Acknowledgment: This paper is based on a larger project begun during the author's term as a Visiting Fellow of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in 1995, whose support of this research is gratefully acknowledged. The author would like to thank the editor, members of the PIN group, and especially Didier Bigo, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
The brutality of deadly violence in several immediate post-Cold War internal conflicts -- especially anarchy and mass starvation in Somalia, "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, and premeditated genocide in Rwanda -- spawned an intensive assessment in the international community of how identity-based, or ethnic, conflict can be prevented. What actions can be taken by third-party intervenors to pre-empt the escalation of conflict as tensions are spiraling toward violence, as in Somalia or the former Yugoslavia, or when a nascent peace process is threatened by renewed violence, as in Rwanda? How can essentialist -- kill or be killed -- attitudes in multiethnic societies be moderated? How can the stakes of intergroup conflict be highlighted more clearly? Which tactics will be successful in preventing a slide into violence among ethnic groups sharing a common territory?
These burning questions have resonated across continents and capitals, with considerable attention being given to the causes of ethnic violence, the key variables that provide early warning of impending violence, and the range of instruments and actions that can be taken to channel conflict within peaceful, institutionalized boundaries. Some concentrated efforts to prevent the expected outbreak of ethnic violence have clearly been successful. For example, the deployment of United Nations peacekeeping troops in Macedonia inhibited the spillover of the Balkan wars to that newly independent country, and deft diplomacy prevented tensions between ethnic Russians and ethnic Estonians from becoming violent after the dissolution of the Soviet empire.
Analysis of preventive action in ethnic conflicts has rightfully focused on
the initial escalation spiral. But because preventive action is frequently demanded,
as Zartman argues in Chapter 1, attention needs to be paid to the equally critical
issue of preventing the recurrence of violent ethnic conflict. This
chapter, therefore, assesses a certain type of preventive diplomacy, namely
efforts to keep peace processes on track. This approach highlights especially
well the issues central to this book: preventive diplomacy as negotiation.
I. Opportunities for Prevention
The debate on preventive action in ethnic conflicts(1) -- whether ethnic violence can be anticipated, whether sufficient responses can be generated, and whether the instruments of diplomacy available and feasible are up to the task -- has yielded an important conclusion. That is, there are invariably myriad opportunities for preventive action -- particular points for action -- to nip incipient escalation in the bud. Preventive action can take place at various phases of a conflict: during the initial spiral of escalation, at the moment of crossing the threshold into violence, to contain the intensity and spread of violence, and -- when settlement seems near or occurs -- to keep violence from recurring. The key characteristic that distinguishes this type of diplomacy is engagement in crises to prevent their escalation into broader and more costly conflicts. In these instances, the likelihood of renewed violence is imminent, the time frame is short-term, and the principal objective is to prevent war (Jentleson 1996: 7).
Consequently, prevention is not a one-shot affair; on the contrary, it is constantly with us. Even when Congo-Brazzaville was described as a successful case of preventive diplomacy in 1992-1993 (Lund 1996; Jentleson 1996, 1997; Stedman 1995), it broke down into violent strife in September 1997. Was the earlier preventive effort too transitory and unsustained, or were the 1997 clashes a new and altogether different missed opportunity to prevent violence?
Similarly, when prevention end and normal war termination diplomacy begin? During much of 1996 the simmering Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Burundi was the object of concerted action by the UN, global powers such as the U.S., regional states and organizations, and non-governmental organizations. Burundi, deeply divided among Hutus and Tutsis (as is Rwanda) became the preventive diplomacy flavor of the month -- propelled by the strong desire to prevent "another Rwanda." Burundi had held elections in 1993 that led to a Hutu-majority president, and officers in the Tutsi military began fomenting ethnic violence to undo their putative loss of power. A power-sharing pact that looked good on paper was reached to stem the growing tensions, but it proved to be shaky and ultimately unworkable.
A 1996 coup d'état in Burundi restored Tutsi minority hegemony and military rule, and the violence quickly escalated into a renewed civil war. By early 1997, an estimated 500 people were dying per week in widespread violence. At what point did Burundi cease to be a problem of preventive diplomacy, and instead became a problem of war termination? No one seems quite sure. In any event, Burundi had previously experienced recurring spasms of ethnic violence and the civil war that erupted in the 1996 was a new manifestation of long-standing conflict. What was the international community seeking to prevent? It wasn't seeking to prevent an initial slide into violence, but instead a recurrence of previous conflict. Precisely because of Burundi's nearly genocidal past, the prevention of renewed conflict was paramount. Unfortunately for Burundi, the international community's extensive efforts failed. So preventive diplomacy can mean different things at different moments in the life cycle of conflict.
II. Preventing Recurrence of Violent Ethnic Conflict
Preventive action to keep a peace process on track occurs during a specific and limited phase of an existing negotiation process: after the conflict has escalated and begun to de-escalate through structured, formal talks, but where backsliding and re-escalation are distinct, even likely, possibilities.(2) The concern is less on the outcome than on the process of conflict management by challenging the dispute into an ongoing negotiation. The challenge of diplomacy in such instances is to prevent impasse and maintain progress in an ongoing negotiation.
Three cases are considered in this chapter. South Africa, 1990-1994, is as an example of unambiguous success, where concerted action through the UN at a moment of crisis helped prevent the peace process from derailing. Sri Lanka, 1994-1995, is an unambiguous example of failure; insufficient prevent efforts were not forthcoming, the talks collapsed, and the civil war resumed -- principally because the parties refused international mediation. In Northern Ireland, the peace train appeared stalled and broken several times during the course of the talks, but they eventually led to a negotiated settlement (the April 1998 "Good Friday Agreement") that was backed by majorities of both the Protestant and Catholic communities. In Nothern Ireland, international mediation was conducted by individuals working in their private eminence, not as the representatives of states.
