PrintStep 4 - Conduct Track-I Mediation
Step 4
Conduct Track-I Mediation
Once the mediator has assessed the conflict, determined his or her readiness to act and evaluated and, if necessary, enhanced ripeness, the mediator is ready to begin the fourth stage of the process: negotiation. Among the tasks that fall to the mediator at this stage are laying the groundwork, creating roles for all relevant actors, handling logistics, actually conducting negotiations, fitting the public into the process, and working with the media.
Use Consultations and Prenegotiations to Lay the Groundwork
Solicit Input and Build Trust
Regardless of the specific structure of the negotiations, participants are more apt to be satisfied with the outcome if they have been consulted in its design. Rather than independently reviewing and choosing from among available designs and then presenting the parties with that choice, mediators should solicit the parties' input early on: what form should the meetings take, where should they be held, whether and how to record them, how broad should the agenda be. Consultations are an opportunity to build trust. Reporting back to those who have been consulted is also important, especially if the mediator has asked the parties to respond to formal queries (e.g., surveys and questionnaires). Participants who are not completely satisfied with the final design will be more likely to endorse it if they have been consulted.
Feature Box 4-1: Topics for PrenegotiationPreliminary "talks about talks" should establish shared expectations and agreements on a number of matters, including the following:
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Establish Clear Ground Rules
Trust and confidence among the parties can be fostered by clear and consistently applied ground rules for negotiations. Involving participants in designing those ground rules is itself an exercise in building trust.
That being said, much of the work of international mediation is conducted informally, often with only one partner and without rules and guidelines of this sort. When serendipity and emerging opportunities present themselves, the mediator should adjust strategies and arrangements accordingly.
Determine Participants
While a large number of stakeholders will be consulted, relatively few will participate in direct negotiations. When helping to determine whom to involve in direct negotiations, the mediator should consider the most viable partners, be prepared to manage spoilers, and try to include marginalized groups as appropriate.
Work with Viable Partners
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The mediator should work with viable partners who have sufficient control over the drivers of violence and relevant constituencies. Benerally, this means working with top-level leaders, but the mediator should not focus only on senior leaders; midlevel leaders can be viable (and sometimes invaluable) partners, too.
Top-Level Leaders
Negotiations often involve the top leaders of each party or their direct representatives. A high profile, however, can constrain top leaders, who, if they appear to be accepting less than publicly stated goals, risk both their own positions and the interests of their constituencies. High status confers the power to negotiate but may also reduce the freedom to negotiate.
Midlevel Leaders
Midlevel leaders play a useful role in many negotiations. They know and are known by the top leaders, yet have broader connections to constituencies. Their positions and effectiveness depend less on a having a high public profile, and they thus enjoy greater maneuverability. Negotiating teams should generally include midlevel leaders with varied areas of expertise and different links to constituents.
Manage Spoilers
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Spoilers, who will block settlements if their own interests are not met, require careful management. To give a seat to a spoiler may appear to be rewarding bad behavior, and may risk alienating other participants and tainting the talks. Yet outright exclusion often means they will use their power to resist both the peace process and its outcome. Furthermore, their exclusion risks eliminating from negotiations the very actors and issues that are most difficult to deal with, thus undercutting the realism of the mediation effort. Consequently, instead of excluding spoilers, mediators should find ways to marginalize or undercut them while also involving them in the process — for instance, via meetings with mediators rather than with the other parties or by including them as individuals without conferring a public role or formal standing.
Steven Stedman has presented a typology of spoiler management based on an analysis of the spoilers' key characteristics (e.g., whether they are positioned inside or outside the peace process, their numbers, whether their goals are total or limited, and the nature of their power bases). Stedman recommends using one or a combination of three strategies: inducement, socialization, and coercion.
- Inducement involves taking positive measures to address the grievances of factions that obstruct peace. When spoilers act out of fear, they will usually demand some sort of physical protection. When acting out of a sense of fairness, they will usually demand material benefits. When acting out of a sense of justice, they tend to demand recognition or legitimacy. However, when used inappropriately, inducement can exacerbate the problem.
When the UN mission in Cambodia tried to use a strategy of inducement, it backfired, strengthening the state of Cambodia while weakening the opposition party participating in the peace process.
- A socialization strategy establishes a set of norms for acceptable behaviors by parties that commit to peace or seek to join a peace process. Adherence to these norms is encouraged by the use of carrots and sticks. The norms must be clearly established and communicated to all stakeholders and must remain consistent over time.
