Peace talks are the negotiations that bring warring parties to the table to resolve their conflict. Peace processes, involving both national-level negotiations between states and sub-national or localized initiatives involving armed non-state actors, necessitate high levels of buy-in from stakeholders to overcome conflicting interests. Achieving a sustainable peace is hard work that requires commitment and patience. But what explains some peace processes succeeding while others fail? In addition to the prevailing structural and contextual conditions, scholarship reveals that the negotiation framework matters.
The negotiation framework defines HOW a government conducts its peace talks, which impacts HOW the negotiations proceed. The negotiating parties may also differ in their ability to address conflicting interests or in the degree of reluctance they have in tackling past injustices. In addition, a government’s choice to include or exclude third-party mediation and civil society participation carries costs such as legal codification, publicizing the process, granting a negotiated outcome legitimacy, and enabling third-party guarantorship.
Drawing on the Colombian and Turkish cases, this article illustrates how different negotiation frameworks result in divergent peace negotiations. The analysis shows that while the initial conditions in both countries were similar, the contrasting negotiation frameworks led to significantly different results: the Colombian process was more inclusive and made legally binding commitments; while Turkey’s government opted for informality and excluded third-party mediators and civil society participation. The article argues that the varying frameworks reflect how governments’ short-term interest in minimizing the costs of a peace process may clash with the longer-term interest in creating durable peace.
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