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.

What can our ancestors teach us about building trust?

The answer is an extraordinary amount based on what I heard at a fascinating workshop held on 25 May on ‘Human Security, Human Nature, and Trust-Building in Negotiations’, as part of the Disarmament Insight initiative. Their workshop brought together disarmament diplomats from Missions in Geneva, officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and UN with considerable experience of disarmament negotiations, and researchers specialising in trust issues.

The challenge posed for multilateral practitioners in the international security field attending the workshop was to think about how the information presented to them relates to their interactions, and to what extent their current community of practice leverages or impedes trust-building (something which John Borrie described at the meeting as ‘cognitive ergonomics’. Hear his podcast here.) Several speakers were invited to address the seminar, including Robin Coupland, the ICRC’s adviser on armed violence and the effects of weapons and a former war surgeon.

The starting point for his presentation was that negotiating effectively on human security issues requires understanding the role our ‘nature’ plays in the use of weapons and in restraining their use. His brief talk set the scene for the workshop’s two main speakers, Frans de Waal and Paul Seabright.

On the building of trust at the international level, an issue which he had been quite pessimistic about in his book ‘The Company of Strangers’, Seabright’s thinking reflected the dominant view in international relations theory which has been, in the words of John Mearsheimer, that ‘there is little room for trust among states’. What underlies this view is that because we can never have 100 per cent certainty about the current – and crucially the future – motives and intentions of others, we must assume the worst and plan accordingly.

State leaders have to begin with the assumption of mistrust because to trust can be dangerous in an uncertain world. But it can be equally dangerous to mistake potential friends for enemies. The security dilemma that confronts governments is to decide whether they face what one participant called a ‘trust game’ or a ‘force game’ (see my ‘Putting ourselves in the shoes of our enemies’ post of 18 May).

A category error in thinking about trust is to associate it with the elimination of uncertainty, because if we had certainty, we wouldn’t need trust. Other disciplines, notably psychology, sociology, and philosophy recognise that trust and uncertainty are mutually implicated, but these ideas haven’t been systematically applied in international relations. Ken Booth and I map out the beginnings of such an engagement in our forthcoming book The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, arguing that although uncertainty will always exist in world politics, this needn’t preclude processes of cooperation and trust-building.

The challenge is to explore in greater depth what other disciplines might contribute to thinking about trust at the international level – hence the 25 May event and the establishment of the interdisciplinary research network on trust-building in world politics (TrustNet) which is being set up at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth under the auspices of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies.

A key theme running through the day’s discussions concerned how actors who were committed to promoting cooperation and trust might signal their peaceful intentions. The immediate response from hard-nosed realists is that it isn’t possible for states to ‘signal type’ (to use the language of U.S. theorists writing about the security dilemma) because of the impossibility of distinguishing offensive from defensive weapons.

Even if decision-makers are persuaded that certain military moves will send a decisive signal of their peaceful intentions, thereby triggering a virtuous circle of cooperation if others are committed to the ‘trust game’, they might be so fearful that such a reassuring move will expose them to great danger if it is not reciprocated, that they’re not prepared to take such risks for trust.

Seabright recognised in his presentation that this dilemma faced the earliest human groups as they had reached out to cooperate with others. We have no idea how many of our ancestors perished because they mistook an enemy for a friend. Seabright rightly praised those who took such risks as the unsung heroes of humanity.

Without these early risky experiments in cooperation and trust, humans would never have evolved the combination of ‘calculation’ and ‘reciprocity’ that, Seabright argued, has made us so good at detecting cheats and spotting co-operators. Here, the human capacity for smiling, and especially laughter, has been essential in enabling humans to signal their type. But the grand enterprise of trust between strangers that has developed from this has been far more impressive within societies than it has been between them.

If new structures of trust are to be built at the international level, then peaceful/defensive states will have to do better at signalling their intentions. Here, we might ask what the equivalent of ‘laughter’ is for diplomats negotiating, for example, to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula or resolve the uncertainties, fears, and mistrust surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme. And will decision-makers play the ‘trust game’ if the consequences of misplaced trust might be a permanent exit from the game itself?

