Missing a trick: expertise in mediation and negotiations

UNIDIR’s ‘Disarmament as Humanitarian Action’ project has examined how process in multilateral arms control negotiation matters. Arms control is but one area in which issues of human security are subject to complex negotiation. In my research field – analyzing the roles of international organizations in peacebuilding – I believe that, similarly, many international organizations pay insufficient attention to the institutional machinery and expertise required for managing negotiations to end high intensity conflict.

Laurie Nathan has presented a strong and eloquent argument for increasing institutional support for mediation in a concept paper called ‘Deficiencies in African Mediation’ prepared for the Organ Directorate of the South African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat. His argument rests on the premise that mediation is a specialist endeavour ‘not reducible to common sense or power-based diplomacy’ and that the quality of mediation matters; ‘depending on their proficiency, mediators can either heighten or reduce the prospect of a positive outcome’ [1].

Nathan noted that the evolution of mediation skills to facilitate dialogue and co-operative problem solving between individuals and groups has taken place primarily in domestic contexts, where in many cases it’s regarded as a professional discipline. Examples of relevant skills and techniques include: conflict analysis, shuttle diplomacy, designing and convening mediation processes, preparing agendas, conducting meetings, managing media relations, paraphrasing or re-framing positions, identifying common ground between the parties, and generating options for resolving deadlocks.

Recently, the Economist newspaper ran a double feature highlighting the increasingly important role of secular (such as the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD)) and faith-based (such as the Sant’Egidio community) organisations in mediating intra-state conflict. In addition to the essential pre-requisite of impartiality, it noted the value of ‘discretion, secrecy and flexibility’ that such small organizations can bring, and also stressed the importance of their experience and specialist mediation skills. For example, the Economist suggested that the technical support of a back-up team of mediators from the CHD was critical to avoiding deadlock and maintaining momentum in recent post-election mediation between the ruling party and opposition in Kenya, led by Kofi Annan. It concluded that ‘the betting is now on Mr. Annan and his team trying to repeat their Kenya trick in beleaguered Zimbabwe’.

Chance would be a fine thing. After the (un)contested Zimbabwe election the African Union reiterated its support for SADC’s mediation effort led by President Thabo Mbeki. Yet, there are critical weaknesses in this mediation effort. The most obvious and well-documented is mediation bias. As Nathan has shown, there is abundant historical evidence that a mediator who displays bias ‘will lose the trust of the disfavoured parties, become less effective if not ineffectual as a result and complicate or even heighten the conflict’ [2]. Since 2005, Zimbabwe’s largest opposition party - the Movement for Democratic Change - has repeatedly objected to President Mbeki as a mediator because he was perceived to be biased. Unsurprisingly therefore the post-election ‘talks about talks’ focused on the issue of the mediator(s) with the MDC insisting on a permanent African Union (AU) envoy to join the talks alongside Mbeki. In the deal that enabled the current negotiations, Mbeki remains the main mediator, but is crucially assisted by a ‘reference group’ composed of AU head Jean Ping, the UN’s Zimbabwe envoy Haile Menkerios, and the SADC official George Chikoti.

Over and above the issue of finding mediator(s) that are acceptable to the parties, it is unclear as to whether the proposed reference group will be able to deliver the requisite specialist expertise. Both the AU and SADC lack institutional knowledge and specialist expertise to support mediation efforts. For example, in the case of the Darfur peace process in 2006, the head of the AU team, Ambassador Sam Ibok, recognized this handicap but couldn’t find suitably experienced mediators to join the process at short notice. This, Nathan said, contributed to

‘a deeply flawed approach of deadline diplomacy emanating from AU headquarters and the international funders and partners of the peace process. It inhibited effective mediation, produced a peace agreement that did not achieve peace, and sowed divisions that exacerbated the conflict’.

[This is a quote from 1. Argument elaborated in 3.]

