Helena Cobban, the journalist and Quaker friend, wrote on her Just World News blog on 10 November about analyzing the possible success of any peace negotiation — such as the forthcoming Annapolis event:
“I went to a panel discussion at the US Institute of Peace yesterday on the topic of ‘Constructing an Effective Ceasefire’. Now, I know that what the Palestinians and the Bushites are hoping for from the upcoming “Annapolis” meeting is something of considerably greater impact than merely a ceasefire. Indeed, the PA still avers it is insistent on tangible and monitorable progress towards the final peace agreement with Israel that is, surely, the desire of the vast majority of the people in the world. The government of Israel– consistent with many years of foot-dragging now– wants to move much slower than that. (That foot-dragging has allowed government-subsidized Israeli colonial corporations to implant large numbers of illegal colonies inside the occupied Palestinian territories. Coincidence, or what?) But still, even though I recognize there are differences between a ceasefire and a final peace agreement, I thought it would be good to trek along to USIP and catch up with some state of the art in negotiations theory.
[The two speakers at this conference were Dr. Ranabir Samaddar, head of the Calcutta Research Group, and Nita Yawanarajah, "a staff member of the Policy Planning and Mediation Support Unit, at the UN's Department of Political Affairs, described as 'involved in UN negotiations and assessments of ceasefires in the Balkans and Sudan and ...developing guidelines for ceasefire negotiations'."]
Cobban wrote: “Both took a cool, analytical look at what makes peace negotiations (in general, and not just those aiming at temporary ceasefires) effective. Both looked dispassionately at the political components of successful peace negotiations. Samaddar noted, for example, that in government-insurgent conflicts, the governments have a strong interest in using the ceasefire to bring about the complete demilitarization of the insurgent side without opening up any of the insurgents’ grievances, while the insurgents seek strongly to use the ceasefire to get their political issues onto the table without, if possible, disarming. Nothing new there. (Except perhaps to the people across in the US State Department who continue to parrot the Israeli line that all of Israel’s opponents need to disarm completely– at both the military and the ideological levels– before they can even be admitted to any negotiation.) A successful negotiation would, the two panelists said, be one that laid out and won agreement to measurable, monitored steps being taken in parallel by each of the parties, so that neither would end up feeling taken advantage of by the negotiating process itself…
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