The management of RENAMO by the UN mission in Mozambique is an example of a successful socialization strategy. It included constant persuasion and peacebrokering as well as practical logistics for assembly, demobilization, and disarmament.
- A coercion strategy relies on the threat of punishment if a spoiler does not fall into line. Coercion can take the form of threats, the use of force, warnings that the peace process will go forward with or without the spoiler (the "departing-train" strategy), and the mediator's withdrawal from the peace process.
The UN mission in Cambodia successfully used the departing-train strategy in dealing with the Khmer Rouge in 1992-93.
For spoilers who pursue total power and whose goals are not subject to change, the use of force or the departing-train strategy are usually the only effective strategies. Inducement may be useful for spoilers with more limited goals, but only if their grievances are acceptable to the other stakeholders; otherwise, some level of socialization or coercion may be necessary. However, inducement should never be used with a greedy spoiler, whose goals expand and contract with calculations of cost and risk, as it is likely to simply whet the spoiler's appetite for further grievances. Depending on the context, some coercion may be necessary, but long-term socialization is the only truly effective strategy for greedy spoilers.
Include Marginalized Groups in Negotiations
In addition to combatants or other parties central to the conflict, the key stakeholders in society ideally should have seats at the table. Typically, they will include representatives of civil society (whether or not these are formal organizations); women; and ethnic, religious, or ideological minorities, who are often marginalized in decision making. If combatants are opposed to their inclusion, as is usually the case, the mediator may opt to consult informally with civil society or minority representatives in the initial stages of negotiation, providing them with a formal seat in later stages. (Other options are explored in the discussion below of public involvement.)
Feature Box 4-2: The Advantages of Women's ParticipationWomen's experience of war (as combatants or civilians) and of peace is often better heard and better tabled by women mediators or by women they involve in the mediation process. Women often lead civil society organizations and are critical to the public acceptance and implementation of peace settlements. Moreover, ensuring that women participate in designing the ground rules of a peace process increases the chances of their effective participation in that process, both at the negotiating table and in public fora. |
Arrange Logistics
Provide a Safe, Effective, and Well-Resourced Working Environment
Effective mediators provide a safe working environment that accords no unfair advantage to any side and enables effective exchange. Arranging and paying for the components of such an environment is essential to any mediation. These components include:
- A secure, accessible venue that is not identified with any party to the conflict
- Security, transportation, meals, housing, and meeting space (including space for private meetings within each party and informal sharing of views between parties)
- Visas and identity papers (including documents for participants who may be outlawed or traveling under aliases)
- Proven translators who are independent of both parties
- Skilled staff who are sensitive to protocol and cross-cultural issues, and who can provide technical expertise and help draft agreements
- Agreed-upon mechanisms for recording proceedings
- Reliable and secure means of communication (between mediators and their institutional base as well as between all negotiators and their counselors and constituents)
- The means to handle press inquiries
It should be noted that the interactions between parties will not always be formal affairs conducted around a negotiating table. In fact, in many negotiations the parties do not even meet each other but instead interact solely through the mediator.
Manage Information Effectively
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The provision of high-quality supporting materials (such as maps) and expertise on a range of important topics (especially technical ones such as military issues, boundary demarcation, and property issues) can be essential in maintaining momentum when specific questions arise and in developing concrete options.
No less important is scrupulous recordkeeping of the negotiating process. These records can provide benchmarks of progress made; improve the mediator's understanding of the parties and their negotiating strategies; enable evaluation after the process is complete; and prevent subsequent disagreements between the parties — and even the mediator — about exactly what the parties agreed to during the negotiations.
Develop and Execute Strategies for Advancing Negotiations
During negotiations, a mediator must deploy numerous specific skills (such as convening, facilitating, and reframing) to accomplish numerous tasks, including cultivating confidence, disaggregating and sequencing decisions, developing and assessing options, breaking deadlocks, and communicating with constituents.
Increase Parties' Trust and Confidence
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Facilitating mediation includes not only providing a venue but also creating and maintaining an environment conducive to constructive negotiations. Key tasks include developing trust among participants and establishing channels for communication between them to support negotiations. If the level of trust is high enough, the parties can be brought together, in which case care must be taken to establish a "safe space" for communication. Participants in such a space must be able to talk freely without being subject to attack. They also need to be encouraged to listen attentively to the other side and to look for areas of commonalities, not just differences. The mediator needs to accommodate different communication styles and to help participants understand each other and communicate effectively, even when their styles differ.
