Back-Channel Negotiation: International Bargaining in the Shadows

Back‐channel negotiations (BCNs) are officially sanctioned negotiations conducted in secret between the parties to a dispute. These extraordinary negotiations operate in parallel with, or replace, acknowledged front channels of negotiation. Back channels are like the black markets of negotiation; they are separate tables where bargaining takes place in the shadows. When front‐channel negotiations fail, they are sometimes eclipsed by successful BCNs even though the same principals, conflicts, and sociopolitical contexts are involved. This article asks: Why do decision makers deploy back channels? What is the impact of BCN on international peace processes? The Palestinian–Israeli peace process, in which both back and front channels have been used consistently, provides the basis for comparing channels and offering initial answers to these questions. The author concludes that while BCN can facilitate breakthrough agreements, it can also damage a peace process by helping to reinforce some of the uncertainties that gave rise to the use of back channels in the first place.     

Regulation of Cohabitation and Marriage in Canada

Marriage in Canada had lost much of its legal significance because of the extension of many of the incidents of marriage to unmarried cohabitants of the same or opposite sex. This process has resulted in large part from decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status is constitutionally impermissible. In a decision that seemed to many a surprising reversal of this trend, the Supreme Court of Canada in 2002 ruled that legislators could constitutionally exclude unmarried couples from family property laws. The effect of this decision has been to revive the legal significance of marriage. At the same time, courts have resurrected the social significance of marriage by accepting the argument of same-sex marriage advocates that a "separate but equal" civil union institution would not respect the constitutional guarantee of equality and by endorsing the constitutional right of same-sex couples to the symbolic value of marriage as a public and legal celebration of a relationship. Same-sex marriages may now be legally celebrated in three Canadian provinces, and the federal government has made a commitment to open up civil marriage to same-sex couples across the country. While some same-sex couples and unmarried cohabitants have fought for spousal or marital status, others have sought to avoid the burdens associated with spousal status. After the same-sex marriage debate is concluded, Canada will be ready to move on to consider whether all of the legal privileges and burdens now assigned to those in conjugal relationships, whether married, unmarried, same-sex or opposite-sex, can be justified.     

Serious Youth Gun Offenders and the Epidemic of Youth Violence in Boston

Boston, like many other major cities, experienced a sudden increase in youth homicides during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Research evidence suggests that the recent epidemic of urban youth violence was intensely concentrated among criminally active young black males residing in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods rather than all young black males residing in disadvantaged black neighborhoods. Other researchers, however, suggest that there was a diffusion of guns and gun violence from youth involved in street crack markets to youth outside the drug trade who armed themselves primarily for self-protection against the armed criminally active youth. In this paper, criminal history data are analyzed to determine whether the criminal profile of Boston arrested youth gun offenders changed over time and micro-level data on youth gun assault incidents in Boston are examined to unravel whether there were noteworthy changes in the nature of these violent events over time. The results of these analyses suggest that the youth violence epidemic in Boston was highly concentrated among serious youth gun offenders rather than a diffusion of guns away from the street drug trade, gangs, and criminally active youth.