Preventive diplomacy to keep peace processes on track suffers from many of the same difficulties as more narrowly conceived preventive diplomacy that limits the analysis to the initial outbreak of violence (Lund 1996). Such difficulties include receiving and interpreting early warning indicators of an impending crisis; achieving a high-level and concerted response when the indicators are ambiguous or the conflict is not "hot" enough to warrant attention (the problem of political will); determining the seriousness of the crisis threatening to escalate; determining the timing of intervention initiatives and the appropriate ends and means of intervention; leveraging the parties with appropriate tactics; affecting the attitudes of elites and mass publics toward accommodation; and continuing the preventive intervention effort over time (Jentleson 1997).
Moreover, the instruments of preventive diplomacy -- good offices and peacemaking, special envoys and representatives, summitry, fact-finding missions, deployment of monitors and observers, Security Council debates and resolutions -- are largely the same. Similar, too, is the range of players involved: global powers such as the United States, middle power, neighboring states, international organizations (often but not invariably the UN) and regional organizations, eminent persons, and refugee, humanitarian, and ecumenical non-governmental organizations. Finally, an assessment of this type of preventive action yields especially useful insights into the key issues of how preventive action relates to the stakes, attitudes, and tactics of parties to the conflict and third-party intervenors.
Peace processes, as the onset of formal negotiation, don't yield immediate peace. Political violence and the threat of violence continues to effect the scope, pace, and agenda of talks. Moreover, ongoing political violence is integrally linked to the process of negotiation;(3) violence is used as a beyond-the-table tactic by parties at the table as well as by "spoilers" (Stedman 1997) to bring about the peace process's demise. What happens on the street -- continuing military engagements, death squad activity, terrorist bombings, assassinations, deadly riots and faction-fighting -- is related to what happens at the table, and what happens at the table is related to what happens on the street. Progress in talks, or the lack of it, often stimulates violence; and violence often affects whether talks will progress or backslide. The critical question in many peace processes is whether the talks can be sustained in light of, or even because of, ongoing political violence.
Sharp upsurges in overall levels of political violence, or critical events such as a high-profile terrorist bombing, are invariably critical turning points in negotiation processes.(4) Like crises that focus the mind that a conflict is about to turn violent, political violence during the course of de-escalation efforts also become the impetus for external intervention. That is, events such as these force the disputants to make critical choices -- essentially whether to recoil and fight, or hunker down, continue talking, and weather the storm. Dramatic political violence is crisis-inducing, in that the parties are required to make critical choices on whether and how the peace process should progress. Following a particularly bloody event, will the peace process be derailed? The principal questions to ask are these.
Under what conditions does crisis-inducing political violence prompt disputants to retract from talks, and under what conditions does it prompt disputants to continue talking as the way to stem the underlying causes of violence?
What preventive actions can third-party intervenors -- particularly diplomats
seeking to avert a trainwreck -- take to turn crisis-inducing events into potential
stimuli for quicker or continued progress in talks, as opposed to the derailment
of the peace process?
To understand the conditions under which negotiations, once begun, continue
to progress and the conditions under which they fail to progress (and what preventive
actions parties can do to keep them on track), certain questions should be asked
of each case.
What was the nature of the initial pact to begin negotiations? What
brought the parties to the table and how did they agree upon a structure or
process for the negotiations.(5) The confluence
of events that brought the parties to the table may help explain whether they
will stay at the table and whether preventive action can reinforce these original
compulsions.
What was the participant structure of the talks? Who are the principal
parties to the talks and who are the principal rejectionists, or spoilers?
What types of crises arose? What types of political violence, and
by whom, has threatened the peace process? Has the violence been perpetrated
by parties to the talks or by rejectionists? Who has been perceived culpable
in the violence -- parties to the talks seeking to exert power or destabilize
adversaries, parties not in the talks but seeking a place at the table, or spoilers
seeking to derail the peace process?
When crises erupted, what preventive diplomacy efforts were made?
Were international mediators deeply and/or persistently involved, and, if so,
how did they seek to prevent derailment of the peace process?
Did the peace process stay on track, or derail (or, How were incipient
crises diffused or did incipient crises escalate into full-blown crises that
derailed the talks)? Did the parties see the crisis-inducing violence as an
impetus to continue talking ("If we don't continue negotiating, the violence
will only get worse") or as a threat to talks ("We can't continue talking while
this violence is destroying our communities), or both depending on the specific
event? How did the parties react to mediator initiatives? Did preventive action
take place, and did it work?
I have chosen contemporary cases that demonstrate alternative outcomes(6)
to threats to peace processes from political violence -- instances of successful
preventive action to pre-empt a trainwreck (South Africa and Northern Ireland),
and an instance when the trainwreck was not averted and the conflict re-ignited
(Sri Lanka). And, I have sought some variance in the agency of preventive mediator
interventions. Length prohibits extensive review every instance of political
violence and each and intervention (not all of which are publicly known in any
event) in these situations. Instead, my approach is to analyze what I believe
are the key variables that affected whether the peace process might derail,
and the most important third-party action undertaken to prevent a recurrence
of broader violence.
II. South Africa, 1990-1994
Resistance to the cruel polices of apartheid, the legally entrenched form of racial segregation that was implemented by South Africa's while minority government (National Party, NP) stimulated a wide anti-apartheid centralist revolt led by mostly by the African National Congress, ANC. Between 1948 and late 1989, exacerbated by the Cold War, the conflict was characterized by a cycle of revolt and repression, with escalating levels of state violence and anti-apartheid resistance and counter-violence (Sisk 1995). Significant upsurges of violence had occurred in 1960, 1976, and 1984-1988.
A confluence of events, including the end of the Cold War, yielded a ripe moment in 1989. Peace talks began in early 1990, following an extensive period of pre-negotiation (c. 1984-1990). Initially, the talks were bilateral --between the NP and ANC led by F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, respectively -- but they eventually became multilateral. The talks broadened to include parties to the right of the NP (notably, the white right-wing Freedom Front) and ANC (notably, the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party, IFP), small African nationalist parties on the radical left such as the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), and small, moderate, bridge-building parties such as the Democratic Party (DP). Former homeland governments also participated in the multiparty talks, making them eventually (and especially at the time of the April 1994 elections that ended apartheid), widely inclusive of all the major political forces.
