Negotiation Period Research Articles

What Happens to Peace When the Process is Stalled: Competing International Approaches to the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1996–2021

Abstract Does an ongoing stalemate in a peace process affect the international agenda toward the conflict and international perceptions about policies that should be adopted to resolve it? We provide a tentative answer to this question by drawing insight from analysis of developments and trends in international media attention to key terms and concepts in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during cycles of violence, as well as periods of rapprochement and peace negotiations, in the last two and half decades (1996–2021). We find that although attention to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process has been declining over the years, much of the international discussion continues to be devoted to relaunching a negotiation process leading to a two-state solution. The ongoing stalemate in such “process,” we show, provides ample opportunities for alternative approaches to emerge advocating alternative endgames (e.g., one-state), international pressure (e.g., Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), or unilateral steps (e.g., annexation). Each of these approaches promotes an alternative vision and provides a different path and employs its own terminology and vision of the future. The Israeli–Palestinian case study helps illustrate what may happen to peace when the process is stalled, and how a stalemate can produce change in the international debate on the conflict and push for the emergence of new policy directions and agendas.

From Progress to Delay: The Quest for Data in the Negotiations on Greenhouse Gases in the International Maritime Organization

Abstract This article examines the quest for data in the negotiations on the reduction of greenhouse gases in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) from 2012 to 2020. We find that the collection of data was invoked in two different manners: holding back decision-making on emission-reduction regulations and helping the greenhouse gas negotiations move forward out of gridlock. We draw on insights from literature in science and technology studies on the politics of data and boundary objects to explore how these strategies are entangled over time. We argue that aligning around data collection and an ambiguous “three-step approach” to decision-making initially facilitated collaboration between IMO delegations despite disagreement on details. We examine how the three-step approach later morphs into what we call a mechanism for delay over the course of the negotiation period, challenging regulatory development at the pace required by opening for continuous calls for more data.

Ireland During the War of Independence. From the Truce to the Treaty

The year 2022 marks the centenary of the formation of the modern, independent Irish state. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in December 1921 was crucial to its creation and political destiny, setting the direction of Irish state policy for a century and laying the foundations of modern Irish statehood. The treaty was signed after two years of Anglo-Irish war, in which the Republic of Ireland, proclaimed in 1919, had to defend its independence, when both sides found the will to declare a truce and agree to a five-month-long period of negotiations. The author examines the events that influenced the terms of the treaty, including the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which provided for the creation of two Irish parliaments, for the South and the North, effectively dividing the country, and the complex and dramatic events between the truce and the signing of the treaty. Special attention is given to the positions of British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and Irish republican leader Éamon de Valera on key issues of Irish sovereignty and territorial integrity, as reflected in their months-long correspondence. The peace treaty signed by Britain with the unrecognised Republic of Ireland was the starting point of its move towards genuine independence.

Polityka w cieniu koronawirusa

Politics in the Shadow of COVID-19: Parliamentary Election in the Kingdom of the Netherlands On March 15-17, 2021, the first parliamentary elections in the European Union during the pandemic took place in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The political authorities of the Kingdom of the Netherlands decided to hold the elections despite severe sanitary restrictions and curfew. On January 15, 2021, the outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, chairman of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), handed over the resignation of the entire government to the King. The immediate cause was the report of the parliamentary investigative commission announced in December 2020 on the extremely restrictive operation of local tax offices in connection with government child benefits. Mark Rutte has been running the country efficiently since 2010 and was also a favorite in the upcoming parliamentary elections. The elections were conducted without any disturbances. 37 parties were admitted to elections, the largest number in the post-war history of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The election winners were ruling party VVD party and progressive liberals from D’66. The discussion on the formation of the new government has already started and is accompanied by great emotions. It is going to be a long period of negotiations and their results are difficult to be predicted. The article presents the main actors of this parliamentary game.

