Decoding Negotiation Systems in the Middle East and North Africa: A Framework for Analysis

Regional conflicts are becoming increasingly complex due to the involvement of an ever more numerous and interconnected set of actors. Previous research has focused on regional conflict systems and has generated theoretical approaches such as the regional security complex paradigm. However, when complex, multifaceted, seemingly contradictory webs of relationships are spun in a region, new tools are needed to analyze and evaluate them. Drawing on previous regional conflict models, we propose a negotiation-oriented framework of regional conflict analysis that explores the type and intensity of relationships between state and nonstate actors in a conflict system. We offer a seven-step scale of relationships (ranging from ally to active armed opponent) that represents a novel contribution to the methodological efforts to analyze relationships in conflict systems. This framework brings to light the relational imbalance of the MENA region and has the potential to contextualize for negotiators and mediators the complex system of conflicts within, and possibly outside, the region.     

Arms Transfers beyond the State-to-State Realm

Arms transfers beyond the state-to-state realm can have harmful effects for international security dramatically affecting the relations and behavior of states. This article examines why an emerging international norm on "prohibiting states to transfer arms to nonstate groups" has failed to diffuse at the international level. It discusses the already available international law framework existing at the regional and international levels upon which the potential norm could be built. The failure of the norm to diffuse at the international level can be primarily explained by the existence of a long-consolidated norm: the customary practice of states to transfer weapons to nonstate actors, that is, groups they deem legitimate to, without any interference or constraint. ¹ The unrestrained transfer of weapons is an established foreign-policy practice. It is the way states form, uphold alliances, extend friendships, and build spheres of influence ( Sorokin 1994 ). Clearly, no state willingly wants to give this up. Therefore, the multilateral agreement on a norm barring most or all transfers of weapons to nonstate actors would curtail the freedom of action to build spheres of influence as states please. There are genuine ethical and moral dilemmas in this discussion, a nonstate actor may be a freedom fighter or a terrorist depending on different perspectives. The distinction between the categories "state" and "nonstate" actors may risk classifying actors in two camps: the good and the bad, respectively. This is problematic as a few states are known to be the most brutal perpetrators of egregious violations against their own citizens, whereas certain nonstate actors are legitimately fighting for the protection of vulnerable populations.     

Assessing violent nonstate actorness in global politics: a framework for analysis

This article begins with the assumption that the most important shift that is taking place in contemporary global politics is the shift in polity power from the predominance of the state to the rising importance of nonstate actors. It goes on to argue that disciplinary understandings of this shift and, in particular, the nature of the actors driving it, remain dispersed. This article aims, therefore, to provide a framework for evaluating the global political potential—or actorness—of one type of nonstate actor, the violent nonstate actor, positing it as that most overtly challenging states' authority, and therefore with the potential to play a uniquely stimulating role in the shifting of power. Based on three principles of autonomy, representation and influence, the framework provides broad criteria for understanding violent nonstate actors, as well as a means for evaluating violent nonstate actorness and for exploring its potential in global politics.     

Influencing Negotiation Willingness in the Middle East: The Potential Contributions of Private Actors

Numerous efforts to solve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through diplomacy have taken place over the last four decades. To shed light on this dilemma in this article, the role that private actors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can play to enhance the negotiation willingness of nonstate armed groups was examined. It was argued that the NGOs in particular could play key roles in promoting the negotiation willingness of nonstate actors and also in influencing their internal dynamics and increasing their cohesion. Specifically, we examine two pairs of efforts to resolve the conflict in Israel and Palestine: the “Road Map” and the track two Geneva Initiative of 2003, and the Olmert Peace Plan and Jimmy Carter's visit to the Middle East in 2008. In the first pair, NGO efforts yielded unexpected results. The Palestinians were ready to compromise even though the deal offered by the Israelis did not seem very generous. In the second pair, the reaction of the Palestinians to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's generous peace offer seemed especially puzzling, illustrating, the internal dynamics between the Palestinian factions. Negotiation willingness was closely related to cohesion, and that cohesion plays an important role in conflict negotiations. President Jimmy Carter's efforts in 2008 to enhance cohesion among the Palestinians illustrated the potential that NGOs have to complement official negotiations.     