If the level of trust is too low to bring the parties together, shuttle diplomacy may be the best option. In this case, the mediator can go back and forth between the parties, identifying issues, interests, options, and offers. This is a slow process, but sometimes it is safer than bringing the parties face to face.
In this effort, the mediator may also need to help each side recognize that the other side has legitimate grievances. In his book, Statecraft: And How to Restore America's Standing in the World, Dennis Ross suggests that the mediator do this by demonstrating first how well he or she understands the grievances of the side with whom he or she is talking and then to treat the other side's concerns in relation to that context. Ross also argues that the mediator must help the sides abandon their mythologies — especially illusory self-images — and adopt more realistic expectations about the accommodations necessary for a settlement.
As relationships begin to develop, the mediator can create momentum by persuading the parties to adopt confidence-building measures such as making reciprocal gestures related to humanitarian issues or softening the tone of their public statements. Joint study groups and workshops are also opportunities to build relationships. The inclusion of allies, partners, and civil society actors (e.g., from the business community, academic institutions, and religious bodies) helps to surround the parties with a sense of public support and responsibility.
Use Multiple Tactics to Facilitate Agreement
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The tactics a mediator uses will vary depending on the circumstances and overall mediation strategy. If not already done during the prenegotiation stage, the mediator needs to begin by working with the parties to determine what the scope of the negotiations will be: what topics will be on the table, what topics will not, and in what sequence subjects will be negotiated. It is vital to break down peace negotiations, which are often overwhelmingly complex, into more manageable segments and deal with them in sequence. Large and difficult issues can be disaggregated into smaller issues. Those issues can then be considered not by the parties' entire negotiating teams but by subcommittees or outside working groups, which subsequently report back to the teams. This approach is especially useful in resolving factual disputes, but it can also be used to brainstorm options for settlement.
This tactic was effectively employed in the process that generated the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the civil war between north and south in Sudan, with separate working groups being created to discuss security, power sharing, and wealth sharing.
Conversely, some cases may call for linking one issue with another to increase the likelihood of buy-in. For example, it might be best to negotiate the terms of a cease-fire in the context of agreement on other critical issues so that if a party feels itself shortchanged on the cease-fire, it can get much of what it wants on other issues in contention.
How a mediator sequences discussions and decisions is also extremely important. This may entail dealing with the easiest issues first, to build momentum and confidence. Conversely, it may call for tackling the most contentious issues first, while initial commitment is strong or because smaller issues cannot be resolved without knowing how the larger issues will be resolved. An appropriate order will depend on context. Adopting any method of sequencing is preferable to seeing talks stall or collapse under the pressure of trying to address all questions simultaneously.
Introduce Fresh Frameworks
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One way of keeping negotiations moving is to persuade parties to frame issues in terms not of positions, which are often in opposition to each other, but of interests, needs, and ultimate goals which are often compatible or even mutually supportive (e.g., increasing the security of one side often increases the security of the other). Once interests, needs, and ultimate goals are understood, mediators should highlight any areas of commonality and help the parties brainstorm options for resolving disagreements.
When they get stuck, mediators can ask participants to work back from possible futures rather than forward from current problems. Stories and metaphors, humor, and even training-type exercises can be effective tools to get participants to see their situation -- and each other -- in a new light. Contingent agreements and matched conditional commitments ("yes, if") can be used to define elements of a settlement and create incentives for compliance. The mediator may introduce new settlement formulas that include new actors to serve as reliable guarantors, thus spreading the political risk of a settlement.
The IGAD mediation of the Sudan civil war became much more effective when the United States and three other nations were brought in as guarantors.
Encourage Communication with Constituencies
Communication and consultation with constituencies increase the chance that a settlement -- even one that is disappointing in some respects -- will be accepted as fair and supported by the public on both sides. To this end, the mediator should encourage negotiators to inform and consult their constituencies, learning from them what terms are likely to be acceptable and what will be seen as unacceptable. Negotiators should also report on the progress of negotiations and the terms being discussed, thereby building support for a settlement. Such communication reduces the danger of a top-down settlement being rejected when it is announced, or undercut during its implementation.
Some observers believe that the various Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives would have been successful if negotiators and mediators had recognized the respective interests of religious constituencies on both sides and engaged them in the peace process.
