elites through Accountability
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Recalcitrant actors may pursue violent conflict despite its costs to society. Direct personal costs can be increased if actors understand they will be held accountable for their actions. Mediators can promote accountability in a number of ways. The first involves appealing to transcendent or locally legitimate principles (e.g., patriotic duty, responsibility to the people, a leader's place in history). Mediators may make this case directly or may offer platforms to locally acknowledged voices of moral, cultural, or religious authority to make such arguments to elites.
Mediators may also use formal institutions and practices to promote accountability. This might include gathering evidence regarding human rights abuses or corruption for the purposes of documenting and publicizing leadership failings. This evidence may also be used in judicial review, if not in local courts then via transnational jurisdictions or international tribunals. Mediators may choose to utilize third-party advocates or experts.
A third avenue for fostering elite accountability is to turn an international spotlight on the conflict, perhaps via media attention or the involvement of international organizations, NGOs, or international solidarity groups. All these avenues bring pressure on elites to appreciate the costs of their continued commitment to the pursuit of violence.
An alternative approach is not to hold elites accountable. If obdurate elites are an obstacle to peace, then granting them impunity (in the form of amnesty, asylum, or the promise not to prosecute) may be a step toward getting parties to the negotiating table. However, granting impunity risks compromising justice for the sake of peace, which can create challenges for acceptance and implementation of an agreement. If granting impunity is among the tactics used, a mediator must decide how to limit any deleterious consequences on the peace process and its outcome, perhaps by using alternative mechanisms for transitional justice.
A qualified approach to amnesty was incorporated in the creation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which provided criminal and civil amnesty to individuals in exchange for full confessions. Individuals who did not confess their crimes were subject to prosecution, and information from other confessions could be used in such prosecutions.
Cultivate Leaders Who Can Assume Responsibility for Negotiations
If top leaders are unwilling to negotiate, are other potential leaders more amenable to entering negotiations? Attention from a mediator can raise the stature of such potential leaders; communications can help build new coalitions of support for a peace process. However, such efforts risk backfiring if they appear manipulative. Mediators must work with leaders who possess internal legitimacy and support.
Create Balance between Parties
Another way to create a stalemate and foster readiness to negotiate is to strengthen the weaker side in a conflict, helping to create an objective balance of power. This may include helping the weaker side by providing material resources or by encouraging it to think through strategies, build coalitions, and find advocates and allies.
The international community had to provide logistical support to the rebel group RENAMO in order for its leaders to be full participants in the Mozambique peace process.
Change the Costs and Benefits of the Conflict
In order to persuade leaders to change their calculation vis-a-vis costs and benefits of pursuing the conflict, is it possible to change the actual costs and benefits? A mediator with the resources to do so may induce antagonists to turn to negotiation through a variety of means that change the context of the conflict. These include the threat or imposition of sanctions (e.g., travel restrictions, financial sanctions, arms embargoes, and trade embargoes, especially on conflict commodities such as diamonds or timber) as well as the offer of aid, the provision of reconstruction programs, or the commitment of outside parties to guarantee a peace settlement.
Take into Account the Legacies of Previous Mediation Attempts
Much can be learned from previous efforts to mediate the conflict at hand and from efforts to mediate other conflicts, especially conflicts in the same region or with similar causes. In addition to examining case studies and maintaining familiarity with the mediation literature more broadly, the mediator can learn much from interviews with other mediators, their support staff, and others with firsthand experience of previous mediation initiatives.
Assess Positive and Negative Results of Previous Efforts
Previous interrupted or unsuccessful attempts at mediation affect subsequent initiatives and cannot be ignored. A mediator should understand the legacies of previous mediation efforts before embarking on a new one.
On the one hand, there may be something to build upon, including negotiation skills conferred, relationships forged, or mechanisms established. Rather than squandering previous accomplishments, subsequent mediations should attempt to harness these.
In the 1990s, when conditions were finally ripe for a settlement of the Ecuador-Peru border dispute, mediators were able to use the four-country guarantor structure established by the 1942 Rio Protocol. In the intervening years, the four guarantors had grown accustomed to dealing with the problem, and Peru and Ecuador had come to recognize and welcome their authority.
On the other hand, unsuccessful peace processes can promote conflict intractability. Failed negotiations may leave parties convinced of the futility of talks and with a more intransigent view of opponents. Partiality or incompetence on the part of previous negotiators may have generated suspicion and distrust of subsequent mediators. After unsuccessful talks, associated reasonable proposals may become discredited and deemed intrinsically flawed. Unimplemented settlements may raise general cynicism and discourage potential donors and allies from supporting a process.
Consider New Sequencing of Decisions, New Settlement Formulas, and New Actors
If previous attempts have failed, what can a new mediator do? An important first step is to acknowledge that the failure is now part of the conflict history and to analyze the failure with the parties to develop a shared understanding of what happened and to renew trust in mediators and mediation. Other steps include sequencing decisions differently than in the earlier process or introducing new settlement formulas. New actors — not only new individual mediators but new types of mediators — may also be able to make progress. If a previous Track-I attempt failed, perhaps a weak mediator is needed to reopen lines of communication. If the earlier unsuccessful attempt was track-II, perhaps the conflict now calls for the full public commitment of Track-I actors.
Whether earlier efforts to launch a peace process have been outright failures or partial successes, the information, perspectives, insights, and experience generated by those earlier endeavors should be absorbed by the new mediator.
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