The most important interim pact was the Groote Schuur "minute" (agreement) of 1990, which linked renunciation of the ANC's armed struggle with normalization of political freedoms, the return of exiles, and the release of political prisoners. The pact defined "nonracial democracy" in a united South Africa as the ultimate outcome of the talks. Subsequent pacts on both procedural and substantive issues were reached in 1990, 1991, 1992 and 1993.
White right-wing militias and political parties, elements of the South African
Police and intelligence services, elements and often the leadership of the IFP,
all openly rejected these agreements and fomented violence to bring it down.
Similarly, for much of the negotiations outbidders on the ANC's left such as
the PAC rejected the talks and members of its armed wing continued to wage an
armed struggle. Controversy continues over whether then-president F.W. de Klerk
and his senior cabinet officers sought to derail the accord by stoking political
violence by clandestine security forces and agents provocateurs.
Political violence was an endemic feature of the transitional period. 14,000 persons lost their lives in political violence between 1990-1994. There were several crisis-inducing events that threatened the talks beginning in June 1990, just after the Groote Schuur pact. IFP-ANC faction-fighting -- mostly the youth wings -- was extensive, especially in greater Johannesburg and the KwaZulu Natal region. Significant events were the June 1992 Boipatong massacre, which prompted Mandela to withdraw from talks (along with a lack of progress in multiparty constitutional negotiations). The failure of state security forces to prevent the killing implicated both the IFP and the NP in the incident. Later, in 1992, after a bloody shootout in the town of Bisho, for which the blame was laid at the feet of the ANC leadership, the parties returned to the table and made an implicit agreement to negotiate despite (or even because of) the violence.
The April 1993 assassination of ANC and South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani by a white-right wing gunman failed to derail the talks despite widespread public protests. Efforts by white right-wingers to disrupt talks in June 1993 (they drove an armored vehicle through the plate glass window of the hotel where talks were being held) failed to prevent the Interim Constitution from being sealed that month. Significantly, a white right-wing bombing campaign and an eleventh hour ANC-IFP shootout in downtown Johannesburg (the Shell House massacre) in the early months of 1994 failed to prevent the celebrated elections in April that brought Mandela to power and ended apartheid.
Most mediation in South Africa to keep the talks on track was internal, led by church and business leaders. After the June 1992 Boipatong incident -- a significant crisis -- the UN dispatched Cyrus Vance as a Special Representative of the Secretary General on a fact-finding mission designed to prevent the talks from going off track. Had the talks gone off the track altogether, it was clear that levels of violence would escalate. Vance met with all the parties, implicitly (but not explicitly) mediating while the talks were frozen and de Klerk and Mandela were engaged in vituperative exchanges of letters blaming one another from the breakdown in talks and engaging in mutual recrimination over the violence.
The Vance mission resulted in the August 1992 deployment of a 60-member UN Observer Mission to South Africa (UNOMSA), which monitored political violence (but was barred from mediation). UN monitors were augmented by European Union, Commonwealth, and Organization of African Unity observers, about 100 altogether. The OAU and Commonwealth observers were less constrained by their mandates, and they directly mediated a number of hot disputes, particularly the Hani assassination crisis and in virtual civil war then raging in KwaZulu-Natal. The observers did not directly mediate (it was beyond their mandate), but they the critically important "eyes and ears" of the international community.
In the turbulent run-up to April 1994 election, with the IFP vowing to violently spoil the poll, eminent persons Lord Carrington and Henry Kissinger were brought in to mediate between the NP, ANC, and IFP, but they left after several days without agreement on their terms of reference. A modest Kenyan professor -- Washington Okumu -- who was part of the Carrington-Kissinger mission, stayed behind and brokered a last-minute accord in which the IFP agreed to contest the poll and accept the settlement. Throughout the transition, western diplomats and nongovernmental organizations also worked to backstop the talks. Had the preventive effort not been launched, the elections might have precipitated a bloodbath.
Violence clearly stalled the progress of the South African talks. Terrorist bombings and mass murders, faction-fighting, assassination of mid-level political leaders, rioting and mayhem, all accompanied South Africa's transition. Prior to the Boipatong incident, violence had the effect of inhibiting progress in talks. Mandela's refutation of the talks after Boipatong is probably the best affirmation of this instinctive response. After Boipatong, with UNOMSA deployed, political violence failed to derail an agreement.
The ANC, particularly, changed its view and recognized that much of the violence
was aimed at derailing its pursuit of power. Particularly after the Bisho massacre,
the ANC resolved that upsurges in violence would not stall the long march to
freedom. The ANC's changed position was summed up by key negotiator Kader Asmal,
who told the author in November 1993 that "We cannot hold the peace process
hostage violence and to the will of violent men." Thus, a settlement was clinched
in June 1993 despite the ongoing strife on the street. The two preventive diplomacy
efforts -- Vance in 1992 and the eminent persons mediation of 1994 -- were clearly
critical to the success of the South African transition.
III. Sri Lanka, 1994-1995
Since 1983, Sri Lanka has been embroiled in a civil war between a Sinhalese-led government and Tamil separatists principally but not exclusively represented by the Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The mostly Hindu Tamil minority is 18% of Sri Lanka's 17 million people, the majority of whom are Buddhist. Tensions grew in the post-independence era (1948-), following Sinhalese cleric-inspired intolerance of Tamil language rights and educational opportunities. Violence flared intermittently in 1958, 1977, and 1981. The ethnic strife, which escalated dramatically in July 1983, has claimed some 30,000 victims, and Tamils have been "cleansed" from some areas of formerly mixed living. The Tamil-majority area of northeast Sri Lanka, was for some time in the de facto control of the LTTE. A bloody stalemate ensued.
Sri Lanka has a history of stalled and failed peace negotiations. Since the outbreak of the war in 1983, India's brokerage of an agreement -- with considerable coercion, particularly on the LTTE -- in 1987 is the most significant. The Indo-Sri Lanka Accord led to the deployment of an Indian peacekeeping force for implementation. Tensions over Indian hegemony stimulated an insurgent reaction to the force, and the mission collapsed in a debilitating armed confrontation between the Indian soldiers and the LTTE; the only silver lining, however short-lived, was the cooperation of the government of then prime minister Ranasinghe Premadasa and the LTTE to oust the foreign peacekeepers. The war between the regime and LTTE resumed thereafter.
