Negotiating Justice: The Challenges of Addressing Past Human Rights Violations

The focus of this article is talking about what difficulties arise when peace has been agreed upon after a conflict that saw significant human rights violations. This comes under the field of transitional justice. One common procedure in dealing with reparations is a Truth Commission where a temporary group of people investigates the human rights violations. This is not related to a judicial system. At the end of this process, the committee makes a public report and suggests improvements and reforms to policy and institutions. Truth commissions often include people telling their stories and communicating about things that happened during the conflict. The hope in truth commissions is that lessons will be learned from the future and the victims will find some reparation. One of the largest challenges to think about is the idea of amnesty. Should the people who committed the human rights violations and other crimes be offered amnesty if they come forward and tell their story as part of the truth commission. This is a tricky question because there are so many levels of crime and the judicial system cannot completely be ignored. Another issue is whether or not the people who have amnesty will have that same privilege in international law or when traveling from their country.

The article gives two examples about truth commissions. In Liberia the lack of amnesty for the leader, Charles Taylor, helped in the transitional justice process. He has an indictment, which actually helped the peace talks because they knew that he could not continue to seek power in the future. In Sierra Leone the peace agreements included the clause that 'full and unconditional amnesty' was granted to all the parties. Both sides wanted this to be in the agreement, and this fact helped the peace negotiations. Clearly there is no blanket answer on the effectiveness of amnesty on a peace negotiation, but it is an interesting element to consider. I feel like if I had my human rights violated, I would want to see some more concrete form of justice, but perhaps I would be open to a non-judicial reparation.

Varieties of Mediating Activities and Mediators in International Relations

This article focuses on a lot of different elements of mediation. The success of mediation can be hard to define; it comes in many forms like de-escalation, settlement, and enduring resolutions. An important aspect of mediation is the timing of the mediating activity, which is very similar to the concept of a conflict’s ‘ripeness.’ The international context affects the timing of mediation because at some points in time there are more mediating type organizations. Public pressure can also affect the timing of mediation through public opinion surveys, policy makers, and visible support. The relationship between the adversaries, I think, has the most affect on the timing of mediation. Parties can go though stages of their relationship and their parity of power is necessary for mutual accommodation. Parties can have fluxes of power.

Mediation has a variety of stages and the pre-negotiation stage is one of the most important. This is the stage where strategic choices are made and issues are decided on. The initiation stage involves explaining the process to the parties. Negotiation is where a lot of the interparty contact happens, and the implementation stage involves putting the settlement into action. Mediators are not always official professionals; they can be church officials or other informal people.

Understanding Public Disputes: The Spiral of Unmanaged Conflict (C & K Chapter 5)

This chapter focuses on the different dynamics and elements of public disputes. Public disputes can be very different from labor-management disputes/family conflicts because of the more broad range of people involved and affected. Public disputes tend to have more complicated relationships between interests and in fact can have more interests associated with the conflict than other types of disputes. It is hard to pinpoint all of the parties at the start, and the party members can vary widely on their expertise and power. Power can come in different forms; some examples are: financial power, reputation power, network power, skills/knowledge power, and legal authority. Since there are so many parties at varying levels there are many different ways to make decisions and the procedures for public disputes are not standardized.

If conflict goes unmanaged, it can undergo a downward spiral. After a problem emerges, people/citizens get involved and if nothing is done quickly and openly people can tend to get stuck in their issues and stop communicating amongst the parties. The conflict can then even go outside the direct community via people looking for outside support of their interests. Parties can tend to lose their objectivity and see the conflict as more polarized than it may be. This brings about a sense of crisis. The outcomes of public disputes can vary widely. Different options are include litigation, government decisions, and violence. It seems that it is easier to manage a conflict at the beginning of its cycle rather than waiting for the downward spiral.

One thing in this chapter that confused me is why they state (pg. 6-7) that the parties tend to not have a continuing relationship; wouldn't a community need to have a continuing relationship?