‘A good investment?’ State sponsorship of terrorism as an instrument of Iraqi foreign policy (1979–1991)

Governmental support for nonstate actors designated as terrorist organizations is not only a policy that carries significant international and domestic costs; it further poses a theoretical challenge to structural realist thinking about alliance politics in international relations. By debating, firstly, the utility of terrorism as a means to influence systemic power distribution, and, secondly, the functional equality of nonstate actors, this article considers under what conditions state sponsored terrorism occurs despite the expected security loss. Drawing on the example of Iraq between 1979 and 1991, the assumption that the interplay of external security challenges—as well as domestic dissent as an intervening, unit-level factor—affects governmental alignments with terrorist groups will be reviewed in the cases of the Iranian Mujahedin al-Khalq Organization, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and armed Palestinian factions. The article concludes by addressing whether state sponsorship of terrorism is inevitably linked to policy failure or whether it could be seen as a good investment to balance external and internal security challenges successfully.     

Narcotics,Radicalism, and Armed Conflict in Central Asia: The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan

While the academic debate on security has broadened in recent years, it has failed to cohesively include transnational organized crime and drug trafficking as a security issue. However, especially in weak states in developing and postcommunist regions, these phenomena are having an increasingly negative effect on security in the military, political, economic, and societal sense. Security issues in Central Asia are a prominentexample of the links between drug trafficking and military threats to security. This is illustrated most clearly by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which has been both a major actor in the drug trade from Afghanistan to Central Asia as well as the most serious violent nonstate actor in the region. The link between the drug trade and armed conflict is of fundamental importance to understanding the challenges to Central Asian security.     

Conflict Dynamics and Feedback: Explaining Change in Violence against Civilians within Conflicts

Conflicts are complex, dynamic processes wherein the frequency and intensity of violence changes throughout the contest. In this article, we explore the temporal dynamics of two long-term civil wars—DR-Congo and Sudan—to identify systematic and random conditions that lead to changes in civilian targeting. Violence committed by rival political actors, territorial exchange, and the number and addition of violent agents strongly shape the likelihood that civilian targeting events and casualties increase or decrease over time. General and country differences emerge from vector autoregression analysis to suggest that (1) three types of violent agents—rebels, militias, and the government—are locked in spirals of violence where violence against civilians by one actor leads to subsequent violence by another actor; (2) rebels and government forces respond to the other side’s acquisition of contested territory by increasing counterattacks on civilians, specifically in DR-Congo; and (3) increasing numbers of active nonstate agents lead to higher violence rates in the following months. Among these, civilian targeting by rival actors triggers the most follow-on violent events against civilians.     

Conflict analysis for the twenty-first century

Approaches to conflict assessment remain stuck in the late 1990s. Methodological tools are overwhelmingly geared toward development actors. Significant policy evolution—driven by experiences in practice—over the last decade, along with progress in research on conflict and instability, powerfully suggests the need for analytical tools that are both truly joint—involving all relevant departments—and capable of embracing all major aspects of conflict causation and drivers of state fragility. Based on a review conducted for DFID and taking the UK as a case in point, this article outlines the key issues, challenges and requirements involved in operationalising genuinely joint analysis. There are positive signs that the UK government is serious about its commitment to integrated approaches in conflict-affected and fragile states, as demonstrated by development of the new Joint Analysis of Conflict and Stability (JACS). Crucially, this must be backed up by a shared understanding of the context that is theoretically informed, process savvy, empirically grounded and geared toward addressing the key issues identified in domestic and international policy.     

Rebellion without a shot—peaceful conflict management in Ecuador

Most conflict studies focus on the causes of war and violence. In contrast, this article on Ecuador explores the causes of peace in a country with strong conflict fault lines, a political army and several deep political crises during the last two decades. The article suggests that focusing on domestic capabilities for peaceful conflict management provides a new entry point to explaining why peace is sustained. An important aspect lies in the role of the armed forces and of civil society. Theories on civil-military relations provide an understanding of why armed forces intervene. However, there is less analysis of factors that influence political armies' behaviour in terms of the use or non-use of violence. This is the focus of this article. Furthermore, the article asks why actors in civil society opt for non-violent strategies. In summary, the article analyses the capabilities for peaceful conflict management of national actors—particularly of the armed forces and of civil society—through a focus on their behaviour in three recent political crises, and by tracking the influence of historical experiences, cultural context and the structural and institutional framework on their behaviour.     