Direct talks began between the LTTE and the government of Sri Lanka began in early 1994, following the assassination of Premadasa. As elections approached for November 1994, ruling United National Party candidate Gamini Dissanyake was killed by a suicide bomber, along with 51 others; the blast was attributed to the LTTE. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of the violence, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (daughter of a previous prime minister who had struck an accord with Tamils), won elections on a peace platform. After her election, direct talks with the LTTE led to an 8 January 1995 cease-fire agreement, with broad agreement that the government would eventually devolve significant power to the Tamils. Elements within both communities opposed the peace process. Chauvinist Buddhist monks and the Sinhalese nationalist JVP worked to undercut the search for moderation. So, too, did elements within the LTTE and likely including unpredictable leader Velupillai Prabakaharan.
Sri Lanka has more than its share of violence, including and especially while nascent talks were under way. In early August 1995, prime minister Chandrika Bandarnaike Kumaratunga unveiled a long-awaited peace plan. The following day, suspected insurgents of the LTTE killed 21 people in a attack on a government building in Colombo, the capital. Equally, the bloody attack was on Kumaratunga's peace plan itself, the key plank in her effort to build a moderate core of Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil constituencies to support the peace plan's aims and provisions.(7) The early August blast was followed by a sharp upsurge in bloodletting -- both between the government and rebels, as well as within the rebel movement itself. Justice Minister G.L. Peiris declared that "now the government is at war with the LTTE . . . In those circumstances we cannot confuse the picture by entering into any process of negotiation."(8)
The government of Sri Lanka, since the failed Indian attempt at peace, has consistently rejected external mediation or other forms of intervention (with the exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for relief work assisting the internally displaced. However, in 1995 Kumaratunga sought the mediatory assistance of the government of France. The French refused to mediate, but offered the services of eminent person Francois Michelle, who would be working in his private capacity. The LTTE rebuffed the government's effort, however, to allow third-party intervention and Prabakarharan insisted that any mediator represent a government and not act as an individual. With the exception of the work of Western ambassadors to keep the cease-fire, no other serious effort was mounted when elements within the LTTE continued terrorist attacks in April through August and the talks process collapsed as a result.
Political violence during the nascent period of peace talks undercut the ability of Kumaratunga, despite her electoral mandate, to continue talks with the LTTE. It was clear that the cease-fire of January 1995 was a momentary pause in the war, and that talks failed to progress beyond very initial and preliminary steps.
Kumaratunga's devolution plan for Tamil areas in November 1995 reflected an effort to woo Tamil moderates away from the LTTE and to possibly split the organizations. Hard-liners within her own government and the Sinhalese majority rejected the plan as generous, and the devolution scheme failed to gather momentum. In 1996, the Sri Lanka military launched a massive offensive that wiped out much of the LTTE's real estate holdings, although the military has not been able to "mop up" in the country's heavily jungled terrain. Many Tigers fled the Island, gathering strength to return to the fight. The war, therefore, continues. Little prospect for resumed negotiation appears on the horizon. In my view, the absence of sufficient international action was at least one factor in the failure of the talks to stem the conflict.
V. Northern Ireland, 1994-1998
Northern Ireland is, like South Africa, a remarkable instance of a situation in which a negotiated settlement was reached despite severe threats to the peace process. International mediation was critical in surmounting critical issues in the talks, especially on the decommissioning of arms. Between the IRA and Protestant Combined Loyalist Military Command's cease-fires of late 1994, and the "Good Friday Agreement" of April 1998, continuous and extensive mediation helped keep the parties on track toward a settlement.
In Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom has for nearly a century controlled disputed territory that is slightly majority (55% to 57%) Protestant on an Irish island that is overwhelmingly Catholic. Due to differential population growth rates, the Catholic-Protestant gap is shrinking, exacerbated fears of vulnerability by the latter. The sectarian strife that pits nationalist, republican Catholics in the northern province against unionist Protestants that favor continued British sovereignty has claimed nearly 3,000 lives since "The Troubles" began in 1969. Unqualified majority rule has historically kept unionist parties, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the more virulent pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), politically dominant in the province along with a heavy British military presence.
The British military and the Ulster security forces, along with unionist militias, have waged street battles and have traded bombings with the Irish Republican Army, the armed wing of the Irish republican nationalist party, Sinn Fein. The IRA, in particular, has waged an armed struggle that has featured terrorist bombings, assassinations and assassination attempts on British government officials (including former prime minister Margaret Thatcher.) Still, the more mainstream party among Catholics is the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP), which advocates more conciliatory republicanism. The relatively small Alliance Party seeks to bridge the chasm between the two communities.
The governments of the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom are both
implicitly or explicitly party to the dispute, although they have acted both
as disputants and mediators in recent years. There have been myriad attempts
to mediate the Northern Ireland conflict and get the parties to reach a comprehensive
settlement, most notably the 1973 Anglo-Irish Sunningdale Agreement that failed
to win the consent of the republicans or the unionists in the north. In recent
years, the most significant efforts have been the UK Northern Ireland secretaries'
(Brooke and Mayhew) initiatives and the international eminent persons group,
the Opsahl Commission. The Brooke and Mayhew mediations, particularly, laid
the groundwork for all-party talks, possibly including Sinn Fein, that could
lead to a comprehensive peace settlement.
In August 1994, after much pre-negotiation and many back-channel talks, but little high-profile external intervention, the IRA announced a unilateral cease-fire and a statement generally favoring talks on a future dispensation for the disputed territory. In response, weeks later Ulster unionist militias, too, agreed to cease the violence. Direct, public British-Sinn Fein talks began in December 1994, with the question of whether the IRA would surrender its weapons in exchange for participation in all-party talks at the top of the agenda. The British government and the unionists insisted on the handing over of weapons prior to the talks; Sinn Fein and the IRA insisted that progress toward a settlement be reached before the arms caches would be disclosed and dismantled.