It isn’t only our earliest human ancestors who might have something to teach us about the importance of taking risks for trust. In his presentation, de Waal explained that chimpanzees are far better at reconciling than humans, though they also seem to have a greater propensity to fight. What’s fascinating here is that a male chimpanzee signals his desire to reconcile with another male by placing himself in a position where if the other chimpanzee rejected his olive branch, he’d be vulnerable to attack – a perfect illustration of primates ‘signalling type’. Decision-makers are more likely to take risks for trust where there is what Booth and I call a margin of safety, but primates appear to reconcile without such a safety net being in place.

Given that there may be situations where it is only possible for a state to signal its peaceful intentions to its adversary by exposing itself to significant risks in the event that its trust in the peaceful motives and intentions of the other proved unwarranted, the challenge facing leaders in these cases is whether to take a ‘leap in the dark’ (the phrase comes from Robert Schuman, French Foreign Minister, when launching his bold plan for European integration in 1950).

‘Leaps in the dark’ clearly involve risks and dangers. But in weighing these up, decision-makers need to remember that ‘playing it safe’ – applying worst-case thinking because there are no guarantees about the current and future motives and intentions of others – brings with it the risks and dangers of a self-fulfilling prophecy of security competition no one intended. There is no escape from risk and uncertainty in our world, and whilst this is so, a concept like trust will remain both elusive in conception - and hence worthy of interdisciplinary study - and indispensable to our global future.


This is a guest blog from Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler, Director of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth


References

More on the work of the DDMI in the area of Trust-Building is available on the Institute's website.

Booth, K. and Wheeler, N.J., The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics (forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan 2007).

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W.W. Norton.

Seabright, P. (2004) The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fun and Games

The New York Times has just published an interesting profile of Harvard scientist, Professor Martin Nowak, director of the university's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Nowak is a gamer - that is he takes informal ideas and builds them into versatile mathematical models in fields as diverse as economics and cancer biology.

What's this got to do with human security or disarmament diplomacy? For some time, we on the DHA project have been thinking about what insights from the natural and behavioural sciences could do for work in these areas. We explored some of these in a recent book we published, entitled "Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations" (click on the pink book at left to explore its contents).

The underlying theme in Nowak's many projects is that of cooperation, "one of the most puzzling yet fundamental features of life".

It's also a particular source of fascination for me because international relations are essentially problems of cooperation played out among states with different levels of interest, power and resources - inspired in part by the work of scholars like Robert Axelrod and Thomas Schelling.

In some multilateral contexts structural or institutional factors can constrain the ways in which cooperation can develop. I discussed this in a chapter of our book called "Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament" using some simple insights from game theory like variations of the classic Prisoners' Dilemma. I talked about the importance of "clusters of cooperators" in a population, who can change the rules of the game in real life situations as varied as the spread of viruses to the core group behind the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.

My hunch is that behind all of the complexity of multilateral relationships lie some pretty basic rules-of-thumb, which could be summarized like this:

1. Figure out what's in your best self-interest, but take a broad view and look in the longer term if you can (call it enlightened self-interest, if you will).

2. Identify others you can work with to pursue your interest. Common interest is the best basis for sustained cooperation.

3. Cooperate. In the short term you may face opposition and obstacles from "defectors". But don't worry so much about it. You're stronger in a cluster, and over the long term you'll change the rules of the game - or pay-off structure - of interactions for everyone. Social interactions matter.

In contrast, Nowak has been working on problems like the spread of cancer cells in the body. But he realised the tools he was using might be applied to human problems, especially when applied to thinking about social networks:

"Dr. Nowak and his colleagues found that when they put players into a network, the Prisoner elsewhere in the network are not able to undermine their altruism. "Even if outside our network there are cheaters, we still help each other a lot," Dr. Nowak said. That is not to say that cooperation always emerges. Dr. Nowak identified the conditions when it can arise with a simple equation: B/C>K. That is, cooperation will emerge if the benefit-to-cost (B/C) ratio of cooperation is greater than the average number of neighbours (K). "It's the simplest possible thing you could have expected, and it's completely amazing," he said."

John Borrie


References

Carl Zimmer, "In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution", New York Times (31 July 2007), see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31prof.html
?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin.

John Borrie, "Cooperation and Defection in the Conference on Disarmament", in Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations", Geneva: UNIDIR: 2006.

Picture by revlimit retrieved from Flickr.