Beyond the Target State: Foreign Military Intervention and Neighboring State Stability

Despite the abundance of research on the consequences of foreign military intervention for target countries, scant research has been devoted to the possible regional externalities of intervention. This article examines whether large-scale armed operations affect the likelihood of civil conflict onset in countries neighboring the target of intervention. We posit that interventions against the target regime reduce the government's ability to maintain full control over the entire national territory by diminishing its coercive and administrative capacity. This might, in turn, result in safe haven possibilities for neighboring rival groups in the target and facilitate the transnational spread of arms and other illicit activities that increase the risk of civil conflict onset in the contiguous countries. Armed interventions supportive or neutral toward the target state, on the other hand, bolster the government's coercive capacity and mitigate ongoing crises in the target. Such armed intrusions might therefore undermine the likelihood of internal armed conflict in neighboring countries triggered by the factors associated with “bad neighborhoods”: safe haven possibilities, transnational spread of arms, and refugee flows. To substantiate these claims, we use time-series, cross-national data for the 1951–2004 period. Results indicate that hostile interventions increase the probability of civil conflict onset in connected countries while supportive interventions have a regional pacifying effect, reducing the likelihood of domestic unrest in countries neighboring the target state. Neutral interventions, on the other hand, are unlikely to have any discernible effect on regional stability. Further, the primary motive of intervention, whether for humanitarian or other purposes, has no statistically significant impact on the stability of neighboring countries.     

A Means of First Resort: Explaining “Hot Pursuit” in International Relations

This article provides a new theory of hot pursuit—the use of military force by a state against a nonstate actor across borders—in international relations. Drawing from the literature on civil-military relations, I argue that attitudes on limited use of force in peripheral areas will vary between civilian and military, with the latter preferring to treat hot pursuit as a policing operation, whereas the former will treat it as a military one. The logic of my argument is that militaries are oriented structurally and culturally to fight conventionally and against state near-peer adversaries. Threats emanating from nonstate actors, while at times perceived to be existential, require “pin-prick”-style targeted airstrikes, raids by commando forces, or policing operations along a state's periphery. I draw on an original dataset of “hot pursuit” (1975–2009) I collected and examine two recent case studies: India's hot pursuit of ethnic militants into Myanmar and Turkey's pursuit of Kurdish militants into Iraq and Syria.     

Diplomacy in the media age: Three models of uses and effects

This study offers three conceptual models to promote systematic research into uses of the media as a major instrument of foreign policy and international negotiations: public diplomacy, where state and nonstate actors use the media and other channels of communication to influence public opinion in foreign societies; media diplomacy, where officials use the media to communicate with actors and to promote conflict resolution; and media-broker diplomacy, where journalists temporarily assume the role of diplomats and serve as mediators in international negotiations. The first two models, while previously defined, undergo serious revision in this study. The third model is new. This article demonstrates the analytical usefulness of the models through applications to various examples and case studies of significant contemporary diplomatic processes.     

Microlevel Dynamics of Violence: Explaining Variation in Violence among Rural Districts during Northern Ireland's Troubles

Violence varies in intensity across intrastate political conflicts. This study suggests that interactions between local state agents and nonstate radicals affect the intensity of violence. When contention develops in a community and nonstate actors radicalize, whether or not some local state agents deviate from their institutional role as providers of law and order to support radicals is a crucial feature that explains how some communities experience more violence than others. This argument explains the different trajectories of violence in two neighboring rural districts during the 1971–76 period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The major implication of the study is that these interactions affect not only the intensity of violence in particular communities but also the breadth, length, and end of violence in the overall intrastate conflict.     

Security sector reform: The building of security in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article addresses the issue of Security Sector Reform (SSR) in Bosnia and examines whether the reform of security structures has enhanced security of Bosnia as a whole. The experience of recent armed conflict, and fragmentation and ethnicization of security structures have created special challenges for SSR in Bosnia. Transformation of the security sector in Bosnia is made even more complicated by the plethora of international actors involved in the process. The article argues that, despite the complexity of the task, SSR has produced some notable results, particularly in redressing the balance of power between the state and entities in the spheres of defence, policing and intelligence. However, while some of the SSR initiatives appear to be very successful in their main objective, they have inadvertently created some new security risks and/or displaced problems into another area. Thus, the question remains whether Bosnia's security has been enhanced in the process. The article identifies two main obstacles which block further progress in the building of security in Bosnia: first, the lack of local ‘ownership’ of SSR, and second, the Dayton constitutional arrangements. The article concludes that until these two fundamental issues are effectively addressed Bosnia will remain a weak, marginalized country filled with insecurity, divisions and adversity.     

