Cultivating Peace: A Practitioner's View of Deadly Conflict and Negotiation

This article was a response to the Zartman article about ripeness. Lederarch's main point is that ripeness is not necessarily the best indicator of the prime time to intervene. He points out that you can really only pick the ripe moment out in retrospect. Another main point of Lederarch's was that ripeness can mainly be picked out by on objective third party. In fact if you see that the situation is 'ripe' as a third party and try and intervene and negotiate, if the parties are not ready, it can escalate the conflict. I think that what Lederarch failed to recognize in the Zartman article was the idea of the way out (WO). Zartman meant that the parties need to perceive the idea that they need the other party to get themselves out of the conflict (i.e. the stalemate is draining the economy and the cost of human lives is too high). The idea of the WO is basically one of the things that Lederarch said was missing from the ripeness idea. I also found the Zartman article a little easier to understand because of the lack of excessive metaphors; I found them hard to wade through in the Lederarch article. Other than that, I think they both had good points. Lederarch especially was perceptive in pointing out that it is hard to see the ripe moment in the present and that sometimes the right moment or thing to say can be purely coincidental.