How can the timing of peace initiatives help to resolve conflicts? This Global Review of Ethnopolitics article argues that parties resolve their conflicts only when they are ready to do so – when alternative, usually unilateral means of achieving a satisfactory result are blocked. Practitioners need to take advantage of this ‘ripe moment’ when it exists, or help produce it, or stand ready to act on it when it does not exist.
The concept of a ripe moment centres on the relative parties’ perception of a Mutually Hurting Stalemate (MHS), optimistically associated with an impending, past or recently avoided catastrophe. The concept is based on the notion that when the parties find themselves locked in a conflict from which they cannot escalate to victory, and this deadlock is painful to both of them, they seek an alternative policy or a way out.
Diplomatic memoirs have explicitly referred to ripeness through its MHS component and they provide examples of when a MHS has brought parties to seek a way out:
- Chester A Crocker, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa between 1981 and 1989, mediated an agreement for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and of South African troops from Namibia, then to become independent. It was only when military escalations ended in stalemate that the position ‘ripened’ paving the way for negotiation to begin.
- Alvaro de Soto, Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs at the United Nations (UN), also endorsed the necessity of ripeness in his mission to mediate a peace in El Salvador. The conflict was ripe for a negotiated settlement only when each side realised that they could not defeat each other and that its persistence was causing pain that could no longer be endured.
- In Yugoslavia, it took the 1995 Croatian offensive, coupled with NATO bombing, to create a MHS composed of a temporary Serb setback and a temporary Croat advance that could not be sustained.
Practitioners need to employ all their skills and apply the concepts of negotiation and mediation to take advantage of the necessary but insufficient condition of ripeness.
- Evidence suggests that perception of a MHS occurs either (and optimally) at a low level of conflict, where it is relatively easy to begin problem-solving, or, in salient cases, at rather high levels of conflict.
- To ripen high level conflicts for resolution, practitioners must raise the level of conflict until a stalemate is reached. Then further through the perception of hurt, then to the perception of pain, and finally to create a perception of an impending catastrophe. The ripe moment becomes the godchild of brinkmanship.
- A MHS can be a very fleeting opportunity, a moment to be seized lest it pass, or it can be of a long duration, waiting to be noticed and acted upon. Failure to seize the moment often hastens its passing, as parties lose faith in negotiating a way out or regain hope in the possibility of unilateral escalation.
- Unripeness should not constitute an excuse for second or third parties’ inaction. In the absence of a promising situation, either the ‘second’ party that is alone in feeling hurt or the third party should ripen or position themselves. Positioning options include becoming an indispensable channel for negotiation.
