Professor of Politics, University of Ulster
The concept of peer learning is not widely recognized in the literature on political mediation or in conflict transformation. It owes more to the world of pedagogy, where it is used alongside "tutoring," "counseling," and "assessment." Working on the principle of the benefits of peer tutoring or cooperative learning at the school level, it accepts that young people need to learn to share responsibility and that "working with others" is a core skill. Peer learning is not solution-driven but is part of a process which is more concerned with networks than with hierarchies, and with learning within a sustainable community. Some of the most interesting work in this respect is being conducted by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, which has been working on a "values in education" project for about five years.
At first sight, this might seem to have little relevance to the business of conflict transformation, but the very activity of sharing responsibility is one of the prerequisites for moving out of conflict in divided societies. In that respect peer learning at the political level may be a very useful tool in the arsenal of conflict transformation practitioners. But we need some precision in how we employ the concept. Initially we can place peer learning in the literature on mediation, which has been defined as:
Peer learning can be placed within this nexus but too many claims should not be made on its behalf. It is only one device in the range of options open to those engaged in conflict transformation. It is not solution-directed but can assist in the process which leads towards a solution by allowing for the enlargement of a common ground based on establishing a common vocabulary, language, and understanding. In the first instance it is about analysis. Negotiation and implementation are much further down the line. As a process it can produce several results, ranging from sending substantive messages to establishing informal networks and understandings and ultimately to changing ways of thinking. It is about what Pierre Wack has called the "gentle art of reperceiving."
Peer learning can be about people on different sides of a conflict learning from other parties to the same conflict; or it may be when people in conflict learn from others in another conflict and this takes place directly without a third party directing them to come together. We will concentrate on the latter exercise but need to say something about the former to draw on examples of good practice. Between 1990 and 1994 many "forums" were set up in South Africa as temporary structures that gathered together the broadest possible range of stakeholders. The dates are significant in that these meetings took place between the release of Nelson Mandela from prison alongside the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and other organizations, and the holding of democratic elections in April 1994. (We shall see that the historical context in which peer learning is exercised is important.) The breadth and depth of these forums was an indication of how "strikingly few conflict-torn societies possess anything approaching the wealth of civil society institutions, mediation and negotiation skills and leadership depth found in the South Africa of the 1980s and 1990s." The (unhappy) contrast with Northern Ireland goes without saying.
One such forum, which met for three three-day workshops at the Mont Fleur conference center outside Cape Town in 1992, settled for scenario stories: "The essence of scenario development conversation deals with what might happen, not what should happen ... the process is 'only' about telling stories, not about making commitments. This allows people to discuss almost anything, even taboo subjects." It was not about formal negotiation but about the one subject all the participants had in common -- the future of South Africa. Some of their conversations were relevant to the formal negotiations which were going on simultaneously, but what was important was that the process allowed for a constructive, choice-eliciting, inclusive and holistic, and open and informal, conversation: "The Mont Fleur exercise demonstrated a new way for a society in conflict to approach the future. The informal, indirect scenario approach is different from and complementary to negotiation. Scenarios are a promising tool for public consensus building."
We have labored this example to make two points. The first is that peer learning can be a useful exercise even when it involves different sides from the same conflict learning from each other. This may be easier to achieve in those countries or regions where there is a strong civil society or where there is a tradition of humanitarian cooperation: "The close cooperation between voluntary organizations, academic circles and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in humanitarian action and peace work has become known as the 'Norwegian model.'" We shall see that neither was present in the Northern Ireland conflict. The second is that timing is crucial: are public leaders prepared to talk together about the future? When a willingness exists, then two other factors become critical -- the nature of the process and the compositions of the various teams.
Before we look at those we need to give some consideration to the question of timing. There is a view that the conflict must "ripen" to the point at which the parties have reached mutual exhaustion or one side has been forced to capitulate. On the other hand, third parties have to make the crucial decision as to whether the price of doing nothing at all is greater than that of the "least bad" form of intervention. There are a variety of options in terms of diplomatic intervention along this spectrum. We can speak of strategic third-party diplomatic intervention such as United States mediation initiatives in the Middle East and in southern Africa over the past two decades; or episodic diplomatic intervention in stubborn conflicts such as Cyprus or Kashmir; or crisis intervention when a conflict suddenly flares with third parties having little to offer save "the leverage inherent in the balance of forces on the ground." Finally timing and intervention come together, as in the Mozambique settlement process during 1992-94, when outsiders were "needed to translate a 'ripening' situation into the essential building blocks of the transition from war to peace. Without outsiders to provide much of the pressures, ideas, concepts, resources, deadlines, and inducements, there would have been no settlement. Without outsiders to sustain the settlement through several arduous years of implementation, the underlying agreements would have quickly collapsed."
But that is to move too far ahead of the process. We are more concerned with the nongovernmental analysis stage than with negotiation and implementation. We recognize that there is an interdependence between the "harder" and "softer" forms of intervention "and an awareness of what they all share is the beginning of wisdom." We want to begin with the beginning of wisdom and place the question of timing in the context of process and political leadership. This will be an exercise in the "softer" form of intervention but it acknowledges that there should be a complementarity between governmental and nongovernmental intervention between 'Track I' and 'Track Two' exercises. Ours is an analysis of peer learning as a Track Two process in the peculiar circumstances of the Anglo-Irish conflict. The most succinct definition of Track Two diplomacy is:
Northern Ireland does not shine as an exemplar in the study of peer learning. The reasons lie in history, in a deviant political culture, and in more recent attempts to introduce the process in less than propitious circumstances. The literature on the conflict is enormous, so there is no need to rehearse the history save to bring out a few salient points. Between 1920 and 1972 Northern Ireland operated as if it were a "normal" liberal democracy in that free elections were held on a regular basis. The fact that every general election in Northern Ireland was predictable, and the absolute certainty of the same (Unionist) government being returned to office, meant in fact that there was no need to engage in dialogue with your (Irish nationalist) political opponents. The basic skill of political activity -- negotiation -- was never learned because the majority community believed that it was born to rule in perpetuity, whereas the minority community fell back on a crude combination of the revenge of the cradle and manifest destiny. Both were prepared to engage in extremis in forms of intimidation; and both produced mind-sets which did not encourage empathy or an ability to engage in political bargaining.
