In 2005, Iraq drafted its first constitution and held the country’s first democratic election in more than fifty years. Even under ideal conditions, drafting a constitution can be a prolonged process marked by contentious debate, and conditions in Iraq are far from ideal: Iraq has long been racked by ethnic and sectarian conflict, which intensified following the American invasion and continues today. This severe division, which often erupted into violence, would not seem to bode well for the fate of democracy. So how is it that Iraq was able to surmount its sectarianism to draft a constitution that speaks to the conflicting and largely incompatible ideological view of the Sunnis, Shi’ah, and Kurds? Haider Ala Hamoudi served in 2009 as an adviser to Iraq’s Constitutional Review Committee, and he argues here that the terms of the Iraqi Constitution are sufficiently capacious to be interpreted in a variety of ways, allowing it to appeal to the country’s three main sects despite their deep disagreements. While some say that this ambiguity avoids the challenging compromises that ultimately must be made if the state is to survive, Hamoudi maintains that to force these compromises on issues of central importance to ethnic and sectarian identity would almost certainly result in the imposition of one group’s views on the others. Drawing on the original negotiating documents, he shows that this feature of the Constitution was not an act of evasion, as is sometimes thought, but a mark of its drafters’ awareness in recognizing the need to permit the groups the time necessary to develop their own methods of working with one another over time.

A theoretically-informed, critical account of the making of the international legal rules governing civil war.

This book evaluates the role of international mediators in bringing civil wars to an end and makes the case for ‘powerful peacemaking’ – using incentives and sanctions – to leverage parties into peace. As internal violence within countries is a hugely significant threat to international peace in the post-Cold War era, the question of how these wars end has become an urgent research and policy question. This volume explores a critical aspect of peacemaking that has yet to be sufficiently evaluated: the turbulent period beyond the onset of formal or open negotiations to end civil wars and the clinching of an initially sustainable negotiated settlement. The book argues that the transnational flow of weapons, resources, and ideas means that when civil wars today end, they are more likely to do so at the negotiating table than on the battlefield. It uses bargaining theory to develop an analytical framework to evaluate peace processes – moving from stalemate in wars to negotiated settlement – and it rigorously analyses the experiences of five cases of negotiated transitions from war and the role of international mediators: South Africa, Liberia, Burundi, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka.

As the threat of superpower confrontation diminishes in the post-cold war era, civil wars and their regional ramifications are emerging as the primary challenge to international peace and security. Notoriously difficult to resolve, these internal conflicts seem condemned to escalate with no end in sight. This book recognizes that internal dissidence is the legitimate result of the breakdown of normal politics and focuses on resolving conflict through negotiation rather than combat. Elusive Peace provides a revealing look at the nature of internal conflicts and explains why appropriate conditions for negotiation and useful solutions are so difficult to find. The authors offer a series of case studies of ongoing conflict in Angola, Mozambique, Eritrea, South Africa, Southern Sudan, Lebanon, Spain, Colombia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. They examine the characteristics of each confrontation, including past failed negotiations, and make suggestions for changes in negotiating strategies that could lead to a more successful outcome. The contributors, in addition to the editor, are Imtiaz Bokhari, Bilkent University, Ankara; Robert Clark, George Mason University; Marius Deeb and Marina Ottaway, Georgetown University; Mary Jane Deeb, American University; Francis Deng, Brookings; Daniel Druckman, National Academy of Sciences; Todd Eisenstadt, University of California, San Diego; Daniel Garcia, University of the Andes, Bogota; Justin Green, Villanova University; Carolyn Hartzell and Donald Rothchild, University of California, Davis; Ibrahim Msabaha, Center for Foreign Relations, Dar es-Salaam; and Howard Wriggins, Columbia University.

This book presents a series of essays by I. William Zartman outlining the evolution of the key concepts required for the study of negotiation and conflict management, such as formula, ripeness, pre-negotiation, mediation, power, process, intractability, escalation, and order. Responding to a lack of useful conceptualization for the analysis of international negotiation, Zartman has developed an analytical framework and specific concepts that can serve as a basis for both study and practice. Negotiation is analyzed as a process, and is linked to other major themes in political science such as decision, structure, justice and order. This analysis is then applied to negotiations to manage particular types of conflicts and cooperation, including ethnic conflicts, civil wars and regime-building. It also develops typologies and strategies of mediation, dealing with such aspects as leverage, bias, interest, and roles. Written by the leading exponent of negotiation and mediation, Negotiation and Conflict Management will be of great interest to all students of negotiation, mediation and conflict studies in general.

¿A stimulating read.... Ambitious in scope and with much original insight, this work is an important contribution to an important debate.¿ ¿Carrie Manning, Georgia State University ¿Westendorf offers an important framework for analyzing prospects for state building by the international community.¿ ¿Desha M. Girod, Georgetown University Why do so many post¿civil war societies continue to be characterized by widespread violence and political instability? Or, more succinctly, why do peace processes so often fail to consolidate peace? Addressing this question, Jasmine-Kim Westendorf explores how the international community engages in resolving civil wars¿and clarifies why, despite the best of intentions and the investment of significant resources, external actors fail in their reconstruction efforts and even contribute to perpetuating the very conditions of insecurity and conflict that they are trying to alleviate. Jasmine-Kim Westendorf is lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University.

Set against the backdrop of the collapsing Cold War world, this monograph draws on entirely new documentary evidence to chronicle almost two years worth of UN-led peace talks to end the civil war in El Salvador. Presented in 'moment-to-moment' fashion, hitherto private notes and interviews with the chief UN, American and Salvadoran negotiators demonstrate that the key to enduring peace was to restructure relations between the country's powerful entrepreneurs and the armed forces.