Facilitation Skills for Interpersonal Transformation (Kraybill)

This article focuses on the skills necessary for negotiating a conflict for interpersonal transformation. It talks about the moment-by- moment skills, the techniques for sustained dialogue, and the transformative process design. The section on moment-by-moment skills for interpersonal transformation is an extensive reiteration of a lot of the techniques discussed in intro to conflict resolution and mediation. It is important to paraphrase and what one party says to ensure effective listening and to depolarize what they are saying. It is also important to reframe what the parties are saying to try and get at the issues rather than positions and thus hopefully come up with a common ground. The techniques for sustained dialogue are a lot more interesting. The Samoan circle has two central chairs where people from opposing parties talk about the issues. There are also chairs in a semi-circle around them for others to sit in to make a comment or wait their turn for the center chair. Only the people in the chairs are allowed to be talking and everybody learns from what they are saying. The conflict spectrum is another technique. This is a visual technique where everybody places themselves on an “issue spectrum” corresponding to how extreme they feel their viewpoints on the subject are. Another private technique is interviewing key players to the conflict. This helps create an atmosphere of communication and engagement. The idea of transformative process focuses on the idea that the process of communication and negotiation can be more important than the content of the negotiation/conversation. A lot of group conflict can result from bad process. A good process involves a forum that is acceptable to all parties, all parties have representatives in the decision making and design of the process, is clear about its purpose, has a variety of forums, and has a feedback element. All of these elements require preparation and thought on the part of the facilitators.

Intractable Conflicts

This article focuses on the five different paradigms for handling intractable conflicts. Intractable conflicts are destructive conflicts that persist for long periods of time and no attempts at resolving them have worked. Intractable conflicts are known for their persistence, destructiveness, and resistance to resolution. All intractable conflicts share a sense of context, core issues, relations, processes, and outcomes. The context of intractable conflicts includes power imbalances and can have roots in racism, colonialism, sexism, and/or human rights abuses. The issues of intractable conflicts usually tend to have a depth of meaning which makes them difficult to be resolved in the traditional sense. The relationship between the parties can often be isolated (little positive interaction between the parties), and sometimes the groups have oppositional group identities. The process has a strong emotional core were rage and righteousness come to the surface. The process usually has to involve over coming stereotypes. The outcome of intractable conflicts often includes a prolonged trauma and loss of trust in the world for the lower power party.

There are five different ways to approach intractable conflict. The realist paradigm focuses on the need for aggression in these conflicts because the conflict is about domination and control; humans are always flawed and strong actions are necessary to be in control of the situation. The Human Relations Paradigm says that people have the capacity for good as well as evil and the external conditions they are exposed to affect their actions. Change can only be brought about by including all aspects of the communities with integrative negotiation and antibias education. The Medical Paradigm views these intractable social conflicts as pathological diseases that need to be contained before they spread. This paradigm focuses on preventative diplomacy. The Postmodern Paradigm focuses on how different people “make sense of the world.” Change is brought about by bringing the assumptions about what is ‘right’ into the negotiations; negotiation would be at the intragroup level and about oppositional identities. The last paradigm, the Systems Paradigm is about is simple cell and its environment. A lot of elements in the environment are interdependent and have complex relationships. Each destructive pattern affects all the elements, and thus conflicts have many different hostile elements and complex layers.

The article ends with 8 guidelines of intervention that are helpful, but I think the most important and helpful part of this article is understanding what intractable conflicts are and the ways to approach understanding them.

The Politics of Environmental Mediation

The main purpose of this article is to discuss the downfalls of mediation with environmental issues. The main roadblocks are the friendly atmosphere of mediation, the power imbalance between environmentalists and development companies, and the fact that the mediation process supports development issues naturally.

The first section of the paper discusses how when mediators set a friendly atmosphere the environmentalists tend to start liking their opponents and in addition want to seem like peaceful people, so they end up conceding more than intended. I felt like this section of the article was negatively stereotyping environmentalists as people with no backbone. Perhaps this has been a phenomena in environmental mediations, but I don't think the answer is to fundamentally change the mediation process by taking away the social aspect; rather the answer seems to be to get the environmental party more training. It just seemed generalized and seemed to imply that environmentalists just fall over in front of corporate people. Overall, I agree with the statement on the 4th page that the responsibility for correcting this lies with the participants, not the mediators.

