CONFLICT TYPES

The study of negotiation has made enormous strides since it became a field of research less than a half century ago (Schelling 1960; Ikle 1964; Walton & McKersie 1965). In this, it has kept up with the need for negotiated conflict resolution, as intrastate conflicts persist (after a rise and then a drop in the 1990s, after the Cold War restraints and supports were withdrawn) even though interstate conflicts have declined (Wallensteen 2007 ).

Negotiation can count many successes in Conflict Resolution to its credit in the same period, more or less resolving intrastate con­flicts (in addition to decolonization conflicts) in Mozambique (1992), Aceh (2005), Sudan (2005), Senegal (2006), Liberia (1997 and 2003), Sierra Leone (1999), Bosnia (1994), Kosovo (1999), Congo (1999), Bougainville (2001), among others. It also provided either agreeing or resolving formulas to end interstate conflicts through the Middle East Peace Process in the Israeli-Syrian Disengagements (1977), Israeli-Egyptian Treaty (1979), the Oslo Agreements (1993), and the Israeli-Jordanian Treaty (1995); the Geneva Agreements on Afghanistan (1988), the Ethiopian-Eritrean Agreements (1991 and 2000); the Brazzaville Agreement on

Table 16.2 Outcome and type of conflict, 1946-2005

Source: Kreutz 2006; see also Pfetsch & Rohloff 2000

Table 16.3 Outcome and regions, 1946-2005

Source: Kreutz 2006

Namibia (1988); the Peru-Ecuador Border Agreement (1999); the Tashkent (1966) and Simla (1972) Agreements on Kashmir, not to speak of the agreements in the construction of Europe, among others.

And it has led to the establishment of a growing web of international regimes, beginning with the security regime in the UN itself (1945), and going on to the Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (1982), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) (1947) and then the World Trade Organization (WTO) (1995), the Ozone Treaty (1994) and Framework Convention on Climate Change (1995), the Conven- tion/Organization on Security and Coopera­tion in Europe (C/OSCE) (1975/1992), and a myriad of other regimes. Each of these types has its dynamics and analyses.

There has been less analysis of interstate conflict negotiations, because there have been fewer interstate wars in the postwar and especially post-Cold War period. Parties to interstate conflicts enjoy formal equality as states, and usually in the post-World War II era their existence is not in question in the conflict; they will continue to exist when the war is over and the conflict is only one of their concerns. That said, their levels of power and commitment may vary greatly, leading to a greater or lesser degree of asymmetry. Much of the work that has been done on negotiating interstate conflicts focuses on territoriality, as discussed in the chapter by Vasquez, and on asymmetry, which is also an angle used by research on war itself. Studies of war asked why weak states attack, attributing the decision to imperfect information (Paul 1994); studies of negotiation ask how weak states can win something, and often a lot, attributing the result to strategies of borrowing power and of phasing, as already discussed (Zartman & Rubin 2003). Negotiations to end interstate wars, whether mediated or direct, generally tend to be conflict-driven and depend on the elements of ripeness to be perceived before they can begin; thereafter they tend to stop at agreeing formulas, sometimes surprisingly long-lasting, rather then being able to reach into the basic issues to come up with a resolving formula for agreement.

Intrastate conflict negotiations are charac­teristically asymmetrical, both informally in regard to power and formally in regard to status. In the first, the rebellion opposes its commitment to state power and its fixation on the conflict—an existential struggle to—the state's many other problems; in the second, it seeks recognition as spokesman for its cause, denying the state legitimacy as national authority, and status as an equal. Recognition is necessary for negotiation; negotiation confers recognition. This situation constitutes the major obstacle to substantive negotiating, and once it is overcome, the parties can begin discussing the range of issues lying between integration and independence or takeover. A whole range of intermediate solutions— various forms of autonomy, executive, and legislative power-sharing, elections—is avail­able for the negotiating, but the biggest obstacle is generally the absence of trust. The longer negotiations drag on, the greater the number of additional issues, including wounds and hatreds, that encumber the agenda: the longer it lasts, the harder it is to end, and so the still longer it lasts.

Intrastate conflicts frequently involve iden­tity issues that are highly impervious to negotiation. Such issues require constructive formulas, since concession and compensation are ill suited to deal with the problem.

In interstate cooperation, the path to prevention through the establishment of standards and institutions is entirely a matter of negotiation, as is the matter of maintaining and adjusting such regimes (Hasenclever et al. 1997; Chesterman, Ignatief & Thakur

2005). As in conflict negotiations, parties are formally equal but have different weights in power and, in addition, different roles in the negotiation. As a result, the challenge is one of managing complexity, involving largely the creation of coalitions of parties and of issues (Dupont 1994; Hampson 1995; Sebenius 1996). Negotiations to create regimes are problem-solving negotiations, designed to economize on transaction costs by setting up standard procedures for handling recurrent problems.