PROCESS

Negotiation is a process, and its outcome can be best explained—and hence obtained— by process analysis: “Where you get is a function of how you get there,” as Henry Kissinger was to have said.

Active conflict or escalation typically contains sets of steps to negotiation. One begins with a stage of petition (or diplomacy, in interstate conflicts), where grievances are broadly felt as Needs and the aggrieved party seeks to negotiate redress, recognizing the government’s authority. The protest moves on to consolidation, where the rebellion turns inward to build its own solidarity and unity; often using identity or Creed to articulate the grievances and to build support; negotiation is unlikely and antithetical to the rebellion’s focus at this stage. Only when consolidation is completed can the rebellion turn to confrontation, in combat and diplomacy (although the two work against each other) (Stedman 1991; Zartman 1995, 2006). However, at this stage, if victory or negotiation do not take place, the rebellion often turns inward, using its means as ends, and enters a phase of Greed that is much less amenable to negotiation (Collier et al. 2003; Arnson & Zartman 2005).

Parties consider positively the notion of conflict resolution through direct or mediated negotiation when they perceive the conditions of ripeness (Touval 1982; Touval & Zartman 1985; Zartman 1982, 1989, 1995, 2000; Gregg 2001). Ripeness occurs when the parties feel that they can no longer expect to win the conflict through escalation (or simply holding out) at an acceptable cost and that there is a possibility of a jointly acceptable solution.

Ripeness was found in the mediated negotiations that resolved the South West African conflict in 1988 (Crocker 1992) and the Salvadoran conflict in 1989 (deSoto 1992) and in the direct negotiation in South Africa in 1990-94 (Sisk 1995). It was carried through to a minimal outcome (agreeing formula) in Nagorno Karabagh (Mooradian & Druckman 2003) and to more or less resolving formulas in Dayton in 1993 (Holbrooke 1998), in the Israeli disengagements (Rubin 1982) and the Israeli-Egyptian Washington Treaty (1979). Ripeness was absent in the failed Carter mediation between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1990 (Ottaway 1995) and Clinton mediation between Palestine and Israel in 2000 (Enderlin 2002), and was present but not seized in Liberia in 1990 or Lebanon in 1976 (Zartman 2005).

Once it has become a perceived option by the parties, either directly or through the help of a mediator, negotiation typically goes through its own process involving a number of stages and turning points (Zartman & Berman 1982; Bendahmane & McDonald 1986; Druckman 1986, 2001; Hopmann 1996). These may overlap and parties may backtrack; their passage maybe explicit or implicit; but their functions need to be observed or else the negotiations will fail or produce an incoherent result.

The first stage is diagnosis, without which the parties cannot get the most out of the negotiations for themselves and at the same time find terms of agreement that are acceptable to the other party.

Parties and issues are some of the most diffi­cult prenegotiation problems. While agreeing that negotiations among both sides' moderates only are likely to leave the mass of the rebellion outside the agreement, scholarship and practice are still out on whether to include diehard spoilers in the hopes of carrying them along in the momentum of the negotiations or to leave them out in marginalized isolation (Stedman 2001; Zahar 2007). Inside they may wreck the talks, and outside they may torpedo the results, the critical variable being the weight that they command within the rebellion. Whether the hardline akazu and the Committee for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) should have been included in the Arusha negotiations on Rwanda in 1993 is a question that will be long debated and never answered (Jones 2001; Leader 2001). But the absence of the IRA on one side and the DUP and the UKUP on the other made the Good Friday Agreement possible in 1998 (Curran & Sebenius 2003). In between, excluded parties at the Arusha negotiations on Burundi after 2000 were gradually brought in as the agreement evolved. Similarly, the question of what issues to include without breaking the back of an agreeable agenda is also crucial; it is unlikely that the Jerusalem question could have been included at Oslo or the Kosovo question at Dayton, but the decision to put off a resolution of Brcko at Dayton (1994) and of the Panguna mine at Arawa (2001) were the keys to the last lock on the Bosnian and Bougainville agreements.

Although diplomats may assume that such preparation is natural to negotiation, it is frequently neglected. A comparison of President Carter's (1979) and President Clinton's (2000) preparation for their Camp David Mideast negotiations goes far to explain the relative success of the first and the failure of the second. Rebel groups often need training in negotiation, beginning with the diagnosis phase, as the painful experiences of Renamo in Mozambique leading up to the 1990 negotiations, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka leading up to the 2005 ceasefire, and the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda leading up to the 2006 negotiations all show, among others.