Non-Violence, Armed Struggle and Politics: A Conversation with Ronnie Kasrils

Abstract Based on interviews with Ronnie Kasrils, a former anc military commander and former intelligence minister in South Africa, this article examines that country’s struggle against apartheid. It looks at the interplay between violent and non-violent forms of resistance, explains the reasons for the anc and other South African liberation movements adopting the armed struggle after almost half a century of commitment to non-violence, and discusses the dilemmas within the movement in trying to ensure that the military component of the struggle always remained subservient to the political. The article also looks at the development of the political underground in South Africa, and its role, together with the armed struggle, in effecting the end of apartheid. Kasrils also discusses the period of political negotiations in South Africa, from 1990 to 1994, and the relationship between that and on-the-ground struggles – both armed and unarmed.

The Effect of “Brexit” Uncertainty on The FTSE 100 Index and The UK Pound

We investigate the impact of the uncertainty surrounding the United Kingdom’s proposed departure from the European Community (“Brexit”) on financial assets. We conduct an event study around the November 14th 2018 draft withdrawal agreement. Our motivation was that the economic impact of the various political permutations that persisted throughout the negotiation period were both measurable and distinct. The probability of each Brexit scenario that was discussed varied over the political discourse. Using opinion poll data we investigate the event impact on both the FTSE 100 and the UK Pound. We found that, in accordance with existing academic evidence, asset prices discounted the weighted probabilistic economic impact of likely outcomes. We observe, however, that this impact was not as immediate as theory suggests. Interestingly, currency markets had the greater sensitivity. Our conclusions have important implications for the pricing of country risk premia in general and the European Union in particular. Key takeaways: 1) Asset prices were slow to discount the weighted probabilistic economic impact of Brexit risk. 2) Currency markets had the greater sensitivity to changes in Brexit risk. 3) Country risk premia can be impacted by perceived changes in custom union.

Britain’s Continental Connection and the Peace of Amiens: A Reassessment

The Treaty of Amiens, which brought an end to almost a decade of Franco-British warfare in March 1802, has long been understood as a flawed attempt at peace making. The British government’s surrender of most of its wartime colonial acquisitions, combined with a failure to push for guarantees on the Continent, has been interpreted as a meek acquiescence in France’s domination over Western Europe. The recommencement of war in May 1803 simply seems to confirm the supposition that the treaty was fundamentally inadequate. This article questions that interpretation by examining Britain’s relations with and policies towards Europe, and above all towards the Netherlands, during the period of negotiation and subsequent peace, 1800-3. It suggests that the British government did not conceive Amiens as the surrender of key interests, but as a base from which British influence could be reasserted. By looking at the context of Britain’s historical connections to the Netherlands, their experience of previous periods of relative diplomatic isolation, and the wider framework of European treaties, it is shown that British ministers had every reason to believe that the Treaty of Amiens left Britain in a reasonably strong position to limit French dominance.

Coopetition in a merger process: Regulators and management of coopetitive tensions

Coopetitive tensions can arise as strategic decisions are imposed on firms that challenge them to pursue competition and collaboration with other organizations. Regulators—such as the state—can interfere in merger strategies. Using a longitudinal case study, the objective of the study is: (1) to analyze which regulators influence coopetitive tensions in a merger process (including negotiation and integration stages); and (2) to explore how coopetitive tensions are coped with during the process. We found that the state and customers have architectural roles as regulators during the process (negotiation period, deal, and integration process). We explore coopetition paradox management at different levels (interorganizational, organizational, and individual levels) over the merger process. Points for practitioners Our study sheds light on tensions experienced by managers with conflicting identities at the beginning of the integration and on the way they coped with such tensions. Indeed, our study shed lights on the integration principle as managers were able to transcend the paradox in their decisions and actions implemented at the organizational level through reorganizing the organization and favoring tandem teams and joint piloting.