A critical breakthrough in the Northern Ireland imbroglio occurred in February 1995 with the conclusion of the Anglo-Irish Framework agreement between the governments of then Irish prime minister John Bruton and then British prime minister John Major. The proposals emphasized the notion of consent for any political changes in the territory, and proffered a set of inter-Northern Ireland and cross-border institutions through which a comprehensive dispensation could be negotiated.
For more than a year, talks lagged over disputes relating to the sequencing of talks and the question of the IRA's capacity to wage armed struggle. Once they began in 1994, Sinn Fein was excluded from talks over the issue of "decommissioning" their weapons. Elements of Sinn Fein and factions within the DUP (including, possibly, the leadership of Rev. Ian Paisley, Jr.), opposed to the talks, lacking trust that their respective adversaries are negotiating in good faith. Some have described war factions and peace factions within both communities, and place the blame for the conflict on the wicked ways of the respective war factions.(9) A report by the commission headed by the principal mediator, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell -- the most intrusive effort to date by the international mediator to keep the talks on track -- failed to break the impasse.
In the few months of peace that followed the 1994 cease-fires, there were reports of increased violence within the IRA (reported score-settling) although widespread intergroup violence ceased. Reports as early as November 1994 suggested that Sinn Fein officials were warning that if the peace process did not accelerate, violence could resume.(10) With efforts to convene all-party talks as envisaged in the framework agreement lagging, the IRA broke its cease-fire in February 1996 with a series of bomb attacks in England, the most dramatic of which was a blast in London's Docklands development that killed two people. However, neither the IRA nor the unionist militias resumed their violence in Northern Ireland territory.
There are differing interpretations as to why the cease-fire was broken, although most observers say that the IRA military hawks were convinced that the armed struggle was a "use it or lose it" option. Delay in progress in talks weakened their commitment to talks. Many believe that the precious months of peace in 1994 and 1995 were squandered. The IRA says British stalling and betrayal scuttled the talks; the British decried the IRA's bloodlust and demanded a reinstatement of the cease-fire.
In June, expected IRA bombers struck in Manchester, effectively ending any dialogue with the British government. In October 1996, IRA terrorists are believed to have detonated a 500-pound bomb on a British military base near Belfast, further damaging the likelihood or renewed direct talks. Tit for tat response from the unionist militias ensued.
Clashes have also recently occurred around the practice of Protestant marching, essentially claiming territory by insisting on the rights to publicly parade through disputed neighborhoods. Catholics decry the marching as "triumphalism." In July 1996, for example, disturbances in the town of Portadown flared after the Orange Order unionists marched through town and clashes with police and Catholics ensued. Rioting, mayhem, and fire-bombings spread to other cities, particularly Belfast and Londonderry, and one fatality was alleged to have been perpetrated by Protestant militias.
Along with Mitchell, the Clinton administration also facilitated negotiations in the Northern Ireland conflict, within the framework of Anglo-Irish efforts. President Clinton's celebrated November 1995 trip to the province was perhaps the high point of peace in Northern Ireland, although he was unable to secure an agreement on Sinn Fein's entry into talks prior to his visit (which included a controversial White House meeting with Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams), as was hoped.
The All-Party talks under the framework of the Anglo-Irish Framework Agreement were chaired by Mitchell acting in his personal capacity (i.e., as an eminent person -- but with the implicit backing and considerable effort of the United States -- began in June 1996 in Belfast. Parties at the talks had been elected in an earlier poll in May, which was remarkably free of widespread violence. Significantly, Sinn Fein garnered 15.5% of the votes. The talks, which began June 10, were severely crippled, however, in light of the provocative IRA bomb attack on June 16th in Manchester that injured 200. Mitchell kept a low profile on the question of violence, and was not extensively engaged in managing the fallout of the Portadown and other marching-related crises. Preventive efforts took place, but they were mostly behind-the-scenes.
In early 1997, Mitchell had held extensive discussions involving David Trimble's UUP and John Hume's SDLP on the problem of decommissioning IRA arms and the conditions for Sinn Fein participation in the talks. The all-party talks moved forward without Sinn Fein, although little was accomplished. With British elections anticipated for early 1997, as well as Irish elections, the talks were held ceremoniously -- to prevent the appearance of total derailment of the peace initiative -- and back-channel negotiations between the government of John Major and Sinn Fein failed to yield fruit on a reinstatement of the IRA cease-fire.
The return to political violence by the IRA, and ongoing street violence, has crippled but did not mortally wound the peace process. The response of the British and Irish governments, as well as the unionist parties and Sen. Mitchell, was to continue with the formal -- some would say boring -- talks while attempting to work directly with Sinn Fein on reinstating the IRA cease-fire. While the uncertainty of the elections in late 1996 and into early 1997 kept the talks in a holding pattern, the talks were needed to give the appearance that the momentum toward peace was being sustained.
With a Labour Party victory in Britain's May 1997 elections, and a new sense of clarity after the June 1997 Irish elections, a turning point was reached. In May, newly installed Labour Party officials began discussions with Sinn Fein; the decommissioning issue and the reinstatement of the cease-fire comprise the most important elements in the agenda, but these would occur on parallel tracks as proposed in the earlier efforts by Mitchell to prevent an impasse. By the end of the summer, the IRA had reinstated its cease-fire, Sinn Fein was invited to the talks, and the negotiations resumed with a greater probability of success for reaching a comprehensive settlement than has existed since "the Troubles" first began almost thirty years ago. Mitchell's tactic of continuing the talks during a turbulent period of on-again, off-again violence by the IRA proved to be a successful preventive diplomacy tactic.
A successful bid to impose a deadline on reaching a settlement helped focus the parties' minds on the need to grasp a rate opportunity for peace. What particularly informed the Northern Ireland talks was the experience of South Africa, in which a widely beneficial agreement was reached despite much higher levels of previous and ongoing political violence. The Northern Irish negotiators learned critical lessons that, when reinforced by the efforts of third parties like George Mitchell, helped turned the tide toward peace. As Northern Irish scholar Paul Arthur has commented,(11) third-party facilitated talks that involved negotiators from South Africa, led the Northern Irish participants to conclude that they could make better use of technical committees to resolve disputes. They also learned about the principle of "sufficient consensus, " in which the talks to go forward even if one of the major political parties did not concur.