Events since 1972 bear out this pessimistic prognosis. Political activity consisted of a combination of bullets and bombs, intransigence and procrastination. Four attempts at brokering an internal settlement between 1972 and 1986 floundered on the politics of "no surrender." The most serious was an effort to form a coalition government composed of representatives of both the nationalist and unionist communities. Such an executive -- composed of the Ulster Unionists Party (UUP), the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and the biconfessional Alliance Party (AP) -- took office on 1 January 1974 but collapsed less than five months later. It was brought down by a combination of IRA antipathy and a political strike led by the Protestant working class under the banner of the Ulster Workers' Council. It was one of those rare occasions when the work of republican and loyalist extremism coincided. The former believed that the 1974 agreement reinforced the partition of Ireland whereas the latter feared that its was a substantial step in the direction of Irish unity: in short politics as paranoia and as a zero-sum game.
We should not be too surprised with the collapse of the coalition government. Obviously anticoalition parties (which had received 23 percent of the vote) were not represented in government. They were formidable opponents who built on the electorate's fear of the unknown to work on their emotions. In any case it may have collapsed of its own volition because it came into office with too much contentious and unfinished business. Whatever the reason, its rise and demise has several lessons for students of peer learning. One was that during its short period it worked remarkably well given that it was composed of politicians representing widely diverse and fundamental views. Here was a rare example of political leadership. Brian Faulkner, the chief executive, knew the risks he was taking. He had used ambiguous language to persuade his followers to go into coalition with a nationalist party, the SDLP. The failure of the experiment led to his own political demise because in a demotic culture political leaders cannot afford to go too far ahead of their followers. As a corollary the Northern Ireland model is an example of the absence of structured elite predominance. In interviews two of those who had played a key role in bringing down the executive told me, respectively, that political leadership should follow the electorate and that the politician's role was to be a "handmaiden" of the electorate. A second concerns the insular nature of political activity in Northern Ireland -- what one interviewee described as "Northern Ireland as the navel of the world" syndrome. There was a strong resistance by loyalist politicians to consider anything other than the Westminster model. Consociationalism, for example, was considered to be too "un-British."
The demise of power sharing had a paradoxical effect. The elites engaged in it had learned to trust each other to a certain extent and had profited from this practical exercise in peer learning; but not enough effort had been made to establish closer alliances between the backbenchers of the power-sharing parties. Secondly, it underlines the demotic nature of Ulster politics and calls into question whether exercises in peer learning should concentrate at the elite or non-elite level. If non-elites feel that the democratic process is not within their control then they have the capacity to destroy virtually any political initiative. And those engaged in peer learning must be aware of communal sensitivities and have a sense of perspective -- they should not push matters on too rapidly. The rate of change can often be as significant as the need for change. Thirdly, the 1974 experiment was exclusive rather than inclusive, and that mitigated against a spirit of accommodation.
These points are especially important in those polities where the distance between politics and violence is not clear-cut. When the conflict recommenced in 1969 several factors suggested themselves. One was the degree to which those engaged in conflict enjoyed considerable communal support. A second was the very naturalness of the conflict: it was as if that generation had inherited the attitudes and the skills of earlier generations. The IRA had started with virtually no weapons and with fundamentally divided counsels. Yet within a few years it had fashioned itself into one of the most sophisticated paramilitary organizations in the world. Similarly the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) was claiming a card-carrying membership of 25,000 within a few months of its formation. A third, paradoxical, factor was that the widespread communal support for both sets of paramilitaries imposed its own constraints on the violence.
It is a commonplace that political violence has had a role to play long before partition. When the IRA re-formed in 1970 it modeled itself self-consciously on the leaders of the 1916 Rising; and they in their 1916 Proclamation asserted that this was the sixth time that the Irish had risen to expel the British since 1798. In this setting few would have challenged the curious statement of a nineteenth century constitutional nationalist MP that "violence was the only way of securing a hearing for moderation." That suggests an ambiguity about the distance between violence and politics in which it appears that (the constraint on) violence is genetically encoded. Darby has derived some comparatively positive messages from this situation.
The same attitudes pertained in three further failed internal initiatives in 1974-75, 1979-80, and 1982-86. By the latter stage the British government had abandoned the search for an internal settlement and begun to work closely with the Irish government on a joint approach when both signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985. That was to change the nature of the game by adding to the number of parties which would be engaged in an inclusive dialogue, and by raising major constitutional issues concerning sovereignty. In these new circumstances unionist parties were even more reluctant to be drawn into public dialogue with their political enemies.
At this stage we need to pause to make some general statements about the process. The first is that none of the attempts were inclusive. Only in 1974-75 did all the constitutional parties sit down to ascertain how much common ground was there. For the most part their public rhetoric was truculent and negative. They were as conscious of the intraethnic as of the interethnic. Factionalism ruled the roost and some of them had an antipathy to getting involved in any secret negotiations. The second was that the political representatives of the paramilitaries were considered to be outside the pale of dialogue. It leaves us with the bald conclusion that none of the exercises were viewed as serious attempts at inclusive peer learning by the parties concerned, and that most of them felt under no particular pressure to produce results. Procrastination ruled.
The situation appeared to be the same until 1990. Then the secretary of state, Peter Brooke, opened up tentative talks with the four main constitutional parties. After 14 months of tenacious and skillful bilateral meetings, he secured their agreement to enter into structured discussions with both governments to examine the problem through a discussion of the three strands: (a) relationships between the two communities within Northern Ireland; (b) relationships between the people of Ireland, north and south; and (c) relations between the two governments. In addition, a principle was established that nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. And in the meantime secret discussions were going on between the IRA and an emissary of the British government (1990-93). All of this emphasizes the complexity of the problem. But it was not complexity which undermined the Brooke talks (and those of his successor, Sir Patrick Mayhew) over three years in which the parties very rarely moved beyond the procedural to contemplate the substantive. The simple fact was that they had had too little experience in dealing with procedural matters and they had a zero-sum view of substantive issues.