The second main point deals with the imbalance of power between the two main parties. The development groups have a greater access to economic and political resources. This affects the neutrality of mediation three ways: who is participating, superior technical analysis, and involuntary participation. The environmental groups can view their participation as non-voluntary because they do not have the resources to sustain a long court battle. Environmental groups also can have less political power, and their interest groups are wide spread, so often there is not a representative to the mediation process from all of the interest groups in a conflict. Since the environmental groups have less power, they are bound to agree to solutions that do not fulfill their needs because some concessions from the powerful group are better than none. There is also a section within this part of the paper that argues that some mediators see themselves as just a mirror that reflects the imbalances of society and that they focus on their process and not take responsibility for perpetuating imbalances. Laue would disagree with them because he argues that no mediators can truly be neutral and in order to be a good mediator you need to try and balance the power between the two parties.

The mediation process itself can be bias towards the pro-development party. The mediators consider that both parties have equal and negotiable interests. What can rarely come to the table is the core issue itself: whether or not the land should be developed. One mediation focused on how the mall should be environment friendly, but the fact that mall was being built was never discussed. Mediators rarely see the environmental issues as part of the larger structural and value choices from our society. There is also debate about whether environmentalists should even go to the table about certain issues. Some issues are fundamental beliefs that cannot be negotiated, like being opposed to nuclear power. Those are non-negotiable issues to some people and thus should not be brought to mediation.

In conclusion, it appears as though in order for environmental mediations to be successful, the environmental party needs more training and/or more power.

The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes

This article by Laue and Cormick help define what the different types of intervention roles there are. The main ones are activist, advocate, mediator, researcher, and enforcer. An activist can help the party they are sided with organize, devise a strategy, rally a following, and communicate with the public. An advocate is an advisor or consultant to one of the parties; an advocate can usually envision what it would take to terminate the conflict with a positive outcome for their party. A mediator must be acceptable to both parties, so they cannot have a clear side; they help the parties reach a win-win solution. A researcher is independent of the conflict, but they report their findings to the public, and often they do not stay uninvolved. The enforcer has the power to implement solutions.

There were several interesting points that Laue and Cormick made in this article. The one that I found most interesting was that in order to be an ethical intervener, one should not remain neutral. It is important to try and help minimize the power imbalance between the parties. Important values to consider while intervening are freedom, justice, and empowerment. They all seem to revolve around making sure the disadvantaged party is able to entirely make their own decisions, and to feel the consequences of their decisions. Power should be diffused among many individuals/parties.

The idea of decisions is also important to interveners. Several important decisions include: deciding to intervene, deciding when to intervene, how to intervene, and deciding what a good settlement is. Laue and Cormick argue that ethics and the above values should help an intervener with all of these decisions. The article uses several examples that helped explain the ideas of this article.

Changing Group Norms

This was a very interesting article about group norms. Group norms can actions/gestures/procedures that are followed in a group. An example of a norm here at Juniata is that when we go into Baker, we leave all our books/coats/everything out in the hallway. This reflects our open and trusting culture here at Juniata. It is normal for us to do this action, thus it can be classified as a norm. This article focuses on how to change norms. Often times norms need to be changed because they are outdated, they are not effective, or they are negatively affecting the group. Here are some examples of norms that need to be changed. Technology is rapidly expanding and often times groups settle on norms of past technologies. The material culture changes a lot faster than the non-material culture. If a group is constantly communicating via post-letter, their business will be a lot slower than if they used the telephone or e-mail. This is an example of an outdated and ineffective norm. An example of a negative norm would be if in a company it was the norm to always arrive 10 minutes late; this cuts down on work time, and thus negatively affects the groups productivity.

The article shows several examples of how/when norms need to be changed. It is very difficult to change norms. One way to induce a change is if a very confident, or high status person initiates the new norm. These types of people have more allowance for deviance, and thus makes it easier for them to try out new norms. Crisis can also help induce a change in norms. If a company is failing, it is a crisis, and members will be able to analyze their actions and see where improvements can be made. Unfortunately, often in crisis times, people don't want to change; they want to stick to what makes them comfortable. Sometimes an outsider needs to come in and help a group change their norms to improve their goal completions. Another main point of this article is that it is easier for an individual to change than an organization.

This article applies to conflict intervention because often times you might be walking into a group conflict or negotiation, where the group has norms that are contributing to the conflict. You need to be able to identify them and know how to help them see how their norms affect them. You also need to have the foresight to know what norms might work best for the group.