The success of the Northern Irish peace process has much to do with the parties' realization that further violence would leave them marginalized from the negotiation process. Thus, the incentives for staying in the process were quite great. Moreover, it became clear in the referendum of May 1998 and the elections to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in June, that the people of Northern Ireland backed the settlement by wide majorities. Given this basic conflict dynamic, quiet, behind-the-scenes mediation to prevent the peace process from derailing through the use of wise diplomacy proved effective.
V. Attitudes, Stakes, and Tactics
An assessment of prevention efforts to keep peace processes on track can provide new insights into the overall issues of preventive diplomacy. The principal task is any such effort is to induce parties in conflict to sustain the use of negotiation and bargaining as the primary means for managing their conflicts. This means channeling ethnic disputes into a structured negotiation process. The most serious danger to intergroup negotiations is escalating political violence. Debilitating violence can be perpetrated by the parties to the talks -- either as a means of exit or as a beyond-the-table tactic to affect the pace, agenda, or balance of power -- or by rejectionists who oppose the very idea of negotiation and seek victory through revolution or the exhaustion and withdrawal of their adversaries. Whatever its source, it usually results in at least one party withdrawing from talks and asserting that negotiation in a climate of violence is intolerable.
Can preventive diplomacy -- in these cases, a form of mediation within an ongoing negotiation -- change attitudes, highlight the stakes of a recurring conflict, and re-orient disputant tactics away from violence? It is clear that under some conditions peace processes can weather the storm of such violence and strike a viable negotiated agreement, following which the conflict is to be channeled through newly legitimate political institutions. Prevent efforts can help build a shelter to weather disputants through political-violence induced crises in negotiations. South Africa and Northern Ireland successfully managed to sustain a nascent peace process threatened by violence. Clearly, in these two cases, sustained efforts by third parties to prevent recurrence of the violence made a difference.
Under other conditions, like in Sri Lanka, the talks break down, perhaps because one or all of the parties at the table wasn't really committed to reaching an agreement anyway. Whether a more sustained effort at third-party mediation could have prevented the recurrence of violence in Sri Lanka is a counterfactual assessment that is difficult, if not impossible to make.(12)
In assessing preventive action, I believe the analytical priority should be
in analyzing the scope and strength of moderate, centrist elites committed to
negotiations over violence within each of the contending parties, in
addition to the more common focus on relations between the parties
to the talks. That is, can a sustainable centrist coalition formed by moderates
be struck and maintained? How vulnerable are moderate elites favoring talks
when an act of street violence induces a crises? The ability of political leaders,
who are ostensibly committed to talks, to control their own mid-level combatants
is the most critical problem; after all, it is many of these mid-level functionaries
who have the most to lose from peace.
Moreover, it is also important to analyze the relationships between elites and mid-level elites in each party to the talks, and the relationships between them at the broader groups they represent. Can elites, assuming the genuinely seek a settlement, carry their own organization's factions and their publics? Analyzing the relative strengths and weaknesses of the moderate coalition can also reveal the extent to which rejectionist violence will undermine moderates and exacerbate polarization to the point where talks are no longer sustainable.
Thus, the focus of preventive action should be on the attitudes of these key elites, the stakes they perceive in terms the relative costs and benefits of peace over violence, and the tactics that third parties might take to influence them. The focus of preventive efforts should be as much on the splits between hard-liners and moderates within each group or faction as much as on the differences between groups-in-conflict.
If the target is the conflicts among elites within a group, on what issues
such the preventive effort be focused? The principal explanation for the sustainabilty,
or lack thereof, of the peace process in each of the cases has been the extent
to which the parties are motivated to avoid a worse outcome to negotiations
(return to open, violent conflict). Perception of the stakes involved in maintaining
talks versus a regression to open violence is the most important variable. Are
the key elites motivated to avoid the abyss? When this perception holds, a certain
inevitability or sense of momentum is generated around the talks. Interventions
designed to reinforce the perception that a worse outcome is to be avoided at
all costs may reinforce the basic instinct of moderates to avoid derailment
of the peace process and a return to the abyss of violent conflict.
The ability of preventive efforts to change attitudes and redefine the stakes in ethnic conflicts is, alas, highly limited. Preventive efforts in ethnic conflicts are effective mostly at the margins. The principal factors that sustain the momentum of the talks are the strategic choices of the disputants themselves as they respond to (or sometimes foment) crisis-inducing violence that threatens the negotiations. Whether they recoil and stall or end the talks, or whether the violence spurs them to move toward a settlement, is affected by the following variables over which most external intervenors can exercise little control.
The first is culpability. Who is culpable, or perceived to be culpable, in fomenting the violence? When a party to a negotiation process is perceived by other parties to the negotiation as culpable in a crisis-inducing incident, digression occurs. When rejectionist parties or individuals are perceived as culpable, or when parties to a negotiation are perceived as equally culpable, crisis-inducing political violence can stimulate progress. The second is uncertainty. How clear is it where the peace process is headed? That is, how specific are the outcome parameters of the talks defined at the onset of negotiation? The greater the uncertainty in the expected ultimate outcome of the talks, the greater the likelihood of that crisis-inducing political violence will stimulate digression in talks. The greater degree of certainty in the expected ultimate outcome of the talks, the greater the likelihood of political violence will stimulate progress.
The timing of crisis, and of third-party interventions, is also critical. Does the violence surge right after talks have begun, or only after the talks have been under way for some time and are nearing a settlement? Crisis-inducing violence at an early stage of talks impedes progress more than violence at later stages of talks. However, violence fomented by parties to a negotiation at a late stage of talks stimulates digression. Crisis-inducing violence by rejectionists at a late stage of the process can actually reinforce momentum toward a settlement, spurring progress.