If the lessons of history and a deviant political culture did not bode well for exercises in peer learning, the problem was compounded by clumsy official initiatives in the early days of the conflict when the Northern Ireland government established a Ministry of Community Relations serviced by a Community Relations Commission. Its very first minister, for example, had to resign from the Orange Order, an exclusively Protestant body which was perceived as being rabidly anti-Catholic. The first chairman of the commission was a prominent Catholic, Maurice Hayes, who was released initially for only one day and a half in each week to fulfill his duties. It became a full-time post eventually but it was not the most suitable device for sensitive community relations work:
At the unofficial level one early workshop in peer learning received bad press in Northern Ireland. The "Belfast Workshop" has been described by its creators, Leonard Doob and William Foltz, (a psychologist and political scientist from Yale University) thus:
Stirling had a serious effect on applied conflict research. There was a great uneasiness about researchers being parachuted in with neither the requisite knowledge nor sensitivity to the cultural and psychological underpinnings of the problem. Another Track Two initiative in 1988 caused problems for the participants. On 14-15 October a workshop was convened by a lawyer and Lutheran ecumenist, Dr. Eberhard Spreicher, in Duisburg, then West Germany, Spreicher had organized similar meetings with churchmen, politicians, and paramilitaries from Northern Ireland. At Duisburg he proposed a four-point agenda. But that was soon abandoned and discussion centered on a way around the fixed positions each party had adopted ever since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. Unusually, there was a leak that the meeting had taken place -- the main BBC News which carried across the UK made it its leading item on 1 February 1989 and suggested that it was potentially the most significant breakthrough since partition. The politicians who had been present -- Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Austin Currie of the SDLP, Jack Allen of the UUP, and Gordon Mawhinney of AP -- were embarrassed by the leak and accused of negotiating without the imprimatur of their party leaders. It emerged later that someone who was perceived as a proxy for Sinn Fein, Father Alex Reid, had also been present. It is my understanding that the four party representatives had no idea that such a person was to attend. The essential prerequisite of trust had been shattered. Duisburg gave Track Two a bad name.
There are more successful examples of reconciliation exercises within Northern Ireland with a strong indigenous component. The Corrymeela Community was founded in 1965 -- before the onset of the present conflict -- as an ecumenical organization based on Christian principles married to the ideal of "community" by creating a space "where our differences can be overcome and we can learn to live together." It is the largest of 32 groups involved in reconciliation in Northern Ireland and it has no illusions about the complexity of the task it faces. Its founder encapsulated its philosophy thus: "I believe that Corrymeela can operate here to change attitudes and this is a long term process ... If attitudes change then structures will change." Corrymeela is working on a broad canvas and with extended time frames.
Since 1990 I have been engaged in several Track Two exercises with a number of colleagues. These sections will describe some of this activity as an aid to peer learning. It will not be comprehensive in at least two respects. It will not give equal weight to each exercise since some were more useful than others; and it has to be remembered that the series of workshops were more agglutinative than sequential -- that is, they were not conceived initially as part of a package but were generally in response to offers from external third parties to assist the political process. We will see, however, that the sum total of these meetings had a positive incremental effect on the formal political negotiations. Secondly, given the discreet nature of Track Two exercises, it is possible that others have taken place without my knowledge. It is known, for example, that the National Democratic Institute (NDI) have held a number of workshops with the Northern Ireland parties, but the emphasis has been on training and technique rather than peer learning. In more recent times others organized a session in South Africa (28 May-2 June 1997) to enable those parties elected to the Northern Ireland Forum on 30 June 1996 to learn from South Africa's transition from apartheid to a democracy undergoing the rigors of reconstruction and development. Ironically, a form of apartheid had to be imposed on the process since the unionist parties present refused to share any facilities with the Sinn Fein representatives; and the United Kingdom Unionist Party (UKUP) refused to participate at all since, it contended, that to be present at the same exercise as SF was to concede the principle that SF could be involved in the Northern Ireland dialogue with or without an unequivocal IRA cessation of violence.
In an attempt to draw on commonalities as well as discrepancies I will refer to eight exercises in all. Two workshops complemented each other: that at the Conference Center, Airlie House, Virginia (United States) between 28 January through 2 February 1990; and that at the Centre for Defence and International Studies at the University of Social Sciences, Grenoble (France) between 27 and 30 August 1990. Both had been organized by the same teams from the Centre for the Study of Conflict, University of Ulster, and the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. Both involved the same set of politicians (although they were allowed to add to their numbers for the Grenoble workshop); and both resulted in a single product which made, and continues to make, a significant impact on the political process in Northern Ireland. Two were freestanding -- Des Moines and Strasbourg -- but complemented each other insofar as they were concerned with a bill of rights and a human rights culture. Two -- South Africa and Harvard -- were more reflective in that the participants were concerned with learning from experts and activists about conflict resolution elsewhere. Belfast was the only workshop which was totally public and which involved large numbers of people: thus it will be dealt with in a category of its own.
With the exception of Belfast all were held outside Northern Ireland. That allowed for the removal away from media distortion and away from peer-group pressure. In addition it allowed for the creation of a safe, neutral, and supportive environment where each delegation started from the same equal footing and with the capacity to use an extensive support network. None of these factors can be ignored. The fact that they were taking place in a scholarly setting was advantageous because journalists were inclined to dismiss them as being merely "academic." It was a matter for each party delegation -- although it must be stressed that the politicians were invited in their individual capacities rather than as representatives of their respective parties -- to decide whether they wanted to issue press communiqués before or after each event. Some issued deliberately bland statements but that was as much to cover their own backs with their party colleagues as for any other reason.
All of them addressed transitional, rather than final status, issues because they were concerned with building up a culture of trust among politicians who, for the most part, occupied second-tier positions within their parties. Virginia and Strasbourg had as their theme "Northern Ireland in Europe: 1992." Des Moines was billed as a seminar on the feasibility of a bill of rights for Northern Ireland; and Strasbourg as a seminar on "Constitutional Protection of Human Rights: Comparative Experiences." South Africa was an opportunity to listen to those from every point of the political spectrum who had been participating in its transition. The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard billed their case-study method as "Managing Change in a Diverse Society." In that respect location and format were significant. The opportunity to meet at the margins of the formal workshops was a vital component. Participants were housed in comfortable surroundings all under the same roof and all on the same corridor. Harvard was an exception but even there accommodation was in executive-style apartments with the space to hold informal meetings. A common meeting place was established and it was the practice to eat together. This was not compulsory; a high degree of leisure time was built into most exercises. The South African trip included an overnight stay at a game park; and at Harvard participants went to a baseball game, a reception in a Boston art gallery, and they took a one-day trip to Martha's Vineyard.
We have stressed the lack of media attention and the issue of location because they are relevant. We need to keep in mind that these workshops were taking place against a backcloth of continuous tension where politicians had often adopted adversarial positions. The absence of the media -- and it was something which the participants had fully endorsed -- meant that there was no need to strike poses. A parallel can be drawn with the Oslo process:
The negative example is borrowed from the Harvard workshop. It was the first occasion in which Sinn Fein was in the same company as the UUP. The other unionist parties with parliamentary representation, the DUP and the UKUP, did not participate. That put some pressure on the UUP representation since they could not afford to consort with Sinn Fein. So they found themselves in the situation whereby they were in the same workshop as SF but they would not socialize outside. They would not share the same dining tables nor would they sit in for the group photograph. While one can understand the electoral imperative which forced them into this situation, the consequence was that they were made to look foolish. It has parallels with the "apartheid" conditions of the mid-1997 South African workshop in that the social distance between some of the parties may have been damaging to the process in the immediate term; in the longer term it may have had salutary lessons. Time will tell.