Nathan has identified various categories of expertise required for supporting mediation processes. These include mediation, country, thematic, intelligence, communications and management and administrative expertise. Specialist expertise could be located within expert mediation units, while organizations might also consider decentralized ways to harness mediation talent through roster mechanisms and cooperation with specialist non-governmental groups.

Other international organizations and donor states are themselves not particularly well endowed with much of this expertise. (For example, although the UN has traditionally provided the forum for the resolution of international disputes, it has only recently invested in building up its mediation capacity. This followed recommendations from the 2004 High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change which led to the establishment of a Mediation Support Unit and website in the Department of Political Affairs. Tellingly, the Panel stressed that in appointing envoys, mediators and special representatives, high-level competence should be placed above all other criteria.) This perhaps explains why mediation support has received little attention in on-going efforts to strengthen peace and security capacities of the AU and African regional organisations.

We’re missing a trick here. Building institutional expertise in mediation is arguably one of the most over-looked and cost-effective ways to promote the efficacy of international organizations in preventing and ending violence.


This is a guest blog by Catriona Gourlay. Catriona is a Marie Curie Fellow at UNIDIR, currently working on a project on EU-UN cooperation in peacebuilding.

References

1. Laurie Nathan, ‘Concept Paper: Deficiencies in African Mediation’, Prepared for the Organ Directorate of the SADC Secretariat, 13 December 2007.

2. Laurie Nathan, ‘Deficiencies of African Mediation’ and ‘A Case of Undue Pressure: International Mediation in African Civil Wars’, 1998.

3. Laurie Nathan, ‘No Ownership, No Peace: The Darfur Peace Agreement’ Working Paper, series 2, no. 5, Crisis States Research Centre, September 2006.

Picture downloaded from Flickr.

Everything bad is good for you?

Last weekend I read Steven Johnson's latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You. I had begun reading it in the departure lounge at London City airport a few days earlier, but felt a bit put off by the looks the paperback's bright pink cover got from tanked-up City traders and stag party skiers: perhaps they figured I was tucking into Belle de Jour or a Mills & Boon pulp romance. (The UK version is pinker - much pinker - than the picture looks above. Bad Penguin!)

Johnson is a prominent American technology journalist. Publishers describe his books as "culture", but - like his contemporaries Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki and to some extent others like Timothy Ferris, Matt Ridley and Mark Kurlansky - Johnson really spans lots of different non-fiction genres including science, history and psychology. The title of his last (excellent) book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software conveys a sense of his enthusiastic, entertaining and slightly breathless style of writing.

The basic gist of Everything Bad is Good for You, first published a couple of years ago, is a refutal of the culture vultures who insist that modern culture is going to the dogs - a downward spiral of dumbed-down TV programming, blandified music and repetitive and ultra-violent video games, about which the best to be said is that they improve hand-eye coordination of zombie-eyed teens with brains hollowed out of all moral sense.

Rubbish, says Johnson. And he sets out to show quite the opposite. Sure, there's plenty of crap out there he concedes, but the increasing sophistication of audiences for these things combined with enabling technologies like the Internet means that the best of what's produced today is much more complex and cognitively demanding that most of what we saw or heard 20 or 30 years ago. Video games are about developing and flexing heuristics for problem solving. The best TV dramas like The Sopranos or The Wire are more complex in character depth and multiple plot line than anything seen before, a genre that Johnson notes began with the cop drama Hill Street Blues less than 25 years ago. The best-selling series of games The Sims trumps Pacman and Pong. As a keen music fan, I can attest that for every Britney, it's now possible to find - courtesy of the iTunes Music store or podcasts like NPR All Songs Considered or KPunk (literally produced in some guy's bedroom) - plenty of good new tunes.

So what's this got to do with disarmament? Something of abiding interest to us is how multilateral practitioners do what they do. Reading some academic literature about negotiations one would think that all disarmament negotiators are cravat, tweed and monocle-wearing 19th century types operating in their own parallel bubble universe. There has been little real consideration of the impacts say of new technology on negotiation - and one only has to see the profusion of Blackberries and lately the proliferation of Apple iPhones, MacBooks and Sony Vaios in the conference room to appreciate that these people are deep in the currents of the contemporary age. Talking to them, it's clear they love these gadgets for the ways in which they empower their work - although, as French policy makers discovered last year, their IT security people aren't always impressed.