These variables -- culpability, uncertainty, and timing -- count most for whether political violence will cause a peace process to derail and prevention efforts to fail. "It's really up to the parties," however, is hardly a sufficient answer, given that we know that in certain conflict settings mediator interventions can serve myriad functions to increase communication, build confidence and trust, wield sanctions and incentives, and offer assurances or commitments in efforts to move the parties toward settlement (Rothchild 1997). Even if third-party preventive efforts are effective only at the margins, perhaps relative or marginal gains can keep talks going through a difficult period of violent turbulence. What can diplomacy do to help prevent peace processes from jumping the rails?
The inherent difficulties of preventive action in keeping a peace process from derailing mirror those of efforts to prevent escalation at an earlier stage of the game. Challenges of prevention are well-known; possibilities and examples of successes are harder to come by. Parties are resistant to external influences if they believe it will lead to costly concession-making. The more extensive and high-profile the intervention, the greater the likelihood that at least one party to the talks will not consent to the intervention. Most of the tools of preventive diplomacy, such as the UN fact-finding mission in South Africa, the failed Michelle facilitation in Sri Lanka, and the eminent persons Mitchell mediation in Northern Ireland (backstopped by Clinton's personal diplomacy and interest in the conflict), demonstrate that preventive diplomacy efforts face some inherent weaknesses.
International mediators of peace processes in ethnic conflicts may not appropriately receive and interpret early warning indicators of an impending act of violence that will induce a crisis. Acts of violence are organized and carried out in great secrecy, and at best third parties can seek to anticipate when the climate is right for a violent act (i.e., just prior to, or after, an interim pact). Could the US have anticipated the Sinn Fein return to armed struggle? To what extent could South Africa's high levels of transitional political violence been anticipated? Similarly, even when there is a crisis, it may be difficult to garner a high-level and concerted response when the indicators are ambiguous or the conflict is not "hot" enough, or important enough, to provoke sustained, high-level international attention.
Which of the many acts of violence Sri Lanka would be the last straw, bringing the talks to an end? What could have been done? Given the failure of the earlier Indian peacekeeping force in Sri Lanka during the mid-1980s, what foreign government would have been willing to put its troops in harm's way by contributing to a new peacekeeping force? In sum, there was no political will to extensively intervene in Sri Lanka's long running fratricidal conflict.
Third parties may also be unsure whether the crisis is serious enough to escalate. In South Africa, the UN and others realized that a collapse of the talks was a critical event that demanded immediate and intense attention. In situations like Sri Lanka or Northern Ireland, it was clear that acts of violence were perpetrated by the parties to show that they wanted the talks to terminate, or at least wanted to exert power in them. Those seeking to mount preventive diplomacy also struggled with the appropriate means and ends of intervention. That is, resistance by the parties limits the extent of intervention. Influencing the parties with tactics like wielding carrots and sticks, affecting the attitudes of elites and mass publics toward accommodation, and continuing the preventive intervention effort over time, are all carried out with very little leverage over the parties (especially when the intervenor is an eminent person). Success depends on persuasion: describing and manipulating the stakes, attempting to change attitudes, and determining the appropriate tactics -- which instruments of preventive diplomacy to employ and when to use them.
Stakes and Attitudes. Preventive efforts seek to convince the parties
to the conflict of the stakes involved if efforts to manage the conflict fail
to progress. That is, the stakes are defined as a return to a bloody past that,
against the odds, the parties have begun to escape. How high are the stakes
if the bloody encounters of the past occur once again? Preventive action can
help re-frame the stakes to ensure that the achievement of progress in talks
will be mutually beneficial and that failure to progress will precipitate a
zero-sum situation. Stakes and attitudes in ethnic conflicts are related: when
the stakes are so high that group elimination or subjugation is a real possibility,
attitudes will remain essentialist -- adversaries are to be beaten -- rather
than pragmatic. Attitudes are slow to change in ethnic conflicts such as those
considered here, but the high stakes of violence may be enough to temper attitudes
toward a "cold" cooperation.
In South Africa, Cyrus Vance and the UN-led international monitors (UNOMSA) helped concentrate the minds of South African negotiators as to the stakes of failure, and concomitantly, offered assurances through the presence of observers that the costs of future violence would be managed and that any implementation of an agreement would be international monitored. In Sri Lanka, the parties did not agree that the stakes were so high that international mediation was necessary, implicitly accepting the conclusion that if the talks fail the stakes were bearable. Basically, the LTTE was not committed to peace, and Kumaratunga's coalition for peace was razor thin. The parties in Northern Ireland seemed to appreciate the stakes involved if the peace process had derailed, as indicated by the fact that the abrogated cease-fire of the IRA failed to induce the Protestant militias from abrogating their cease-fire; moreover, the talks resumed despite lingering essentialist attitudes on all sides.
The stakes are high because parties fear of the consequences of renewed violence, but they often fear the consequences of settlement even more. The extent to which preventive efforts are targeted at reducing uncertainty -- for example, by seeking to put in place international confidence-building measures such as deployment of an observer mission -- the greater the likelihood of bolstering the talks and preventing a recurrence of violence. Would-be conflict preventers may also amend the stakes by reframing the issue in non-zero sum terms -- mostly, by exploring specific power-sharing options (Sisk 1996) with the parties, such as creating an interim national unity or consensus-oriented government, and wielding leverage to induce them into such a pact. They may also buttressing the commitment to continue negotiating with sweeteners, such as aid or recognition (a form of bestowing legitimacy) to change the payoff structure.
Who should be the agent? While states may be able to offer such rewards for clinching an agreement, eminent persons (the most common form of mediation experienced in these cases), do not usually wield such authority by themselves. Thus, the close tethering of eminent persons to a powerful state -- like Michelle's relationship with France, or Mitchell's with the US.-- seems likely to help improve success. International organizations offer a comparative advantage if the principal problem is one of building confidence and limiting uncertainty through the deployment of monitoring, observation, or military deployments.