New Podcast – Warring instincts: what we can learn from behavioural economics & neuroscience?

On 25 May we held our latest Disarmament Insight symposium with disarmament practitioners including diplomats, international civil servants, representatives of civil society groups and researchers, entitled ‘Human security, human nature and trust-building in negotiations’.

We’re pleased to unveil the latest free podcast we’ve prepared from the fascinating presentations at that event. Click here to hear or download the second part of a talk by the economist and author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, Professor Paul Seabright.

Professor Seabright's talk investigated "how have human beings tamed our warring instincts?"

In the first podcast of two encapsulating his talk, Professor Seabright observed that, at a time when there's mounting concern about violence in modern society, rates of violent death are very much lower now than they were in the past, which he noted may come as a surprise to many.

In this second 30 minute podcast, "Warring Instincts: What we can learn from behavioural economics & neuroscience?", we've included Professor Seabright's slides to aid the listener. These are viewable on iTunes or in Quicktime Player in sync with the audio.


John Borrie


Reference

Photo: sketch of human skull by Leonardo da Vinci.

War and Peace and Primates…and Podcasts

The Disarmament Insight initiative aims to encourage disarmament practitioners to think differently about human security.

In line with that aim, the Disarmament Insight initiative held its second symposium, entitled “Human Security, ‘Human Nature’ and Trust-building in Negotiations”, at Château de Bossey near Geneva on 25 May 2007.

To stimulate fresh thinking and discussion, we invited some outstanding speakers including Frans de Waal, one of the world’s foremost authorities on ape behaviour and author of books including Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and Peacemaking Among Primates (1990) and Paul Seabright, economist and author of The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life (2004).

As usual, we recorded talks in order to put them up on the website. Today, we have the pleasure to announce the release of Frans de Waal’s presentation: “War and Peace and Primates”.

In his talk, Frans de Waal explores what multilateral practitioners can learn from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, including the chimpanzee and the bonobo, about negotiating, the nature of conflict and reconciliation.

We hope you enjoy this truly amazing presentation. Ideas worth spreading...

Coming soon: Paul Seabright’s presentation “How have human beings tamed our warring instincts?”

Watch this space!


Aurélia Merçay


Reference

Photo retrieved from Flickr.

Putting ourselves in the shoes of our enemies

Academics, it might be argued, have the luxury of thinking outside the box in a way that isn’t open to diplomats and policy-makers. Instead, the latter have to apply worst-case thinking because there are no guarantees about the current and future intentions of potential adversaries. But ‘playing it safe’ in this way ignores the possibility that others might be arming out of fear and not malevolence. And if both sides are arming out of fear and mistrust, the result could be a vicious circle of power and security competition no one wanted.


The fundamental problem, as the British historian Herbert Butterfield pointed out over half a century ago, is that diplomats “may vividly feel the terrible fear that [they] have of the other party, but [they] cannot enter into the [others] counter-fear, or even understand why [they] should be particularly nervous”. He added that it’s ‘never possible for you to realise or remember properly that since he cannot see the inside of your mind, he can never have the same assurance of your intentions that you have’. This is the security dilemma, a key research area of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies (DDMI) at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

The security dilemma confronts all groups in a condition of anarchy (defined as the absence of a central authority) and it arises from the existential condition of uncertainty that characterises all human relations. Analysing these kinds of situation was a major focus of international relations theory during the Cold War. Far from belonging to a bygone era, however, security dilemmas require further careful study because they’re still prevalent – and very dangerous – today.

Recognising this, the DDMI held a workshop in Aberystwyth on 4 May focusing on the ‘Nuclear Security Dilemma in Northeast Asia’, gathering together a diverse bunch of diplomats, academics, and researchers. One contributor to the workshop argued that what motivated North Korea in its nuclear ambitions is ‘fear – fear of the United States, fear of China, and fear of Japan’. Others maintained that North Korea has nothing to worry about because it knows the United States and South Korea would never attack it.

But the DPRK has not been so easily reassured. Building upon Butterfield’s core contention, three decades ago Robert Jervis highlighted the psychological dynamics that blind policy-makers to recognizing how their ‘own actions could be seen as menacing and the concomitant belief that the other’s hostility can only be explained by its aggressiveness’ (see the references below). The danger is that if the White House believes the DPRK knows that the United States is not a threat, Pyongyang’s arming must indicate aggressive intent. Other possible interpretations of North Korea’s motivations abound, underlining the challenges involved in seeing security dilemmas and the full range of responses clearly.