Two further general points need some elaboration. One concerns the quality of the workshop teams, and the other the standing of third parties. Ideally the teams need to be tolerant, respected, and representative. All of this is relative and may be dictated to some extent by the relationship between the third party and individual politicians. Tolerance simply means a willingness to listen to and work with others. Since the politicians were willing to participate, ipso facto they were tolerant. Dialogue could be robust at times -- and some workshops reflected (more than others) rising tension on the ground in Northern Ireland -- but it was pursued in a civilized and inquiring manner. In a divided society a respected politician who has the capacity to transcend that division is a very rare bird: in this context "respected" means within one's own community. They need not necessarily hold official positions -- indeed it may be an advantage to target emerging talent where the conflict is complex and tortuous. Two criteria were adapted in the seven workshops under discussion: the delegates were either potentially part of their respective negotiating teams or they were perceived as being emerging leaders. The result was that the workshops were dominated by the secondary leaderships.
The question of representation is more problematic and may have some relationship to the role of a third party. In the case of the Northern Ireland workshops, my standing with individual politicians was crucial. Besides a sustained effort to involve the same cadre of politicians throughout, the selection of politicians tended to be self-fulfilling. Initially I approached politicians with whom I had some previous relationship either through interviewing them for academic projects or being involved with them in other conferences. The common denominator was that a degree of mutual trust and respect had been established. When the first workshop was being planned for Virginia in 1990 (and it had been mooted as early as 1986), I approached the SDLP leader, John Hume MP, the deputy leader of the DUP, Peter Robinson MP, and a senior UUP MP, Ken Maginnis, to seek their support for a peer-learning exercise. I did not anticipate that they would necessarily participate themselves but I knew that they had the authority to introduce me to significant players in their respective parties. In any case Robinson and Maginnis did participate and they nominated younger and talented people in their parties, Gregory Campbell and Drew Nelson, respectively. The SDLP nominated Sean Farren and Denis Haughey, two key party strategists with a particular interest in Europe. The Grenoble workshop allowed for wider participation to allow the parties to make more use of their European expertise. All six veterans from Virginia attended with the addition of Jack Allen (UUP) and Nigel Dodds (DUP). Both were in their party's European office. The SDLP did not add to their number. These two workshops set the pattern. In every instance the same cadre of politicians was called upon and if their leading members (such as Robinson and Maginnis) were not available they would nominate like-minded individuals. In these circumstances it is safe to say that over a period of six years a small group of politicians were being versed in the process of peer learning. Every workshop entailed serious effort from each individual politician.
It might be objected that there was a certain arbitrariness to the selection of participants. In the beginning this was the case. It was my judgment that two of the party leaders would have considered the type of exercise in which we were involved to be foreign to their way of doing business. Neither Messrs. Robinson nor Maginnis spoke for their parties on Europe. Indeed, following the Virginia workshop I made a courtesy call on the DUP leader, Rev. Ian Paisley, to inform him of the progress we had made. He expressed considerable annoyance at my choice of his deputy, whom he maintained was not well versed on Europe: it was no accident that Nigel Dodds (from his private office) was in the next workshop at Grenoble. So there was a certain inconsistency in the choice of personnel. But a conscious effort was being made to identify those who had potential to make a political impact in the longer term and were seen as representative of a newer generation. Total consistency is impossible in any case because much depends on the vagaries of timing. Each workshop had its own preplay and could be a few years in planning. Once a date had been set we came up against parliamentary and personal timetables. What was more important was that parties in a hostile climate were accepting that this type of exercise had a role to play in managing Track One efforts. It is best to examine this in greater detail by looking more closely at specific exercises.
This brings us back to the question of how representative were these delegations. The answer is impossible to quantify. There had been no female representation, for example, before the Strasbourg workshop in December 1993. Indeed the issue did not properly surface until the formation of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition to contest elections in June 1996; and in more recent workshops an attempt has been made to establish a more equitable gender balance. Secondly, the process cannot be totally representative in that it cannot contain those who spurn "the gentle art of reperceiving." In place of an idealized form of representation we sought instead to concentrate on those who had leadership qualities to move some of their own intransigent colleagues. Nor should it be forgotten that some had to take greater risks than others by even participating. Peter Robinson (and Jack Allen of the UUP, who joined the exercise at a later stage) had been involved in the Duisburg imbroglio. That had damaged their standing among elements of their own party. Indeed Robinson had been one of three authors of a 1986 report, An End to Drift, which was implicitly critical of unionism's loss of direction, and had resigned as deputy leader of his party for a period in the aftermath.
His willingness to take part from the outset -- after he had received promises of confidentiality and of transparency -- raises two further questions about timing and the nature of third-party intervention. We shall see when we look at case studies that context had an important bearing in the proceedings of individual workshops; and we will learn that the third-party role in these "softer" forms of intervention is more facilitative than prescriptive.
Eight Exercises in Peer Learning
With the advantage of hindsight, it could be argued that the Anglo-Irish conflict had reached the stage of "hurting stalemate" by 1990. The demography of violence over the next few years was to witness an upsurge in loyalist violence -- nothing spectacular, but much more focused on republican targets -- so that by the early 1990s loyalists were responsible for more acts of violence than republicans. That is not to say that the latter had become a spent force; it was generally accepted that the IRA had the capacity to continue with the "Long War" (but more as a war of attrition than a war with a successful outcome). We have seen that the political talks convened by the British government between 1990 and 1993 appeared to be bogged down in procedural and substantive minutiae; and we know now that during these years an emissary for the British government was conducting secret talks in an effort to break the deadlock. We know, too, that the Clinton administration began to pay sustained attention to assisting a peace process in Northern Ireland. The ultimate outcome was the cease-fires of August and October 1994, and the renewed IRA cease-fire of July 1997 which allowed for the very first time an inclusive political dialogue.
It would be tempting -- but fallacious -- to give some credit to the prescience of some of us who were engaged in peer-learning exercises from 1990 onwards. The best that can be said was that the participants shared a concern that something needed to be done and that at the very least they should explore each others' options. Track Two presented the best opportunities to do so. The absence of the media, the physical location, the neutral back-up support, all were as far removed as was possible from the rawness of the Northern Ireland political arena. These factors assist in explaining how 'third parties can intervene most effectively depends upon (1) their own capabilities, leverage, and linkage to the conflict; (2) the conflict's status, form and ripeness; and (3) the character of the parties to the conflict, their accessibility, and their decision-making systems.
