Peace talks are an intricate dance of steps often choreographed by third-party mediators among parties in conflict to gradually exchange war for peace. While the ‘handshake moment’ of an agreement receives the most attention, the success or failure of a peace process depends on many factors beyond the negotiating table.
First, the underlying grievances and positions on which a war is fought must be reconcilable. If both sides insist that they are right and no compromise is possible, a peace process can stall or even fail. This is especially true when the conflict is over identity, as is the case in Sudan and Turkey, where the core identities of the parties are irreconcilable.
Second, a negotiation framework must be adapted to the specific circumstances of the conflict. The choice of a framework may be influenced by other variables such as regime type or the political ideology of a government, but this is not inevitable; both Colombia and Turkey could have chosen alternative negotiation frameworks. A negotiation framework shapes a government’s decision-making calculus at the onset of negotiations and can have important causal effects on outcomes.
Third, a good negotiation framework should address information asymmetries and commitment problems. A negotiation framework must be designed in a way that minimizes these problems and provides incentives for both parties to cooperate. A key example of this is how the Colombian government included victims as central to its negotiation framework. This shifted the bargaining balance from the government to the conflict’s victims and helped overcome commitment problems. In contrast, the Turkish government denied access to Ocalan during a critical period in the Kurdish peace process and aggravated commitment problems by treating information asymmetry as a threat to its power.
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