Tactics. The tactics available for preventive efforts include the possibly employment of a wide range of instruments. In these cases, the timing of intervention was dependent more on the existence of a crisis than in any objective assessment of ripeness. A standard response remains to dispatch a high-level envoy in the aftermath of a crisis, hoping that high-level international attention and facilitation will cap escalating tensions. In addition to special envoys and eminent persons, there is an important place for ongoing, systematic international monitoring and observation. Such permanent observation, as the UNOMSA mission to South Africa, serves two purposes. First it provides an on-the-ground early warning system to determine when and to what extent violence is likely to occur and what can be done to defuse it. Second, observer missions, if sufficiently large, can actually deter violence if the parties know the "eyes and the ears" of the international community are upon them. Practical efforts to monitor human rights and diffuse community-level violence are prudent means of launching preventive action, in effect institutionalizing the intervention through a structure of ongoing engagement.
High-level summitry and attention was also used in at least two of the cases,
South Africa and Northern Ireland. The potential payoff of summitry is great;
leverage can be maximized and symbolic breakthroughs can be dramatic. They can
be conducted to create or stimulate a positive turning point in the negotiation
process. Yet the potential for payoff does not come without considerable risk.
Summits that fail can put peace processes back and make future progress more
difficult to achieve. Even when summits succeed in making breakthroughs, mass
publics become even more cynical if the peace process subsequently derails.
High-level attention is necessary, and a high degree of coordination between
states and envoys, appears to be a prerequisite for success.
VI. Conclusions
Preventive diplomacy, whether to calm a newly emerging ethnic conflict or in preventing recurrence of violence in a long-standing one, needs to be more broadly conceived. Preventive action in ethnic conflicts should be aimed at preventing new disputes from spiraling into violence, but equal weight needs be given to those opportunities for taking preventive action to pre-empt a long-standing conflict's recurrence. Anticipating the opportunities and acting upon them is the key to successful intervention in both sets of cases; the problems and prospects are remarkably the same.
An accurate assessment of the parties' intentions is critical. In South Africa, preventive action was based on a correct assessment that the talks had only snagged, not derailed. Eminent person's mediation by a Special Representative of the Secretary General made a critical difference at a key moment. In Sri Lanka, external parties were skeptical of the LTTE's commitment to peace; they doubted whether, given the lather's behavior, the peace process was really salvageable. There was no ability to generate sufficient political will to significantly intervene in Sri Lanka, especially when the parties were so resistant to a third party role. Whether allowing Sri Lanka to slip back into civil war was a failure of prevention, or a justifiable unwillingness of the international community to become involved in a hopeless quagmire, depends on assessing the attitudes and intentions of tough ethnic forces such as the LTTE.
If the parties are fundamentally motivated to avoid the abyss from
which they are trying to escape, third-party preventive efforts may help prevent
a recurrence of widespread violence. Preventive diplomacy has a chance if the
intervention is institutionalized in the form of an ongoing monitoring and observation
mission, pursued by accepted, eminent, high-level envoys drawing their clout
from close coordination with states or the UN, and if the intervention aimed
at reinforcing the basic compulsions of moderate elites that the risks of a
negotiated settlement are preferable to the consequences of a return to war.
Preventive action in these ethnic conflict circumstances, then, seems not only
warranted but is a necessary activity to provide a bridge from a recurring history
of violent conflict and to new opportunities for negotiated peace.
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1. On preventive diplomacy, see, for example Lund (1996) and Jentleson (1996). The 1998 report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict offers and extensive overview of the concepts and issues in preventive international conflict management. For a skeptical assessment of preventive diplomacy, see Stedman (1995).
2. This particular phase of negotiation has generally taken a back seat in the literature on negotiation when compared to the difficult problems of getting the parties to the table and the substantive or outcome issues related to the nature of the comprehensive settlement (i.e., in centralist revolts, the terms of living together or the terms of separation or partition). Getting to the table has been explored in some length (Stein 1989, Saunders 1985), and so too has the implementation of peace agreements (Hampson 1996). However, the extremely risky and uncertain period after formal talks have begun, and before a formal, comprehensive peace agreement has been struck, has not received sufficient attention as a distinct phase of negotiation in-and-of-itself.
3. Stephen Brams, in a Theory of Moves (1995), refers to the use of "threat moves" as a part of iterated bargaining.
4. On the concept of turning points, see Druckman (1986). When parties transform their relationship from one characterized by a zero-sum perception of the conflict -- where one side's gain is another's loss -- to a positive sum perception where mutual gains are possible, they progress across thresholds or transition points that link phases of the negotiation process. That is, the phases of peace processes are linked by identifiable events or turning points which indicate the movement between phases. Because not all peace processes yield peace, it is clear that such turning points can be in the direction toward violence as well as away from it. Roy Licklider writes that "rather than a single pattern whereby civil violence is ended, it seems more useful to conceive of the termination of civil violence as a set of processes at which there are critical choice points. Selections at these points form alternative strategies of conflict termination" (1993:18).
5. The structure of a negotiation finds its origins in agreements made during previous phases. That is, in order to assess the structure of negotiations toward a settlement, one must peer back to the pre-negotiation phases, in which the shape and venue of the table, the sequences, and the outcome scenarios of the talks are determined.
6. In terms of the structured, focused comparison approach, I seek variance on the dependent variable, "progress" in negotiation stimulated by third-party intervention. Progress is defined as movement through the phases of bargaining, in this case from the onset of talks through the preliminary and formal stages of negotiation.
7. The peace plan unveiled in August was attempt by the government to circumvent and undercut the LTTE's base by appealing to directly to moderate Tamils and by retaining the support of a small pro-government Tamil party in the legislature. The peace plan offered to provide for greater autonomy by giving Tamils legislative powers over their own affairs in areas of law and order, land, and finance. Notably, the agreement was also strongly opposed by hard-line elements within the Kumaratunga cabinet and by Sinhalese nationalists led by Buddhist monks.
8. International Herald Tribune, 8 August 1995, p.4.
9. Terry George, "Lost Without War in Northern Ireland," New York Times, 17 July 1996.
10. One incident, the IRA killing of a postal worker during a robbery in November 1994, was blamed on a breakdown in the chain of command.
11. Paul Arthur, "Conflict Transformation - Theory and Practice in the Northern Ireland Conflict" as a case study, ms. 1998.
12. See Jentleson (1996: 8) for an assessment of the methodological issues in assessing preventive diplomacy, including the inherent difficulties of counter-factual analysis.
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