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Use Different Types of Leverage to Encourage Compromise
Mediators should review the potential sources of leverage identified during step 1 (conflict assessment) and determine which can actually be brought to bear on the parties. Typically, mediators can bring some or all of the following types of leverage to the negotiating table:
- Reward power, when the mediator has something to offer to the parties in exchange for changes in behavior
- Coercive power that relies on threats and sanctions, and includes military options
- Expert power that is based on the mediator's knowledge and experience with certain issues
- Legitimate power that is based on certain rights and legally sanctioned authority under international law
- Referent power that is based on a desire of the parties to the conflict to maintain a valued relationship with the mediator
- Informational power that works on the content of the information conveyed as in the case of a go-between or message carrier
Specific resources within these categories depend on the mediator's institutional readiness, mandate, and resources.
A mediator can increase and multiply these sources of leverage by using coalitions and allies.
During the implementation phase of the peace agreement in Mozambique, Aldo Ajello, the UN secretary-general's special representative for Mozambique, was able to exercise significant leverage because of the relationships he established with key embassies in Mozambique. Ajello not only kept the ambassadors of France, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States informed of what he was planning to do but also involved them in the decision-making process; as a consequence, he enjoyed their support and was able to deploy a variety of resources they made available.
Mediators should be aware of how their use of leverage will impact the parties and the dynamics of the conflict. Incentives and coercion are most effective when applied in combination, not only because they present a more compelling offer but because of the effect on the negotiating dynamic. Threats and coercion generate resistance that can be offset by incentives that foster cooperation.
The type of leverage used should be appropriate for addressing underlying sources of conflict and the reluctance of the parties to settle.
In the peace process for El Salvador, the U.S. government helped to erode opposition to the process among wealthy landholders by subsidizing the land transfer program.
Incentives or deterrents must also have sufficient value to induce changes in behavior without being so excessive that they inflate future demands.
Conditionality may be used to link progress on an issue with rewards. Mediators should avoid the appearance of rewarding intransigence by creating a process in which rewards are delivered in response to specific commitments and actions from a party.
Mediators should never bluff or use threats unless the ability and political will to carry them out exists.
Engage the Public and Media
Develop Channels for Public Involvement
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Public participation in the negotiations in some form is imperative; after all, the ultimate responsibility for resolving a conflict lies within the local society. Public participation is also strategically sound, as participants are far more apt than spectators to support and sustain a settlement.
Context will determine the best means of incorporating the public. For example, the more representative and accountable the parties have been, the less important it is that civil society actors have a seat at the table and vice versa.
Public involvement can take many forms.
At the Table
Civil society stakeholders may be directly engaged, particularly those from representative organizations with experience or expertise on specific issues. They may be important assets in working groups addressing issues relevant to their constituencies. By being engaged, such actors provide a counterweight to elites and potential spoilers and ensure that broader public interests are negotiated. They may also be very effective at explaining the negotiating process to constituents. Resistance by the combatants to the direct involvement of these actors, however, may require alternative means of inclusion.
Parallel Meetings
Conducting parallel consultative meetings for civil society can help legitimize and sustain formal talks without making formal talks unwieldy. Such meetings may provide additional bargaining power for negotiators voicing civil society's interest. They also present an opportunity for civil society to practice democratic procedures.
Two-Way Communication
Another way to incorporate the public is by instituting some form of two-way communication. News of negotiations should reach the public, and public discussion and reactions should be heard by negotiators. The means of such communication could include discussion forums, workshops, opinion polls, and referenda.
None of these methods is without risk. Broad engagement can make negotiations unwieldy or unfocused. Parallel meetings could be hijacked by elite groups to promote their own, narrow interests. An informed civil society may reject delicate agreements reached by elites or may conclude that talks are not addressing their own concerns.
Manage Media and Public Relations
During a mediation effort, a media strategy that extends beyond responding to press questions is essential. The strategy should take into account the role that the media has played thus far in the conflict; any legacy of hate media or propaganda must be addressed. At the same time, the mediator should work with the media to reduce inflammatory or biased news coverage. Confidentiality may be an important aspect of talks, yet the lack of information is a vacuum that someone will fill, perhaps with rumors, fears, or slander. The mediator should encourage the parties to make joint public appearances, which will model the progress of negotiations while reducing the ability of the parties to spin public announcements to their own benefit.
A good communication and public relations strategy will aim not just to explain isolated events but also to educate the public about the path to peace. The mediator will usually have natural local allies in the effort to build support for the peace process. These allies can be empowered by cultivating press freedom and peace media (including popular forms such as community publishing, interactive websites, and social networks using mobile phones).
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