As we have noted earlier it will not be our intention to give equal weight to each exercise in peer learning. While paying obeisance to all of them we will pay particular attention to the Virginia and Grenoble workshops which produced the Northern Ireland Centre in Europe (NICE) project, and to the visit to South Africa which placed so much emphasis on process. The comparison serves another useful purpose. NICE can be seen as one form of peer learning in which people on different sides of a conflict learn from other parties to the same conflict, whereas South Africa was learning from another conflict.
The workshops in Virginia and Strasbourg may be considered a success. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end; they were designed to complement each other; and they produced a product. The theme of Northern Ireland in Europe: 1992 had been chosen for a number of reasons. The introduction of the Single European Act was going to change the nature of the political game with the reduction in boundaries across Europe. It had the potential to have positive or negative impact on regions such as Northern Ireland. So the topic had a practical content: how does Northern Ireland prepare itself for the Single European Act? In addition it had a symbolic content in that it was concerned with questions of sovereignty and subsidiarity. Traditionally the unionist parties were seen as antithetical to the European vision, whereas the SDLP was very pro-European. Despite this symbolic input the topic was perceived as being noncontentious enough to enable the politicians to use the workshops to cover any issue they desired.
Discussion at the workshops focused on the implications of the Single European Act, and specifically on how this might affect the relationships among the various Northern Ireland parties and other interested parties elsewhere. The theme had been chosen by the organizers because it was believed that, while thought had been devoted to the economic implications of the act, there had been little anticipatory thinking on the likely political and social consequences of "a Europe without boundaries." It was hoped that the workshop might allow some shared agreement to develop about the nature of the opportunities and problems the new Europe was likely to present to the people of Northern Ireland. One theme which emerged was a strong feeling that Northern Ireland's interests were not being well represented in the European Community in spite of the efforts of local Members of the European Parliament. Hence it was suggested that a Northern Ireland input in Brussels could take the form of the Northern Ireland Centre in Europe, and a tentative draft proposal for exploring the possibilities of establishing such a center was drawn up. Following the Airlie House workshop the three Northern Ireland MEPs were apprised of the deliberations and agreed in principle to support the establishment of NICE. On 16 March 1990 the Northern Ireland participants met at a neutral and secluded venue in Belfast and requested a study of the feasibility of NICE.
With a grant I had received from the Ireland Funds I commissioned a feasibility study from a retired civil servant. His study was considered by the Northern Ireland participants in Belfast on 6 July 1990 and was judged to form a firm basis for progress. It was decided to hold a second workshop to expedite the business of establishing NICE. In the meantime I had learned that sections of the business community were proceeding with a similar model and that that was to be launched by the secretary of state in September. I conveyed this information at the outset of the second workshop in Grenoble. This angered some of the participants who were aware that their standing in the community was low because it was perceived that they did not cooperate across the sectarian divide. Here was an example of practical cooperation which looked like it was not going to be recognized. They conveyed that anger to the Northern Ireland Office immediately and had the proposed launch postponed. This was a rare example of Track One clashing with Track Two.
The participants used the opportunity of their visit to Grenoble to study at first hand how other European regions were preparing for the impact of the Single European Market. A visit to the Rhone-Alps Regional Office in Lyon enabled them to question officials concerned with that region's relationship with the wider world and, especially, the axis of development it had cultivated with Bad-Wurtemburg (Germany), Catalonia (Spain), and Lombardy (Italy). As a result of the workshop the feasibility study was amended and it was agreed that it would be published to engender public debate about Northern Ireland in Europe: 1992. That debate led eventually to the establishment of NICE in a partnership between the political parties and the business community. The feasibility report acted as the catalyst for NICE. Funding was to be derived from a combination of public and private sources, and it was recognized that the project could succeed only if it had a broad base of support from political, economic, and institutional interests in Northern Ireland.
Besides being a successful proactive exercise NICE was an important exercise for two further reasons. It serves as a useful reminder of how third parties can be facilitators, and it gave the political participants the space to explore the more pressing demands arising from the conflict. The project was serviced throughout by academics from both sides of the Atlantic, some of whom had considerable experience in this type of exercise. It might be said that the Northern Ireland academics provided the linkage to, and integrity of, the conflict, whereas others provided most of the technical expertise. The combination produced a level playing field on which both sides to the conflict knew that they could call on the existing support system even though they were not always in agreement with that support. The very first workshop in Virginia, for example, was opened with a mildly provocative philosophical paper from a distinguished practitioner in conflict resolution who had had some experience of Northern Ireland at the early stages of the conflict. In other words he was au fait with the nature of the problem, sufficiently distanced from the action, and sufficiently skillful in drawing the politicians into dialogue. Indeed that was part of the more pressing concerns of the unionist politicians worried about the burgeoning relationship between the governments in London and Dublin. In addition the participants were able to call on academic expertise ranging from knowledge of the evolution of the European Union to workshop experience concerning the conflicts in Cyprus and the south Atlantic. A similar support system existed in Grenoble.
These workshops also produced what one participant described as "shared learning." That meant not only that participants were able to take advantage of the technical expertise but also that they had a better understanding of their political adversaries, which had the potential to be helpful. Discussions went well beyond the European question. Even on that level many of the myths about the EU were exposed, and the notion that 1992 would open up the possibility of manipulative politics (according to one unionist participant), whereby the Single European Act would be utilized to force Northern Ireland into a closer relationship with the Republic of Ireland, was fully rehearsed. One of their primary concerns was that it may not be clear to their constituents back home that there was a distance between analysis and negotiation (shades of Duisburg!), and they wished to ensure that that distance was maintained. They used the cover of Virginia and Grenoble to tease out a formula which would allow them to re-enter the political dialogue without an apparent loss of face. The phraseology they produced was remarkably close to the formulation devised by the two governments at a later stage to keep the process in existence. Similarly the SDLP participants used these exercises to talk down some of the unionist fears about the Irish dimension and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. These shared understandings enabled the bilateral and multilateral Track One exercises to proceed more smoothly than might have been expected, a fact confirmed by the interviewees.
We need not examine the remaining workshops in the same detail. In terms of location and timing Des Moines was the most inaccessible in that it occurred during a very cold spell just before Christmas. It was a long way to travel at a very busy time of year. Also it may have been too academically led. Peter Robinson made the comparison with the South African experience which he found to be not packed as tightly as Des Moines and containing more distractions and interests which allowed for more social interaction. Lord Alderdice believed that Des Moines created a situation where most of the relevant parties were signed up to a bill of rights although they differed on the detail; and that examples such as the Canadian legal system were pertinent because they made it possible to look at cases within the Commonwealth system. The UUP took the Des Moines workshop sufficiently seriously that they commissioned a paper from one of the legal experts on a bill of rights for Northern Ireland, and in its aftermath Jeffrey Donaldson wrote to one of the organizers to say that his experience there had been of direct assistance to him in establishing a rapport with some of his political adversaries.