Analyzing the Political Sentiment of Tweets in Farsi

We examine the question of whether we can automatically classify the sentiment of individual tweets in Farsi, to determine their changing sentiments over time toward a number of trending political topics. Examining tweets in Farsi adds challenges such as the lack of a sentiment lexicon and part-of-speech taggers, frequent use of colloquial words, and unique orthography and morphology characteristics. We have collected over 1 million Tweets on political topics in the Farsi language, with an annotated data set of over 3,000 tweets. We find that an SVM classifier with Brown clustering for feature selection yields a median accuracy of 56% and accuracy as high as 70%. We use this classifier to track dynamic sentiment during a key period of Irans negotiations over its nuclear program.

Understanding the impact of Brexit: The case of foreign software corporations in Scotland and South East England

Market and institutional shocks and upheaval, brought about by political, economic and social changes, have the potential to generate significant corporate restructuring. Foreign subsidiaries are particularly vulnerable to such impacts given the embeddedness of parent companies in their home countries, with the potential for disinvestment and regional decoupling. This paper examines the impact of the Brexit vote and negotiation period on UK-based foreign subsidiaries in the software and software-related sectors in Scotland and South East England. This firm-centric approach follows recent evolutionary thinking that restates the importance of examining the firm as a means by which to understand how regions respond to such disturbances. Rather than simply examine impact, the paper is concerned with why the scope and scale of impacts are mediated by particular corporate and global production networks (GPN) processes. Key to this is the examination of the importance of the value creation corporate role and degree of replication within the corporation (specificity), the GPN spatial configuration, and the markets that subsidiaries are mandated to serve. The paper concludes that a variety of impacts are evident, but that notable negative consequences have arisen for subsidiaries with low corporate specificity, working through European Union (EU)-configured GPNs, and serving European markets. These negative impacts are more notable in Scotland, compared with South East England where a large minority have experienced no detrimental impacts.

The ways and means of ITER: reciprocity and compromise in fusion science diplomacy

ABSTRACT ITER (short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and the Latin word for ‘the way’, as in ‘the way to new energy’), a controlled thermonuclear fusion experiment currently being built in Cadarache, France, is one of the world’s largest technoscientific collaborations. ITER’s complex organisation is rooted in decisions taken during the early negotiation phase in the 1990s. This article focuses on this initial period of the ITER negotiations, showing the importance of reciprocity and compromise in the organizational decisions of the project. These decisions were enacted by actors and organisations who strived to keep ITER together through continuous ‘backstage’ diplomacy work. This work included finding acceptable compromises for the involved Parties on both a diplomatic and scientific level. Looking closely at such work reveals the entangled character of science and diplomacy in large international technoscientific collaborations, as well as the need for compromise to make a project like ITER materialise.

Influence of EU policy on protection of national minorities in Croatia – Pre-negotiation and negotiation period

The protection of national minorities’ rights is one of the EU values from the group of fundamental human rights. Although Croatia’s legislative framework on national minorities existed long before Croatia started pre-assessment negotiations, its enforcement was unsatisfactory. That is why the influence of EU policy on the protection of national minorities in Croatia by monitoring law enforcement has been essential. Creating a good policy practice is not just adopting laws but also implementing them correctly and efficiently, either through self-disciplinary procedures or by agreeing to external monitoring. Whether and how the process of Croatia’s accession to the EU has affected the strengthening of the protection of national minorities’ rights is the question that this paper seeks to answer.

The Political Economy of South Africa’s constitutional road to Central Bank Independence (1993–1996)

Many countries across the world, including on the African continent, legislated increased independence for their central banks since the early 1990s. The way in which this happened took different forms. In some cases these legal processes were wrapped either into constitutional reforms in the context of democratic transitions or into economic reforms that changed the strategic direction of their development. This research note provides a fresh assessment of the affirmation of central bank autonomy and independence in South Africa during the period of constitutional negotiations up to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Although the independence and autonomy of the SA Reserve Bank (SARB), the central bank of the country, are enshrined in its Constitution, little has been written about the ideas and processes that culminated in such inclusion in the Constitution, in itself an unusual step at that time. This note addresses this void in the literature. The affirmation of central bank autonomy and independence (CBI) from political interference coincided with similar processes at that time in other developed and middle-income developing countries. In South Africa the decision taken at the time of the constitutional negotiations to grant the SARB its independence followed on an unfortunate history of government intervention in the central bank in the 1980s. In this research note we analyse some key documents on this policy debate, previously undiscovered, and present the views of a range of key actors in the negotiations process. Some economic policy think tanks such as the Economic Trends Research Group, and the Industrial Strategy Project, did not have a view on the matter of CBI, as far as we could gather. Our conclusions, based on this new evidence, are both surprising and unexpected. SARB independence was enshrined in the Constitution, we show, as much ‘by accident than by design’.