I wonder what the impact of all of this gush of information is going to have. Will it fertilize negotiating environments, or - like nitrate fertilizer run-off - gum things up and ultimately create sterility? It strikes me that multilateral practitioners don't necessarily need more information - their work is complex enough. Rather, they need better quality information, and better means to structure and manage it, in order to be more effective in their interactions. A key element of Johnson's argument is that with popular culture we can be more selective now: technology means we're not stuck with the crap - we can find and choose the good stuff. In theory. It remains to be seen whether we've gotten there yet on the informational side in diplomacy.

Something else Johnson wrote also struck a particular chord:

"The story of the last thirty years of popular culture is the story of rising complexity and increased cognitive demands .... Thanks to e-mail and the Web, we're reading text as much as ever, and we're writing more. But it is true that a specific, historically crucial kind of reading has grown less common in this society: sitting down with a three-hundred page book and following its argument or narrative without a great deal of distraction. We deal with text now in shorter bursts, following links across the Web, or sifting through a dozen e-mail messages. The breadth of information is wider in this world, and it is far more participatory.

"But there are certain types of experiences that cannot be readily conveyed in this more connective, abbreviated form. Complicated, sequential works of persuasion, where each premise builds on the previous one, and where an idea can take an entire chapter to develop, are not well suited to life on the computer screen... I can't imagine getting along without e-mail, and I derive great intellectual nourishment from posting to my weblog, but I would never attempt to convey the argument of this book in either of those forms."

Rising complexity and increased cognitive demands are also features of multilateral disarmament negotiation. And Johnson's point about the role of books is timely food for thought. A couple of colleagues and I are currently trying to complete a book looking at some aspects of negotiations building on work we've done on the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project. It's not easy ... but who knows, perhaps that bad process is good for us. What's the old saying - "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"?


John Borrie

Reference

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For You. London: Penguin: 2006.

We've written some on technology in negotiations. For instance, see Patricia Lewis's DI blog post on mobile technology in the conference chamber here.

Is there a Geneva / New York divide?

Bob Dylan played a sold-out concert in Geneva recently, mixing songs from his latest album, "Modern Times," with some of his old classics, including "Like a Rolling Stone," which contains the following cryptic lyrics:

"You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat / who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat..."

Nobody quite knows what this means, and Bob isn't giving any clues. I prefer a straightforward interpretation: The female subject of the song riding through Manhattan on a Harley Davidson driven by, well, a diplomat; possibly from South-East Asia (which could explain the Siamese cat reference).

All of this set me to thinking about the very different experiences that diplomats dealing with disarmament and arms control must have in Geneva and in New York - apart, that is, from featuring or not in Bob Dylan songs.

On one level, diplomats posted to Geneva and those posted to New York are supposed to be doing the same thing: defending their national interests in the face of competing interests of other countries and, in the process, providing and demanding concessions in order to squeeze the collective national interests of UN Member States into the frameworks of multilateral agreements.

On another level, however, New York and Geneva are like chalk and cheese (excuse the pun). New York is the political epicentre of the United Nations. The city is famous for its fast-paced, no nonsense, in-your-face way of doing business. Geneva, on the other hand, is the United Nations' workshop for disarmament and arms control with a reputation for being quiet and laid-back and with a history of promoting humanitarian causes. These contrasts must translate into quite different experiences for diplomats posted to each place.

But what if it goes further than that? It seems to me that differences between the political environments and ways of working in Geneva and New York is opening up a divide between the two UN centres that is making it harder for creative ideas on disarmament developed by States in one place to gain traction in the other. What a ridiculous idea, I hear you say. Surely diplomats, no matter where they're posted, will be following the same set of instructions from their Capitals, making it inconceivable that policy inconsistencies could develop between Geneva and New York? This is a reasonable view. But it doesn't match up with what we are seeing.

