Mediation and the Ending of Conflicts

Abstract

Progress towards the settlement of protracted and violent social conflicts usually takes one of two basic forms. In one, the adversaries manage to arrive at some solution through direct, interparty discussion of the issues in contention. They then bargain towards an accommodation of their competing goals that, at the very least, satisfies enough of their underlying interests to make the resultant settlement acceptable to leaders and rank and file followers, and thus durable over time. This process of negotiation is usually an extremely complex one, subject to many vicissitudes, and liable, because of its fragility, to break down frequently and disastrously, as in the Basque country and in Sri Lanka. Perhaps for this last reason, a directly negotiated bilateral settlement is something of a rarity.