Reputation of Poland in the Public Opinion of the Countries of Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century in the Studies of the Institute of Public Affairs

Relevance of the topic of the research is determined by the necessity to systemize the works on the study of the reputation of the Republic of Poland during the period of transformation finalization and negotiations on accession to the European Union, which will allow to use them in the future both for the scientific and research work as well as for the application of best practices of national branding in Ukraine. The aim of the article is to study the content and value of the studies of the Institute of Public Affairs dedicated to the topic of reputation of Poland in the countries of Europe at the beginning of the 21st century. Methodology of the research is based on the combination of general (analysis, synthesis, generalization) and specific (historical-genetic, historical-typological, historical-systemic, sociocultural) scientific methods with the principals of historicism, systematicity, scientificity and verification. The Institute of Public Affairs was one of the leading analytical centers of the Republic of Poland. The studies, conducted by the Institute, have shown what reputation Poland and the Polish had in the public opinion of the countries of Europe during the phase of active negotiations on the country’s accession to the EU. The IPA’s experts analysed the information about Poland provided by the European media. The researchers provided extensive empirical data as well as the analysis of the theoretical aspect of reputation formation and illustrated the functioning and shift of historical stereotypes. Conclusions. According to the results of the studies of the Institute of Public Affairs, at the very beginning of the 21st century the country had a reputation during the negotiations on the accession to the European Union, which was caused by negative stereotypes. This situation could have been rectified (and in the end, it was rectified), as the historical stereotypes are slowly eliminated, however, they are being changed under the influence of contemporary reality. Mass media play a significant role in this process, being the mirror of public mood and an instrument for shaping it. At the same time, a positive image of Poland was formed in the public opinion of Ukraine, however, Ukraine itself had a bad reputation among the population of Poland, which should have served as an implication for the representatives of the Ukrainian governing elites to take the necessary similar steps.

Mortality from anti-personnel mines before and during the Colombian peace process

Introduction: Although the peace process in Colombia resulted in a significant reduction in the number of anti-personnel mines across the country, there are no reliable data on the effects of this phenomenon on outcomes for patients who were victims of these devices.
 Objective: The objective of this study was to assess mortality from landmine injuries before and during the Colombian peace process. Furthermore possible associations between peace negotiations and mortality were explored.
 Methods: For this study, we used the "Colombian Victims of Antipersonnel Mines Injuries registry" (MAP/MUSE database) data from 2002 to 2018. This registry was launched in 2001 by the government of Colombia with the aim of prospectively and systematically collect information on all the cases of anti-personnel mine injuries in the country. The period between 2002-2012 was classified as the pre-negotiation period (war period), and 2014-2018 as the peace negotiations period, with 2013 classified as a washout year. Multivariate logistic regression was used to explore the association between peace negotiations and mortality among anti-personnel landmine injured individuals.
 Results: A total of 10306 landmine injury cases were registered. Of these, 1180 (11.4%) occurred in the peace-negotiation period. Mortality was significantly lower during the period of peace negotiations. After adjusting for sex, age group, race, active duty soldier status, rural area, and geographic departments case volumes, the peace negotiation period was found to be associated with lower risk-adjusted odds of mortality after suffering a landmine injury (OR= 0.6, 95% CI, 0.5-0.7; p<0.001).
 Conclusion: Our findings suggest an association between the period of peace negotiation and a lower likelihood of mortality among victims of anti-personnel landmines.

