Loftis Publishes Review in Ethics and International Affairs
Ambassador Robert Loftis, Professor of the Practice of International Relations and Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently published a review of Negotiating Peace: A Guide to the Practice, Politics, and Law of International Mediation by Sven M. G. Koopmans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
The review was published in the Fall 2019 issue of Ethics and International Affairs. From the text of the article:
Sir Winston Churchill is often credited with the phrase “To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.” It is not entirely clear that he actually uttered those words, but judging by the proliferation of university conflict resolution programs and mitigation centers and of graduate degrees in conflict management over the last twenty years, the desire to be part of the “jaw-jaw” has rarely been stronger. Indeed, many foreign ministries have created special offices and cadres of officials to “reconstruct” and “stabilize” war-torn societies, with a focus on meeting the growing need for effective mediation.
Negotiating Peace: A Guide to the Practice, Politics, and Law of International Mediation is Sven Koopmans’s contribution to this growing opus on the practice of mediation. Setting a deceptively modest tone, he argues early in the book that “a peace agreement is an agreement that is intended to come closer to either the immediate goal of ending the fighting, or the medium-term goal of ending the inclination to fight” (p. 3). This caution is useful because the history of peacemaking is disappointing to those who expect a peace agreement to be the end of the story. The reality is often closer to the unfinished business of the Good Friday Agreement; the Dayton Accords; the cold peace between Israel and Egypt; and the (mostly) frozen conflicts in Cyprus, Kashmir, Eastern Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia, to name only a few. But unless one subscribes to the argument put forward by Edward N. Luttwak in his 1999 Foreign Affairs article “Give War a Chance,” even these less than fully satisfactory outcomes are infinitely preferable to the horrors of renewed warfare. Given the toll that wars disproportionately take on noncombatants, this is no mean accomplishment.
Negotiation and mediation are intensely human and personal activities. There are no fixed templates for resolving conflict. For every question about how to proceed, the most apt answer is almost always “It depends.” Case studies are useful, but universal lessons are hard to apply in a particular situation without context. This is where Negotiating Peace is particularly useful. The book does not offer prescriptive advice but in essence poses questions for the would-be mediator to ask herself before embarking on and while engaging in a mediation effort. Indeed, the table of contents alone could be converted into a checklist: the mediator should ensure that the questions raised in each section have been answered, and then reconfirmed or modified as circumstances dictate.
Amb. Robert G. Loftis served in the State Department and Foreign Service from 1980 to 2012, where he held a wide variety of assignments, including Acting Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (2010-2012), Special Representative for Avian and Pandemic Influenza (2009), Senior Adviser for Security Negotiations and Agreements (2004-2007), Ambassador to Lesotho (2001-2004) and Deputy Chief of Mission in Mozambique (1999-2001). You can read more about him here.