The negative consequences of groups and individuals failing to enter into the counter-fear of others is exacerbated if decision-makers operate with benign self-images that blind them to how their actions and behaviour might be seen as threatening by others. What’s more, the converse of a benign self-image is the attribution of a malign image to the character and actions of adversaries. Ken Booth and I call this ‘ideological fundamentalism’ in our forthcoming book on the security dilemma. Governments operating with such a mindset are blinded to the possibility that the other side might have legitimate grievances and security interests.

The security dilemma facing governments with peaceful intent is whether to risk a trust-building move in a world where there can be no guarantees about the current and future intentions of others. Even if actors can enter into the counter-fear of others, they might be so fearful that acting on this will place them in a vulnerable position should their trust prove misplaced, that they feel unable to take such a risky leap of trust.

This situation seems to characterise the nuclear standoff on the Korean peninsula. Should we assume the worst about Pyongyang’s motives and intentions and prepare for a showdown before they become too strong? Or does such a path risk a terrible war - perhaps one in which nuclear weapons might be used? Given the costs and risks of such a conflict, surely the prudent course lies in trying to reassure rather than provoke the regime in Pyongyang.

Diplomats and policy-makers need to understand how their adversary might be acting out of fear (remembering that ambition is sometimes in play), including crucially, the role that their own actions may play in provoking that fear. This was the challenge thrown down by Butterfield, and it guides the DDMI’s new project on ‘Trust-Building in Nuclear Worlds’. Our workshop on 4 May was the first in a series aimed at exploring with practitioners the possibilities of exercising empathy of this kind: it remains to be seen whether decision-makers in the United States and the DPRK can make the leaps of trust that might lead eventually to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.


This is a guest blog by Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler. Professor Nicholas J. Wheeler is Director of the DDMI. You can also read a piece by Disarmament Insight contributor John Borrie on the DDMI’s website by clicking here.


References

Bleiker, R. (2005) Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Booth, K. and N. J. Wheeler (forthcoming 2007) The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics, Palgrave: Macmillan.

Butterfield, H. (1951) History and Human Relations, London: Collins, pp. 9-37.

Collins, A. (2000) The Security Dilemmas of Southeast Asia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Glaser, C. L. (1990) Analysing Strategic Nuclear Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Johnston, A. I. (2004) ‘Beijing’s Security Behaviour in the Asia-Pacific: Is China a Dissatisfied Power?’, in J. J. Suh, P. J. Katzenstein and A. Carlson (eds), Rethinking Security in East Asia, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 34–97.

Kydd, A. H. (2005) Trust and Mistrust in International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Suh, J. J. (2006) ‘Producing Security Dilemma out of Uncertainty: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis’, Mario Einaudi Centre for International Studies, Cornell University, October 2006.

More about the DDMI’s work on trust-building, including a rapporteur’s report about its recent workshop, can be found here and here.

Photo retrieved from Flickr.

And now for something completely different

Regular visitors to this site will have noted that over the last month or so our blogging has focused on two important multilateral meetings - the preparatory meeting of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in Vienna and, more recently, a meeting of the Oslo Process in Lima, Peru, which is working to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

I would have been in Peru blogging to you personally, dear reader, but for a meeting of our own near Geneva, hosted as part of the work of the Disarmament Insight initiative to help multilateral disarmament practitioners think out of the box.

On Friday 25 May, around 25 invited disarmament diplomats at both ambassador and working level, experts from United Nations agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), researchers, civil society representatives and the Disarmament Insight team met for a one-day symposium on the themes of "Human security, 'human nature' and trust building in negotiations".

To help us, our speakers included:

- Frans de Waal, Director of the Living Links Center and C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behaviour at Emory University, who explored what multilateral practitioners can learn from our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, including the chimpanzee and the bonobo, about negotiating and the nature of aggression and reconciliation. Frans was recently named by Time magazine as one of its 100 people shaping the world in 2007.

- Paul Seabright, Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse and author of "The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life", who analysed the interactions between our minds and our institutions in modern life, which may help us to understand better why in some contexts conflict seems so intractable.

