Having a conducive climate for negotiations is at the heart of ending violent and armed political conflict, especially when the terms for a negotiated settlement is agreed to by the parties under optimum conditions. This is vital because it creates an intimate and interdependent relationship between negotiations and resolution during the peace process.
Yet, in practice, bi-lateral negotiations in post-Cold War have often failed and struggled to meaningfully resolve sovereignty-based conflicts. Despite the best of intentions and significant amount of resources invested, peace processes have collapsed. The world is replete with examples of how negotiation processes which began with so much optimism either resulted in failed agreements, or returned to violence, or have continued for a protracted period with no meaningful result in sight. The Palestinian experience is a well-known case demonstrating that the possibilities of negotiating a second peace agreement after the first one has failed is far more difficult and costly in terms of human lives, resources and interests.
Sharing his experience on why peace agreements often fail to end armed conflict, James Schear who held positions in both the US government and the UN stated, “The brutally depressing fact is that for most of the parties in most of these conflicts, war is a safer bet.” War, he observed, was often safer because it has “a familiar pattern; it imposes order, stifles dissent, generates profits … provides employment, provides a pathway to advance.” Schear laments that, “Peace, on the other hand, is a leap into the unknown. It involves bargaining concessions, contingent exchanges of promises that can come undone … Most of all peace involves loss of political control and cohesion.” Schear says too often, peace agreements are vague and makes implementation difficult.
Jasmine-Kim Westendorf in “Why Peace Processes Fail: Negotiating Insecurity After Civil War” analyses a whole range of peacebuilding efforts in Cambodia, Mozambique, Liberia, Bougainville in the Solomon Islands of Papua New Guinea, North and South Sudan, and Aceh, Indonesia. She says, even though some form of peace agreement was arrived at in these situations, they have yet to reach the point where peace can be considered sustainable. But neither have they seen a resurgence of full war. Jasmine explains, “violence, insecurity, ongoing divisions between formerly warring groups and a sense of political instability remain characteristic of nearly all these contexts, as they hover between peace and war, particularly at election times.”
These experiences around the world provide vital learning lessons for Nagas. For those in the field of conflict transformation, it raises the critical question on whether negotiations in a multi-lateral world have become limited in function and scope as a tool of conflict transformation. Jasmine points out that the dominant approach to peacebuilding has been too “technocratic and template-driven” and leaves little room for processes to be responsive to a particular context. In doing so, it becomes distant from “the technical aspects of security building, governance building and transitional justice from the internal political dynamics that are so crucial in defining the shape that peace actually takes.”
Negotiations have the tendency to operate under the false assumption that all one needs is an agreement to end a conflict, in other words a quick fix. In many peace processes asymmetrical power relations already exist where the dominant party seeks to limit the peace process to the negotiating table, thereby bypassing the nature of inclusive participation inherent to the democratic character of peace. This limitation stifles the parties’ ability to contribute fully and creates the conditions to coerce peace from above. Under these conditions the dominant party approaches the process through a security lens and quick fixes, while the other parties emphasize justice, that possibly require more holistic long term solutions. Furthermore, when the State is one of the conflicting parties in the negotiating table, its imagination is limited to the confines of the Westphalian world order, as it is unable to explore creative and imaginative ways of reaching a settlement that is consistent with the principles of transformative peace and justice.
Clearly, negotiations, with all its limitations need to be reimagined in theory and practice. It is fundamental to recognize that negotiations are only one component of a broader peacebuilding praxis. History has informed that in protracted sovereignty-based conflicts, negotiations alone are limiting and the traditional systemic bureaucratic approach of managing the conflict needs to be transformed. Basically, a policy shift from conflict management to conflict transformation where the main cause of the conflict is addressed will illuminate the entire peace process. After all, in order for any State to be a successful it needs to be committed to building genuine peace.
Tragically, most States and Governments, including the Indian State, approach peace processes from the traditional dominant template where its intent is in making short-term gains at the cost of long-term sustainable peace.