The second phase is one of formulation. Negotiators do not immediately start estab­lishing a meeting point from fixed positions; implicitly or explicitly, they first establish a formula for their agreement, consisting of a common definition of the problem and its solution (emerging directly from the diagnosis components), a common sense of justice, and/or an agreed set of terms of trade. This set of principles serves as the basis for the subsequent allocation of details. Establishing a satisfying formula is the key to a subsequent agreement, and if it is not done, the resolution of the conflict will be slower, less coherent, and less satisfactory (Narlikar & Odell 2006). There are two different types of formulas: a minimal agreeing formula that ends or suspends the violence without touching the basic conflict issues, and a resolving formula that takes on the more difficult challenge of managing both the orig­inal issues, the complications that have arisen during the conflict, and mechanism for dealing with old conflict that may reemerge and new conflicts that may arise. The distinction raises a major dilemma in negotiated conflict resolution: should peace be achieved, even if through a minimal agreeing formula that may leave issues unresolved and grievances unaddressed, or should negotiation focus on the achievement of a final resolving formula, even if the search prolongs the violence and killing that come with the struggle for justice (Zartman & Kremenyuk 2005)? Rather than find an answer in the absolute, the optimal strategy involves sequencing, focusing first on conflict management and the reduction of violence and then turning to the search for the ingredients of a just, resolving formula, recognizing that conflict management both undermines and promises conflict resolution since it reduces pressure for a solution (a less hurting stalemate) but also implies subsequent attention to underlying causes lest they return to bring back the conflict.

The notion of justice, which enters the negotiation process through its formula, is important both in understanding the process and in tying negotiation analysis to other elements of social science and diplomatic practice. While some have held that there is a single overarching notion of justice governing negotiated outcomes (Rawls 1971; Barry 1986) and others have held that justice has no place at all in negotiation, it has been found that justice is an important element in the search for a formula but that the particular version of justice to be applied is negotiated between the parties before they can move on to the disposition of specific items in dispute (Gauthier 1986; Elster 1992; Zartman et al. 1996; Albin 2001,2003).

Formulas abound. The Arab-Israeli dis­putes werehandled on the basis of the UNSCR 242 formula of “Peace for security” in the Israeli-Egyptian Washington Treaty (1979), the Israeli Jordan Treaty (1995), and the Oslo Accords (1993), and were not managed or resolved with Syria or Palestine because the formula was not applied. The formula may provide one (or a mixture) of three ways by which conflicting positions are combined into a joint agreement: concession, compensation, and construction.

Concession involves mutual movement from initial positions on a single item to a meeting point somewhere in the middle. It is initiated by the establishment of a range where the potential positions of the parties overlap, termed the bargaining range or zone of possible agreement (ZOPA), absence of which agreement is not possible (Pillar 1983). Pioneering work by economists introduced process analysis in the early twentieth century, but, while theoretically elegant, it was hampered by two assump­tions: fixed initial positions and constant concession rates (Edgeworth 1881; Zeuthen 1930). Concession behavior occurs most frequently toward the end of the negotiation process, often in the form of split-the- difference, after a general framework has been established (see below) (Tracy 1987).

Compensation overcomes the zero-sum problem by bringing in other items as a trade­off. It is expressed in the penetrating insight of the Homans (1961, p 62) Maxim: “The more the items at stake can be divided into goods valued more by one party than they cost to the other and goods valued more by the other party than they cost to the first, the greater the chances of successful outcome,” and also in the Nash (1950) Point. Compensation not only underscores the importance of establishing terms of trade as a key to successful negotiation but also reminds negotiators not to leave unclaimed value on the table (Lax & Sebenius 1982).

In the South West African negotiations (1981-88), South Africa insisted on the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola, whose presence justified South African troops in South West Africa, whereas Angola (and the South WestAfrican People's Organization [SWAPO]) insisted on the withdrawal of the South African Defense Force (SADF) from South West Africa, whose presence justified Angolan troops in Angola. Negotiations looking for a midpoint between zero and 50,000 for either troops would have been meaningless, but using each proposal as compensation for agreement on the other, as the US mediator got the parties to do, produced a highly positive-sum agreement with relatively balanced terms and Namibian independence as well. Similarly, in the famous Cuban Missile negotiations (1972), Soviet missile evacuation was bought by a US pledge not to invade, compensating an action with a promise that was deemed a fair set of terms of trade by the parties.

Construction,² sometimes termed inte­gration or problem-solving, refers to the reframing of the conflict or its solution in such a way that an outcome beneficial to both sides can be envisaged. There are many conflicts where Homans Maxim—and all the more so, a concession strategy— simply cannot be made to apply, and where a redefinition of the conflict is necessary to make a solution. In the Peru-Ecuador border dispute, decades of competing territorial claims produced only war, a real bargaining failure, but redefinition of the problem as one of mutual development made a cooperative settlement possible (1998). In Ulster, the redefinition of the conflict by the mediator into three strands—intra-Ulster, Ulster-Eire, Eire-UK—took it out of a distributive, zero­sum confrontation.

While these three forms are ideal types, they are starting points for variations that make negotiations possible. They indicate that sharing in a coveted payoff, bringing in new values to make a larger pie, and redefining the problem to bring out all parties' interests in a solution are approaches that negotiators need to take to find jointly acceptable solu­tions. Present-day understanding of process is in terms of stages gained in realism by overcoming the two limiting assumptions at the cost of quantitative theoretical elegance.