- Dr. Robin Coupland, the ICRC's adviser on armed violence and the effects of weapons and a former war surgeon, who discussed how de Waal's and Seabright's views tie into understanding armed violence.

- Yours truly. I talked briefly about the notion of 'cognitive ergonomics' - of looking at multilateral negotiating processes and how we could better design them to leverage our cognitive and social skills as human beings.

The emphasis of the symposium was on informal discussion and it followed the Chatham House rule. While respecting that rule, we'll be posting more information about the symposium here, including pod casts of some of the presentations, over the coming weeks.

So check back regularly for some fresh ways of "thinking differently about human security" from what was a productive gathering of big-brained social apes.


John Borrie


Reference

Info about the ICRC's work on weapons and humanitarian law is available here.

Getting the ball rolling in the Conference on Disarmament

I first attended a CD meeting in 2003. I was fresh out of university at the time and assumed, rather naively, that I would require a large sheaf of papers to fulfil my note taking duties. I needn’t have bothered, however, as the meeting began 20 minutes after the stated time closed less than 5 minutes later. What a contrast to the first session of the 2007 year, which ended last week. I’ll forgive the delegates (and interns) for looking a little tired. I’d be too if I had to follow such an unforgiving meeting schedule for 10 weeks.

It’s encouraging to see the CD finally shaking off its apathy. Prior to 2006, delegations would usually meet on a Thursday morning in a formal plenary meeting with private group consultations held at various times through the week while the CD was in session. Often, delegates’ speeches to the Conference lacked focus and direction. Not surprisingly a few capitals began to question the financial and political value of maintaining a full time delegation in Geneva. In many ways these were wasted opportunities for a Conference that allowed delegations to hold up to 10 meetings a week with full translation services and still paid to retain them, despite CD deadlock.

Some analysts have argued that the CD is simply a ‘talk shop’ and that increasing the frequency with which delegates interact with each other on substantive issues is not a wholly valuable way to build trust and enhance cooperation. I believe, however, that increasing the meeting frequency of diplomats over the past 18 months has been a strong factor in the current level of movement in the CD. Why? Because it has given diplomats an opportunity to study their negotiating partners and allowed them to better assess the others’ intentions.

Economist Catherine Eckel and political scientist Rick K. Wilson believe that the ability to read the intentions of others is an important method used by humans in the process of cooperation. One way that humans assess intention, for example, is through facial expressions. Eckel and Wilson argued recently that “Although social cues are culturally derived, the capacity to pick up and process those cues is part of an evolved cognitive structure. The fact that we pay attention to others, that we try to infer intention behind another’s action, and that we conditionally respond, provides new insight into strategic behaviour”. They’ve further argued that “repeated play is crucial, even when identities are anonymous” in order to better assess the intentions of your opponent.

This has important implications for the arms control and disarmament community in Geneva. On average a diplomatic representative there represents his or her country in the CD for a period of 4 years. The question is: how do diplomats know to trust one another? Although altruism comes into play in human behaviour, it’s clear that we don’t act altruistically toward everyone. As we’ve noted in the DHA project, cooperation will fail to thrive if one can’t differentiate between those who are likely and unlikely to reciprocate cooperation over the longer term. Increasing the meeting frequency in the CD may have actually aided the process through which negotiators learn to trust (or not) their negotiating counterparts. Intensified social interaction in the CD has supplemented other contacts between multilateral practitioners in the disarmament community in Geneva, or enabled it between some delegations (say, the U.S. and North Korea) when very little would otherwise occur.

Eckel and Wilson’s paper entitled “Why fairness? Facial expressions, evolutionary psychology, and the emergence of fairness in simple bargaining games” provides some interesting insights into the way we interact with each other and what this mean for international cooperation. They concluded that such perspectives help to conceptualize ‘human decision processes differently from what is usually done in political science’. Seems like another way of “thinking outside the box” in multilateral disarmament to me.


Vanessa Martin Randin


Reference

C. Eckel and R. Wilson (1999) "Why Fairness? Facial Expressions, Evolutionary Psychology and the Emergence of Fairness in Simple Bargaining Games." (paper presented at the 1999 Workshop on the Workshop II conference, Bloomington, IN)