Geneva is less politically-charged than New York. Its permanent missions contain a much higher proportion of disarmament specialists. Also, disarmament diplomats in Geneva have a greater degree of informal interaction with non-governmental experts than do their colleagues in New York. All of this naturally translates into a good number of ideas and initiatives on disarmament and arms control being generated in Geneva. These aren't always well received in New York, however. I suggest that there are two main reasons for this:

First, while all 192 members of the United Nations are represented in New York, only 158 have permanent missions on Geneva. States without representatiion in Geneva are mainly developing countries, many of them from Africa and the Pacific. This makes it more difficult for proposals developed in Geneva to gain traction in New York, particularly if they concern conventional arms control issues with important humanitarian, development and assistance dimensions.

Second, proposals generated in the relatively calm and specialised Geneva environment often fall victim to the political maelstrom of issue-linkage and horse-trading that characterises United Nations politics in New York. This process is sometimes helped along by plenipotentiary Ambassadors who, on occasion, exercise their powers in New York by sacrificing "made in Geneva" initiatives on the alter of some higher national priority, despite that fact that their own country may have played a role in developing them in the first place.

All of this begs the question, what can be done? Apart from Geneva-based actors becoming more politically savvy and New York-based people becoming more willing to accept proposals from outside their sphere of influence, I'm not sure. I would be very interested in hearing other people's views on this, particularly those of diplomats and others working in New York.

Is there a Geneva / New York divide on disarmament and, if it does exist, what can we do about it? The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind...


Patrick Mc Carthy


Reference

Photo Credit: Bob Dylan by legduma on flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/legduma/457080723/

Zapped! Mobile technology in the conference chamber

In the past, in a negotiating conference room, one could always tell when something was afoot. Delegates would be moving around the room – often with unseemly speed - clutching sheaves of draft text. Conclaves of ambassadors would huddle in a corner to sweat out the immediate joint response to a smart proposal from another delegation or group. Junior members would be sprinting to the photocopiers and nicotine addicts would be pacing around outside together conjuring up fixes – I even know of diplomats who took up smoking so as to be part of the smoke-filled rooms that always seemed to be where the creative ambassadors and others produced the ground-breaking work.

Now mobile technology is changing all that. Calls and text messages via phones or Blackberries rebound around the conference room. Vibrating handsets have given a whole new meaning to the “buzz” in a room. Jokes are zapped through – although how these work in an intercultural environment makes me wonder about the wisdom of that – we can only hope that smiley faces are sprinkled liberally throughout: “International incident caused by text message” is undoubtedly a newspaper headline of the near future.

One of the phenomena that I’ve become increasingly aware of is that when a delegate takes the floor, his or her phone seems to start to ring immediately – the microphones pick up the signal even when the phone is set to silent.

It could be my imagination, but it this phenomenon seems to occur with more frequency when the speaker is making a statement on behalf of a group of states. In a recent meeting I attended, a regional group convenor took the floor to respond to a critical point made by the chairman, and, immediately, his phone gave a message signal and he looked at it. Again maybe my imagination, but this normally astute, to-the-point diplomat, said nothing of significance at all and his statement seemed to be cut short. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. But in the pre-mobile communication era, nobody could have signalled to him that they were in disagreement without running up to stop him from speaking and exposing themselves and the disagreement within the group to all. Now they can, so maybe they do.

Another consequence of the use of mobile communicators in the conference chamber is the now well-known “reporting back by factions” strategy. Within large delegations, in a politically-sensitive negotiation, there are often deep divisions. These divisions can be political, institutional or personal – often all three. In some of these delegations, those with opposing views, who wish to see differing outcomes, are reporting back to capital in situ using wireless internet communication or hand-held email communicators, such as Blackberries.

In the past, this was done after a speaker had made her point to the floor: one of the opposing factions would be seen running out after the speech to report back by phone to capital on what she had said and how this had served to subtly undermine the government’s agreed position. Fights would then break out back at the embassy later that evening and a set of new instructions and shifted positions would emerge overnight or over a period of a few days.