Measuring the Ambivalence of Religion: Introducing the Religion and Conflict in Developing Countries (RCDC) Dataset

Despite ample anecdotal evidence, previous research on violent conflict has found little evidence that religion is an important factor in organized violence. Quantitative work in this area has been largely confined to the interreligious character of conflict and measures of religious diversity, and has strongly neglected the peace aspect of religion. The Religion and Conflict in Developing Countries (RCDC) dataset helps to fill this gap with innovative and fine-grained data for 130 developing countries between 1990 and 2010. RCDC includes four types of religious violence (assaults on religious targets, attacks by religious actors, clashes between religious communities, and clashes with the state). In addition, RCDC contains data on interreligious networks and peace initiatives. This article demonstrates the usefulness of RCDC by applying our data to a preliminary analysis. The results indicate that interreligious networks are a reaction to identity overlaps and previous interreligious conflict.     

Ripening Within? Strategies Used by Rebel Negotiators to End Ethnic War

This article explores what strategies rebels use to prepare their ethnic community for negotiated peace. Proposed strategies are distilled from relevant theory and systematically investigated in case analyses of peace negotiations in Sri Lanka, Indonesian Aceh, and Senegal. The empirical findings indicate that although a coercive military capacity underpinned claims to ethnic representation, coercion did not dominate during the prenegotiation phase. During negotiations, noncoercive persuasion, as well as collective and selective incentives, clearly dominated. Moreover, the most important measures were internal to the negotiating rebel group. The successful rebel negotiator appeared to “mobilize in reverse” by initially targeting the core of military leaders followed by competitor groups and constituents. The article systematically examines across cases what measures rebel negotiators have used to “ripen” their own community, how these measures have been sequenced, and against whom they have been directed. The findings have important implications for the concepts of ripeness and prenegotiation and their requirements. The study underscores in particular the relevance of rebels' nonviolent commitment signals, something that has been largely overlooked in the research on nonstate armed actors. The policy implications suggest the possible benefits of third‐party assistance to efforts to promote communication, public outreach, and procedural transparency on the nonstate side in connection with peace talks.     

Contentious Issues and World Politics: The Management of Territorial Claims in the Americas, 1816–1992

This article studies the management of territorial claims using an issue-based approach that reconceptualizes processes of interstate conflict and cooperation as reflecting contention over issues. Hypotheses on issue management techniques are tested using newly collected data from the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) research project. Empirical analysis of territorial claims in the Western Hemisphere supports the general model, with issue salience and past issue interactions systematically affecting states' choices between peaceful and militarized techniques for managing or settling their contentious issues. In particular, action over territorial claims is most likely when more valuable territory is at stake, in the aftermath of militarized conflict, and when recent peaceful settlement attempts have failed. Third parties are more likely to become involved in nonbinding activities when the claim appears more threatening to regional or global stability, and submission of claims to binding third-party decisions is most likely between adversaries that have begun to build up a legacy of successful agreements. The article concludes with a discussion of directions for future research on territory and on other issues.     

Plugging the capability-expectations gap: towards effective,comprehensive and conflict-sensitive EU crisis response?

Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the European Union (EU) has spent considerable time and energy on defining and refining its comprehensive approach to external conflicts. The knock-on effects of new and protracted crises, from the war in Ukraine to the multi-faceted armed conflicts in the Sahel and the wider Middle East, have made the improvement of external crisis-response capacities a top priority. But has the EU managed to plug the capability–expectations gap, and develop an effective, comprehensive and conflict sensitive crisis-response capability? Drawing on institutional theory and an approach developed by March and Olsen, this article analyses whether the EU has the administrative capacities needed in order to be an effective actor in this area and implement a policy in line with the established goals and objectives identified in its comprehensive approach.     

Applying the security-development nexus on the ground: land restitution in Colombia

The general consensus on the security-development nexus is that both are key to achieving sustainable peace in war-torn societies. However, this debate has largely taken place among international actors, with little empirical evidence about how security and development relate to each other or are even considered by local actors. The current paper applies the security-development nexus to the case of land restitution in Colombia. Following decades of internal armed conflict, in 2012 the national government passed sweeping land restitution legislation amid ongoing violence. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with multiple actors involved in this process, ranging from international organisations to national government units, from regional institutions to local communities, the paper analyses the objectives, impact, challenges and opportunities for land restitution related to security and development. Undermining peace-building, a lack of coherence in the integration of security and development priorities limits the extent to which either supports, or is promoted by, land restitution efforts in Colombia. The paper concludes with reflections on how the security-development nexus may promote peace-building amid ongoing conflict.