The Strasbourg workshop (6-8 December 1993) was under the auspices of the Council of Europe, which was implementing a series of pilot projects within the framework of its "confidence-building measures" designed to improve relations between different communities living on the same territory. It was to be open to the four constitutional parties, who could send a maximum of three party members. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe were consulted about the meeting and the British and Irish representatives to the Council of Europe were kept fully informed. Like the other workshops it operated under strict rules of confidentiality with no access to the press in order to promote a climate of confidence among participants. Despite the caliber of the speakers provided and the contents -- International Protection of Human Rights; History and Memory; the case-law of the European Convention on Human Rights; and the Commission for Democracy through Law -- it may have been one of the less successful workshops. It illustrates the fickle nature of these exercises since no one can legislate for the optimum political time in which they should take place. That is not to say that it was not a useful exercise. It continued the process of getting to know one's adversaries. Jeffrey Donaldson MP explained that one of the problems with Northern Ireland politics was rhetoric and that "getting beyond the rhetoric...is where Track Two is very useful."
The visit to South Africa in 1994 was not so much a single workshop but a series of consultations with all the necessary parties inside South Africa to enable Northern Ireland participants to gain firsthand experience of the South African negotiation process. It was to be sponsored by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) and it acknowledged that the proposal was designed to provide key players with an opportunity to reflect on their own process in the light of the South African experience: "In IDASA we have seen the value of such exposure programmes for our own process and a similar value might be expected for the participants." On the question of participation it accepted that it might have to "exclude some sections of opinion who will have to be drawn into the process at a later stage. South Africa has lessons for how the various groups were negotiated into the settlement at various times as well." That last comment was shorthand for the inclusion of Sinn Fein because, as the link person in Northern Ireland, some pressure was put on me by South Africans to have Sinn Fein included. Since this was prior to the IRA cease-fire and since I knew that unionists would not participate in those circumstances, nothing came of the suggestion.
The 1994 South Africa consultations stand with the NICE project in delivering a palpable product but should be examined in conjunction with the 1997 South African visit. The latter was more inclusive in that it contained high-powered delegations on all points of the political spectrum including SF and the fringe loyalist parties and was graced with a visit from President Mandela. It indicated too how useful peer learning could be when the participants were learning from another conflict. South Africa had moved beyond its pariah status in the international community and had illustrated that "intractable" problems need not necessarily be intractable. It was a shining example of what could be achieved if the will was there. In terms of process it is noteworthy that in the multiparty talks convened in September 1997, the two governments set a deadline of May 1998 to produce a formula for political movement and that representatives such as SF's Martin McGuinness make frequent references to their South African experience. At the formal opening of substantive talks in Belfast on 7 October 1997 the Alliance leader, Lord Alderdice, said that the "message Northern Ireland politicians learned from the recent examination of the South African experience was that if deadlines were not met 'you never achieve the outcome you want to achieve.'" It was Lord Alderdice, too, who made the point in interview that workshops such as Des Moines were about looking at particular pieces of content whereas South Africa was mostly looking at process -- how to get from Point A to Point B. Jeffrey Donaldson MP concurs. He believed that South Africa pointed out design faults in the Northern Ireland process. Specifically the South African participants took away three messages: how to make use of technical committees to further the process; the need to accept the notion of "sufficient consensus" for the same reason -- that has now become part of the political furniture in the multiparty talks; and a recognition that parties must not allow themselves to be marginalized and place themselves outside the process. Individuals took away other specific ideas on matters such as policing, but it is my firm belief, following a series of interviews with four of the participants (there were seven in all), that the South African visit helped to make relationships more manageable and allowed the multiparty talks negotiators to use the same language and have a clearer idea of what was possible. Peter Robinson MP used the South African experience in talks with government and in discussions within the DUP. Lord Alderdice argued that if Des Moines was "nearest to Track Two then South Africa was more like Track One and a half."
Although it does not fit within the same remit as the other exercises in peer learning, the Belfast Workshop, "Reconciliation and Community: The Future of Peace in Northern Ireland" (June 1995), is significant because it was organized in the wake of the republican and loyalist cease-fires by the Project on Justice in Times of Transition and was meant to be inclusive. The British and Irish governments, as well as the U.S. embassies in London and Dublin, were fully informed. All of them were helpful in a material capacity and sent observers to the workshop. Every Northern Ireland party was invited and informed that none had a veto power. In the end only the DUP was not represented officially and the fringe loyalist and republican parties played their part in the proceedings. The speakers, who ranged from former prime ministers to police chiefs to guerrilla leaders from the Middle East, South Africa, Central and Latin America, and Eastern Europe, represented societies in transition which had experienced the problems Northern Ireland was encountering. "Inclusivity" and "process" were the key concepts which were developed. It led to the first public handshake of a British government minister, Michael Ancram, with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein and "another symbolic barrier between war and peace would crumble." The "conference worked because the speakers had something to say and the listeners listened."
The last examples to which we will allude were the two workshops using the case-study method developed by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and organised in conjunction with the Project on Justice in Times of Transition. The first, entitled "Managing Change in a Diverse Society," was held in July 1996; and the second (in July 1998) was entitled "Building the New Political Architecture." We have noted already the problems encountered by the UUP at the first Harvard workshop. The second presented a similar, but more complex problem. On this occasion there was representation from the DUP (in addition to that of the UUP). Again there was a lack of social interaction between the mainstream unionist parties (UUP and DUP) and SF, but all parties happily posed for a group photograph - once it was established that the photograph was a personal memento. However, co-operation did not extend so far as agreeing to a joint press conference. The DUP refused to sit on the same panel as SF, and the UUP concurred with this decision. The remaining parties from Northern Ireland - the SDLP, SF, Alliance, the Women's Coalition, PUP and UDP - insisted that the press conference proceed and that if others did not want to participate, they would be the losers. The result was an unseemly squabble when the UUP and the DUP attempted to hold a separate conference after the first had been completed. In the wider scheme of things, all of this was fairly inconsequential, but it did detract from the positive work which had been reached during the week.