Now, when she is speaking, one of the opposing factions sits behind her - email communicator in hand - reporting back as she speaks. Even while she is speaking, her phone will be buzzing with text messages, sometimes of support and sometimes to attempt to intervene and influence her trajectory. The pressure must be terrible.

As with most technologies, there are good, bad and downright dangerous applications of mobile communicators. In the world of arms control negotiations, they can be used both as enablers and as controllers, as John Borrie has described:

“They enable a negotiator to gain access to distant resources and sources of information more easily. Conversely, they lose their value if these links became a straitjacket restricting object-oriented responses flexible enough to capitalize on opportunities emerging from negotiating dynamics (of “being in the room”)”.

They can promote social bonding through jokes, expressions of concern and support, or they can convey terrifying messages of accusation and threats whilst one is speaking. The impact of these technologies on the way delegations are doing business in the negotiating room is hard to measure and is something we’ll return to in the future in this blog – in the meantime I strongly encourage someone to take it up as the subject for their PhD thesis.


This is a guest blog from Dr Patricia Lewis. Patricia, Director of UNIDIR, is the owner of a mobile phone, a laptop, but not yet a Blackberry.


Reference and further reading:

John Borrie, “Rethinking multilateral negotiations: disarmament as humanitarian action” in John Borrie & Vanessa Martin Randin (eds.), Alternative Approaches in Multilateral Decision Making, Geneva: UNIDIR: 2005, pp. 7-37 (to download a free PDF version, click here or on the brown book cover at left on this page).

Image retrieved from Flickr.

In memory of Clive Pearson

In 1997, negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva on a Comprehensive nuclear Test Ban Treaty had recently been completed. Internationally there were widespread hopes that further negotiations would soon commence on fissile materials, and then further steps toward nuclear disarmament as part of the post-Cold War peace dividend. The CD just needed to settle a couple of niggles concerning its work programme first.

Into this environment arrived New Zealand's first Disarmament Ambassador, a flamboyant character named Clive Wallace Pearson. Clive was highly experienced in bilateral and trade diplomacy in various posts around the world, including as New Zealand's first Ambassador to Turkey. But he later said that nothing prepared him for the peculiarities of multilateral arms control negotiations, certainly not the baffling acronyms and the "late-night foul smelling rooms" he would spend so much time in during multilateral disarmament meetings over coming years.

A decade later, the CD still hasn't achieved consensus on its programme of work despite the best efforts of Clive and many others. Clive put his time as Disarmament Ambassador to maximum use, however, and was very active on the full spectrum of disarmament-related issues. He led New Zealand's delegation in the landmark negotiations in Oslo that resulted in the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention in 1997. The New Agenda Coalition, which Clive helped to found, played a major role in the 2000 review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As chair of that meeting's subsidiary body on nuclear disarmament and with the invaluable assistance of his great friend Dr. Joan Mosley (then New Zealand's Permanent Representative in Vienna), Clive brokered a deal that resulted in agreement on the (as he put it) "all-singing, all-dancing" 13-steps to a nuclear-weapon-free world. And he was involved in the informal "Interlaken Group" from 2000 to 2001 that helped to prepare for success at the 2001 UN conference on a programme of action to tackle the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.

These are just a sprinkling of Clive's contributions. But even had he achieved less, Clive would still be remembered with great affection by virtually everyone who knew him in the Geneva context. He was hugely charismatic and great fun, not to mention elegantly attired. Ambassador Pearson's ability to sweep into a room and make most ladies' (and not a few gents') knees go wobbly was widely envied by the other silverback alpha males - but not successfully replicated.

In a relaxed moment, Clive would occasionally admit he could be a bit of a prima donna. Subordinates recall his preference for being called "Glorious Leader", although this was (probably) an affectation. Nevertheless, in line with the deadly professional seriousness with which Clive took his responsibilities, very high standards were expected of those who worked with him. He informed new subordinates, only half-jokingly, "your job is to make me look good". Fortunate then that he was so talented at getting the best out of those who were prepared to try to do so.