„Broń dyplomatyczna pierwszej rangi”? Powstanie polsko-francuskiego Banku Śląskiego SA po I wojnie światowej

The text outlines the process of creation of Bank Śląski SA [Silesian Bank SA] in Katowice after World War I. The core of the article is the analysis of negotiations conducted between Artur Benis, and later Wacław Olszewicz, with French diplomats and bankers in 1920–1922. The author points out that previous interpretations of the talks mischaracterized the role of the Poles, who were in fact an important party influencing the direction and outcomes of the negotiations concerning the economic future of Upper Silesia. The failure of the concept of a Polish-French bank in the territory annexed by Poland is explained by the wavering attitude of the French and the changes in economic situation taking place during the period of negotiations.

Brexit and the discursive construction of the corporation

AbstractThe UK decision to exit the EU in 2016 has led to economic uncertainty. Foreign corporations with UK subsidiaries have sought to mediate these uncertainties while a final agreement is negotiated. Critical to this is the relationship between headquarter-subsidiary relations (HQs) and these subsidiaries. Discourse analysis has increasingly been used to examine corporate relations, with the corporation viewed as socially constructed through discourses and perpetual deliberations. Deploying a discourse approach, and recognising the importance of topological spatial relations, this article examines the relationship between HQs and UK-based subsidiaries during the Brexit negotiation period. In conclusion, HQs have generally devolved responsibility to subsidiaries for responding to Brexit, involving ‘consensual’ relations with subsidiaries and less intrusive ‘stretched’ topological power relations.

A nemzetiségi törvény szlovák szemmel

As a starting point, the study underlines that one cannot speak about a homogenous Slovak nation and politics in the middle of the 19th century; therefore, it gives an overview of the plebeian-middle-class movement, of its system of values, programme, and documents in 1848—1849, 1861, and in the period of the Compromise negotiations. Afterwards, it presents the nobility of Upper Hungary, with a Slovak mother tongue and ethnic feeling, who, according to its identity in the framework of the states, has belonged to the feudal Natio Hungarica. As the narrower focus of the study, the author takes the Slovak perspective and summarizes the ethnic dimensions of the activity of parliaments in 1861 and from 1865 on. The Slovak national movement could not send its own deputy, the interests of the Slavs of northern Hungary thus being represented by Adolf Dobriansky, born as a Ruthenian; however, the Nationalities Law, Art. 1868: XLIV. could be codified rather due to the mentioned Slovak-speaking nobility, standing behind the party of Ferenc Deák. Finally, we are provided a picture of the rival programmes of different newspapers that divided the Slovak public opinion, and in connection with the law we can read about their first reactions and experiences.

Do Firms Strategically Internalize Disclosure Spillovers? Evidence from Cash‐Financed M&As

ABSTRACTWe investigate whether managers internalize the spillover effects of their disclosure on the stock price of related firms and strategically alter their disclosure decisions when doing so is beneficial. Using data on firm‐initiated disclosures during all‐cash acquisitions, we find evidence consistent with acquirers strategically generating news that they expect will depress the target's stock price. Our results suggest the disclosure strategy leads to lower target returns during the negotiation period when the takeover price is being determined and results in a lower target premium. These findings are robust to a battery of specifications and falsification tests. Our results are consistent with expected spillovers influencing the timing and content of firms’ disclosures in M&A transactions.

The Feedback Effect of Disclosure Externalities

We investigate whether managers internalize the spillover effects of their disclosure on the stock price of related firms and strategically alter their disclosure decisions when doing so is beneficial. Using data on firm-initiated disclosures during all-cash acquisitions, we find evidence consistent with acquirers strategically generating news that they expect will depress the target’s stock price. Our results suggest the disclosure strategy leads to lower target returns during the negotiation period when the takeover price is being determined and results in a lower target premium. These findings are robust to a battery of specifications and falsification tests. Our results are consistent with expected spillovers influencing the timing and content of firms’ disclosures in M&A transactions.