We refer to these small rituals (of party conflict) for what they teach us about the world of peer learning. We will use it to highlight certain lessons from these specific examples. The first raises the issue of the utility of media presence at peer learning exercises. The Belfast Conference of June 1995 was meant to be a public event. It was meant to convey the message that a new political dispensation was emerging in reaction to the paramilitary cease-fires. It was based partially on the assumption that the wider public had a role to play in encouraging these political developments. In short, it recognised the power of the demos in a demotic society. When the question of media coverage arose in relation to the first Harvard workshop, a pragmatic decision was taken that since Cambridge, Massachusetts, was not an isolated spot and since sections of the media were alerted already to the event, that it might be easier to control by organising a press conference at the end rather than risk the likelihood of selective leaks. The same reasoning pertained in July 1998. The combined result was that the press concentrated understandably on what divided the parties. Paradoxically, that may have had some advantages in that it enabled the UUP and the DUP representatives to maintain that they had stood by their party principles. Hence, the constituency at home would have been satisfied while at the same time the peer learning exercise had not been damaged. In any case, it alerts us to the fact that we need to pay closer attention to the role of the media in Track Two exercises.
The second concerns, yet again, inclusion. The Belfast workshop established the precedent that all parties to the problem had to be considered as parties to the solution - hence the inclusion of SF at the Harvard workshop in July 1996. But not only SF and the political representatives of loyalist paramilitaries; the three main UK parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) sent a representative to Harvard, as did the five major parties in the Republic of Ireland (Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour, Progressive Democrats and Democratic Left). All of these parties returned to Harvard in 1998. Thus by 1996, inclusion encompassed the political realities which were written into the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement of April 1998, that is, that there were three strands to the solution embracing relationships within Northern Ireland, relationships between North and South, and those between the two islands.
The third alludes to the question of time scales. The very titles of the two Harvard workshops are revealing. The 1996 workshop is anticipatory in that it is concerned with managing change, whereas the 1998 workshop recognises the advances that had been made some months previously in the Belfast Agreement - the architects had unveiled the design, now was the time for building. The workshop was to allow for some reflection on the nature of that design. In addition, it was following the format established in 1995. Peer learning had been shifting more from the method whereby people on different sides of a conflict learn from other parties to the same conflict to one where they learn from others in other conflicts with the assistance of a third party. There had always been an element of the latter in that all of these exercises had been organised through bodies outside Northern Ireland. But it could be said that the focus began to change in the mid-1990s. The republican and loyalist cease-fires in 1994 opened up new possibilities, not least of which was the inclusion of their political representatives into negotiations. That process was challenged by the republican rejection of a British insistence on prior decommissioning before SF, the UDP, and PUP could enter fully into the democratic process. The consequence was a renewal of the IRA bombing campaign in London in February 1996.
The renewed campaign placed considerable strain on official diplomacy. SF accused the British government of bad faith; relations between the British and Irish governments had deteriorated. The role of third parties became crucial. Both governments responded by creating an international decommissioning panel to establish the accepted credentials of this process. The panel was chaired by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, who was assisted by former Canadian General John de Chastelain and a former prime minister of Finland, Harri Holkeri. They delivered their report on 26 January, but it was not enough to save the peace. The Canary Wharf bomb of 9 February signaled the end of the first phase of the peace process. Despite their nuanced and sophisticated report, the whole issue of decommissioning has continued to dog the peace process. The Belfast Agreement of April 1998 was a tribute to the panel's fortitude. It put in place the mechanisms for establishing democratic institutions in Northern Ireland, a North-South Ministerial Council, a British-Irish Council, a British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, in addition to dealing with human rights and equality issues as well as questions of security, prisoners, policing and justice. It noted in its section on decommissioning (para. 3):
In these circumstances peer learning exercises may be redundant in the short term. Track One diplomacy must follow its course, but Track Two should be ready to assist if need be. The latter has to be imbued with a certain degree of confidence in human nature. It needs to recognise the quality of patience, the value of trust through incrementalism, and a sense of proper timescales. It has to accept that there will be setbacks. In that respect, it is interesting to note that the DUP (including the individuals who participated in the peer learning exercise) remain totally opposed to the Belfast Agreement - as does one senior UUP member who played a prominent role in peer learning exercises. Despite the positions adopted by these individuals and parties, it would be foolish to dismiss the role of peer learning in complex mediations. There are more general lessons to be learned.
The experience of all the workshops suggests that they should be studied discretely but that we should not ignore their incremental effect. In that latter respect they assisted a small cadre of politicians to gain from the process of peer learning at a technical level and to learn to trust one another. (One of the more interesting features in the interviews I conducted with many of the participants was that a surprising degree of trust had grown between individuals in the SDLP and the DUP even though the latter had refused to participate in some of the later workshops. To some degree this was a simple recognition of professional respect.). At the very least each had the measure of their adversaries in the bilaterals and multilaterals. All of the parties entered the workshops with their own agendas and would have extracted their own messages. That suggests that they participated with not very high general expectations. Yet we have seen that in many instances there were palpable products, both intellectual and institutional. We have noted as well that common themes emerged and there was a commonality in terms of how to use the process.
We can say that the process was both credible and reflective -- credible in that the participants became advocates for the process and while naturally they used it to present their own positions, they also demonstrated a capacity to grow and learn. It was reflective in that the participants absorbed considerable new information, technical and otherwise. They were prepared to assert their opinions but also to listen carefully to those of others. Many of them matured as a result of the process. It failed the test of inclusion but with the passage of time it became more inclusive. At the very least, then, those who were part of the process gained from it. Indeed a group dynamic had been established as early as 1990. On the last day of the Grenoble meeting one of the politicians made the point that "contacts are now established and we don't need academics to keep them up." Nevertheless academics were called upon on quite a few other occasions in the intervening years.
But once we move outside that tiny elite, questions have to be asked about the utility of peer learning. The cease-fires made it easier to make the process more inclusive; and in including the parties associated with the paramilitaries we were broadening the base in which Track Two had a useful role. The leaders of SF and of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP) were very close to their respective communities. That gave added significance to the Belfast workshop and to the Harvard case-study method but it also suggested that there was a certain haphazardness in organizing these exercises.
Equally, it is impossible to quantify their effect on Track One. What we can be certain of is that the Track Two participants were ultraconscious of what was happening at the formal diplomatic level and hence used their own peer-learning exercises to rehearse positions taken up at the formal level. The unionist politicians in particular realized that they were in danger of being marginalized by the intergovernmental dynamic, and that gave Track Two an added urgency. At a more mundane level the NICE project damaged relations between the Northern Ireland Office and the participants for a brief period whereas the South African visit played directly into the multilateral talks. The important point to establish at the outset is that the process is meant to complement the formal negotiations and if it interferes with it in any way then it has failed. The comments of Peter Robinson MP and Mark Durkan that people should not get engaged in "solution mongering" and that matters can be much more relaxed when participants realize that there is no hidden agenda suggests that the process has a real role to play. In the seven years of my involvement no one has refused to take part because they mistrusted my motives.