Those few people Clive had little time for invariably deserved it, usually being one or more of the following: lacking in deference, impolite, incompetent, deceitful, ungracious or a whinger. Perhaps it was his upbringing in the Presbyterian chill of Dunedin, but Clive detested miserliness most of all. And he wasn't fond of “puffed-up wind bags” either - as a select few in Geneva and even in Wellington discovered to their cost.

While always very conscious of his responsibilities as a senior diplomat and Head of Mission, Clive was also a loyal and supportive person, and was a formative influence in the professional development of a number of young diplomats in Geneva. When asked to be, Clive could always be depended upon to be a frank, yet good-humoured, sounding board. Indeed, if asked nicely enough he was also usually willing to take one for a spin around Lac Leman in his very rapid black Mercedes cabriolet “play car”. This was always good for one's spirits.

Meanwhile, it was the responsibility of any person on Clive's team to "look decorative". Newbies were inspected, spun-around and remedial advice proffered: "Lose those specs, you look like Nana Mouskouri" or "we need to get you into a new cozzie and some six inch heels, inst!" For the boys, French-cuffed shirts were mandatory. It was not entirely unheard of for colleagues at the Mission to be sent home to change for incurring his sartorial displeasure. "It's got to be immaculate", he would say.

Clive was also a widely respected authority on interior decoration, although his basic rule seemed to boil down to "everything in twos, and lots of cream and black". He only got half way there with his pair of marmalade Abyssinian pussycats, the adorable Benson and Hedges. While lacking in deference and uniquely destructive of New Zealand government furnishings, the pussycats gave him great companionship, not to mention the many official and informal dinner guests they harassed.

Like his Abyssinians, Clive had an acute sense of tactical opportunity. He loved nothing more than settling down with Mont Blanc fountain pen in hand and "ciggie on the go" to "dabble in a bit of drafting mischief". And his talents as a drafter were formidable, a crucial skill for good disarmament negotiators, as many speeches, multilateral agreements and diplomatic cables reporting on them come down to the appropriately nuanced formulation of words.

Combined with his drafting skills, Clive’s great powers of persuasiveness made him a difficult negotiator for others to hold back. "We're not having that,” he'd say with a sweep of his hand, and that would be that: others usually had no choice but to be carried along by his enthusiasm and scary competence for whatever he'd decide to have a crack at. This was a refreshing trait in an ambassador, and it kept diplomatic colleagues on their toes.

In 2002, after a distinguished posting, Clive returned to Wellington. There, after running various divisions of the foreign ministry, he became special adviser to the New Zealand government on multilateral affairs - tackling yet more tricky diplomatic challenges with his usual aplomb and humour. From time to time he would turn up briefly at some multilateral meeting in Geneva, usually with a cheeky grin and draft text in the back pocket: "we've got yet another triumph on the go" he would chuckle over a drink or comfort food with old friends in the Café Bourg de Four, which he had long before affectionately dubbed "The Slophouse".

All was not well, however, and ill health intruded more frequently. Recently he took a turn for the worse. Just after the Queen's Birthday weekend, Clive passed away in a hospice in Wellington, with some of his nearest and dearest such as Joan close by.

Clive’s funeral was held in Wellington cathedral last Friday, and messages were read from the Prime Minister and other notables. The head of the Foreign Service delivered the eulogy. The New Zealand flag draped Clive's coffin along with white lilies (his favourite flowers). The clergyman was appropriately sonorous, and the pallbearers were reported to be a judicious mixture of the distinguished and the decorative, as he would have liked.

We already miss him deeply, and can't really believe he's gone.


John Borrie

Welcome to Disarmament Insight

This blog site is aimed at negotiators, policy wonks, activists, researchers and anyone curious about disarmament and human security.

Every few days we'll be adding new thoughts about our research, including how it relates to current events, future trends and other things we feel excited about on disarmament-related issues.

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the Disarmament Insight team