Monday, February 16, 2009

Framing the Issue To Solve the Problem

TW: This piece focuses on how to achieve settlements for intractable problems by re-framing the negotiation parameters to focus less on tangible trade-offs and more on extracting intangible apologies from both sides. They use the big kahuna of intractability, Israel-Palestine. It is somewhat subtle but if one ponders for a moment it brings you back to kindergarten level dispute resolution and as I always say, we progress little after kindergarten only with more money and bigger means to create havoc.

From Int'l Herald Tribune:
"...Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs - like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor - are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies...suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

...All those surveyed responded to the same set of deals. First they would be given a straight-up offer in which each side would make difficult concessions in exchange for peace, next they were given a scenario in which their side was granted an additional material incentive, and last came a proposal in which the other side agreed to a symbolic sacrifice of one of its sacred values.

For example, a typical set of trade-offs offered to a Palestinian might begin with this premise: Suppose the UN organized a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians under which Palestinians would be required to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel and there would be two states, a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Second, we would sweeten the pot: In return, Western nations would give the Palestinian state $10 billion a year for 100 years. Then the symbolic concession: For its part, Israel would officially apologize for the displacement of civilians in the 1948 war.


Almost everyone we surveyed rejected the initial solutions we offered - ideas that are accepted as common sense among most Westerners, like simply trading land for peace or accepting shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. Why the opposition?

Many of the respondents insisted that the values involved were sacred to them. For example, nearly half the Israeli settlers we surveyed said they would not consider trading any land in the West Bank - territory they believe was granted them by God - in exchange for peace. More than half the Palestinians considered full sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light, and more than four-fifths felt that the "right of return" was a sacred value, too.

In general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of "businesslike negotiations" favored by Western diplomats will only backfire.

Many Westerners seem to ignore these clearly expressed "irrational" preferences, because in a sensible world they ought not to exist. Diplomats hope that peace and progress on material and quality-of-life matters will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues. But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years' War - progress on everyday material matters will simply heighten attention on value-laden issues of "who we are and want to be."

...Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war.

Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel's right to exist.

...Making these sorts of wholly intangible "symbolic" concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn't compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/26/opinion/edatran.php

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