Nor can one be too precise about how ideas emanating from the workshops can be spread to a wider audience. Most of my interviewees maintained that they discussed the outcome of the different workshops with a small coterie of political friends, although Lord Alderdice said that he passed on much of his experience to the party through speeches and articles. And finally it should be said that their impact on intraethnic competition is difficult to judge. In the opinion of one of the participants, the most important measurement of success is engaging party leaders in the whole process since they are the only ones who can deliver.
1. Sharing Responsibility: Ideas for Integrating a Key Aspect of the European Dimension into the Curriculum, Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, 1995.
2. Jay Folberg and Alison Taylor, Mediation: A Comparative Guide to Resolving Conflicts without Litigation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986), pp.7-8.
3. Ibid., pp. 8-10.
4. Cited in The Mont Fleur Project, Centre for Generative Leadership L.L.C. 1996, p. 6. Much of the material in this and the subsequent paragraph are drawn from that report.
5. Chester A. Crocker, "The Varieties of Intervention. Conditions for Success," in Chester A. Crocker and F. Osler Hampson with Pamela Aall (eds.), Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 1996), p. 193.
6. Mont Fleur, op. cit., p.5.
7. Ibid., p. 7.
8. Jan Egeland, "Norway As International Peacemaker," Royal Geographic Society, London, October 1994, p. 11. He cites earlier efforts in Guatemala and Sudan long before the Oslo Accords as evidence of the Norwegian approach.
9. Crocker, op. cit., p. 188.
10. Ibid., p. 193. This paragraph has relied heavily on Crocker, pp. 183-96.
1. Ibid., p. 190.
2. Generally commentators have spoken of "the Northern Ireland conflict." We have placed it in the Anglo-Irish context simply to recognise the historical realities and the contemporaneous attempt to seek a solution within that broader framework, and to draw an unwelcome comparison with South Africa where, for example, the Mont Fleur participants had one thing in common: the future of South Africa. In Northern Ireland there were those who wanted Northern Ireland to have no future.
3. Joseph Montville, Track Two Diplomacy: The Development of Non-Governmental Peace-Promoting Relationships (Limerick: Irish Peace Institute, 1986), p. 1.
4. Cited in Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1969), p. 79.
5. John Darby, Intimidation and the Control of Conflict in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), pp. viii and ix.
6. Maurice Hayes, Minority Verdict: Experiences of a Catholic Public Servant (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995), p. 84.
7. Ibid., pp. 94-5.
8. Leonard W. Doob and William J. Foltz, "The Belfast Workshop: An Application of Group Techniques to a Destructive Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 17, no. 3 (1973): 489.
19. G. H. Boehringer et al., "Stirling: The Destructive Application of Group Techniques to a Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 18, no. 2 (1974): 257.
20. Ibid.
2. Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966-1995 and the Search for Peace (London: Hutchinson, 1995), p. 335.
22. Mervyn Love, Peace Building through Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (London: Avebury, 1995), pp. 111-2 and passim, emphasis added.
23. See Fortnight, July/August 1997, no. 363, pp. 12-14.
24. Virginia, United States, January 1990; Grenoble, France, August 1990; Des Moines, Iowa, USA, December 1991; Strasbourg, France, December 1993; South Africa, April 1994; Belfast, June 1995; Harvard University, July 1996 and July 1998.
25. J. Egeland, op. cit., pp. 4-5.
26. Crocker, op. cit,. p. 187.
27. In interview Denis Haughey of the SDLP described Unionist fears about Europe as "strange, unnatural, alien." He said that the way they talked about it "certainly opened up a door for me that I hadn't recognised before. It left me with the increasing feeling through those meetings of the degree and scale of self-regard which makes it almost impossible to get through to them."
28. Peter Robinson of the DUP felt that he was addressed at times by people "who didn't have an understanding of Northern Ireland [and who were sometimes] trying to push their own point of view." He accepted however that there was no hidden agenda involved.
29. Lord Alderdice, the AP leader, believed that the Des Moines workshop allowed him to have a very useful exchange with Jeffrey Donaldson MP (UUP) which led to a very positive working relationship which has worked ever since; and that in South Africa he had managed to use one social meeting "to work things out" with the SDLP's Mark Durkan.
30. In interview Jeffrey Donaldson described the plenary sessions as "quite negative and downbeat" and suggested that "we very much brought Northern Ireland with us." He was alluding to the fact that it was taking place at a time of political uncertainty in Northern Ireland.
3. Communication from IDASA, 16 September 1994.
32. The Irish Times, 8 October 1997.
33. Both quotes from Fortnight, July/August 1995.
Arendt, H. On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1969).
Arthur, P. "Northern Ireland: Track One or Track Two Diplomacy?" Government and Opposition 25, 4 (Autumn 1990): 403-418.
Boehringer, G. H., et al., "Stirling: The Destructive Application of Group Techniques to a Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 18, no. 2 (1974): 257.
Centre for Generative Leadership L.L.C. The Mont Fleur Project (1996).
Coogan, T. P. The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966-1995 and the Search for Peace (London: Hutchinson, 1995).
Crocker, Chester, and Fen Osler Hampson with Pamela Aall, eds. Managing Global Chaos: Sources of and Responses to International Conflict (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 1996).
Darby, J. Intimidation and the Control of Conflict in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986).
Doob, Leonard W., and W. Foltz. "The Belfast Workshop: An Application of Group Techniques to a Destructive Conflict," Journal of Conflict Resolution 17, no. 3 (1973): 489-511.
Egeland, J. "Norway As International Peacemaker." Lecture given to Royal Geographic Society (October 1994).
Folberg, J., and A. Taylor. Mediation: A Comparative Guide to Resolving Conflicts without Litigation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986).
Fortnight. (July/August 1997), no. 363.
Hayes, M. Minority Verdict: Experiences of a Catholic Public Servant (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995).
The Irish Times. (8 October 1997).
Lijphart, A. Democracy in Plural Societies (Yale University Press, 1977).
Love, M. Peace Building through Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (London: Avebury, 1995).
Montville, J. Track Two Diplomacy: The Development of Non-Governmental Peace-Promoting Relationships (Limerick: Irish Peace Institute, 1986).
Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum. Sharing Responsibility: Ideas for Integrating a Key Aspect of the European Dimension into the Curriculum (1995).
Paul Arthur is professor of politics and course director of the master's program in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Ulster. He is a former senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He has served on a number of public bodies, including the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council and the Cultural Traditions Group. Professor Arthur is a member of the academic advisory board of the Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity (INCORE). He is the author of several books and journal articles, for example, Government and Politics of Northern Ireland" and "Northern Ireland Since 1968.