THE FAILURE OF DIPLOMATS TO PREVENT THE ESCALATION OF A MILITARIZED CRISIS TO AN ARMED CONFLICT
Introduction
The question of who or what a diplomat represents has led to the emergence ot two main trends. First, there is an increasingly institutional multilateralism targeted at impregnable world continuum, whether through the improvement of collaboration among countries or its outrival demand. Secondly, the arising disposition of diplomats seen in their dexterity and the tasks required to perform, on the contrary to whom they represent. Since, such advancements perceptively migrate from the diplomats farther away from the sovereign states, their time-honored raison d’etre and source of authority; it has led to the rise of the prospect that the identity of diplomacy as a discrete undertaking may be colligated into the broader vague ideas of bargaining and resolution of conflicts.
An important question arises on whether diplomats are to blame when militarized crisis escalate to armed conflicts. Well, there exist no doubt that Western diplomatic mission in some high-value targets have terribly come short of achieving their objectives especially as they pursue unattainable goals. In explaining this, the paper analyses whether the instruments of diplomacy used effectively, lessons learned from past diplomatic failures, and the impact for those conducting diplomacy overseas.
Diplomacy
Classically, diplomacy is defined as the conduct of foreign relation among states utilizing formal methods and practices (Schnabel and Carment, 2004). Such, includes the dissemination of information between state official representatives, exchange of ambassadors and the participation of one to one negotiations (Schnabel and Carment, 2004). The concept of diplomacy, however, in the recent past has garnered a broad definition to mean the general process of countries seeking to garner influence of each other, communicate and find solutions to conflicts through bargain – either informally or formally – short of using force (Berridge 2016).
The international management of relations through diplomacy entails negotiations – a method used by envoys and ambassadors to adjust these relations; the art and core business of a diplomat (Kissinger, 2016). Mellisen, (2007) defines it as a transaction between groups or individuals, whose success is dependent on three major factors: the production of an environment of opinion conducive to the achievement of the desired goals; provision of the agreement forms through which the desired goals can be translated into practical terms; and discerning the correct moments when the investment of maximum effort is desirable. Diplomats inherently must possess an in-depth knowledge of the facts and the skills to present an argument effectively (Berridge 2016).
Hamilton and Langhorne (2011) explain that in making the definition of diplomacy comprehensive, a purpose is attached to its meaning: diplomacy entails the defense and promotion of vital interests of a country, applying every honorable means in an attempt to resolve conflicts through mutual understanding, negotiation and persuasion. Essentially, diplomacy is regarded as an art that enables the other party to have their views. Within this definition, the exercise of controlling the use of power is posited (Schnabel and Carment 2004).
Diplomacy is a continuous process. The skill set is ascertained by the obtaining the desired ends of one’s state; such could include a trade agreement, exchange of students or a treaty while concurrently ensuring the satisfaction of the other country. However, diplomats explain that emerging victorious in agreement on an issue should never be a call for contentment, given that after that will be a different set of negotiations to follow, in which the long-term achievements are the primary determinants of a victor (Berridge 2016).
The nature of diplomacy
Diplomacy primarily entails the management of international relations to meet the benefits of the concerned parties mutually. Kissinger (2016) notes that the major constraint that hinders the effectiveness of diplomacy and its capabilities have been pointed to be on the fact that agreeing on what forms the mutual benefits of the governments is difficult. Christensen (2011) explains that diplomacy is dependent on the military, economic, cultural, social and other resources of the pertinent country to the other country with whom the diplomats are dealing.
Diplomats from emerging nations, for instance, are limited regarding how they can exert influence on a world powers’ decisions (Kissinger, 2016). However, skillful diplomacy will likely extract an important mutual benefit to all the relevant parties regardless of the problems. However, some cases have proved that diplomacy may not be mutually beneficial – advantaging one party at the expense of the other (Kiiza, 2006).
Based on these practices, the limitations of diplomacy are clear. Diplomacy has the incapacity of preventing diplomats or governments who have mainly opted for war as an essential “extension of diplomacy” (Kissinger, 2016). Diplomacy has facilitated the formation of rival alliances, and proved utterly unable to prevent the proliferation of arms at any point. Given the prevalent global challenges, questions are being increasingly asked on whether a new kind of diplomacy is useful (Berridge, 2016).
Resolution of Conflicts in a Changing World
According to Ronzitti (2016), potentially, a radical change in global politics is the de facto re-delamination of “international conflicts.” Such includes ancient warfare, where nations violently confront each other through their militaries, proxies, or forces engaging in warfare without the confines of their borders. Relevantly, such a redefinition has broadened to include conflicts to be seen as threats to world security, peace and the state of things even when two countries are not fighting. Notably, this is more evident when intra-national disputes entail the violation of international norms on human rights, self-end, and democratic government (Ettmayer 2014). Joint international interventions are necessarily interpolated to mitigate, resolve or conclude disputes just as in past wars. Within such a cognizance, disputes limited to countries are considered global threats; best exemplified by the delayed international response to the Rwandan genocide, repression in East Timor and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia (Gjymshana and Bytyci 2015).
A major question arises on what such developments hold for international diplomats. Ronzitti (2016) posits that conditions prevalent in the present world validate some of the prior techniques used to resolve conflicts, and as such can now be more accurately delaminated and understood, thereof bringing forth the prominence of some of the methodologies in the past not seriously taken by diplomatic practitioners. The main practice of international diplomacy in the resolution of conflicts over the course of the Cold War was a reflection of the national system that had dominated international politics for decades (Pritchard 2007). It thereof was logical to consider international disputes as occurrences among nations that aggressed in a unified manner by discrete and stable governmental interests’ based on natural resources, geopolitics and other lasting resources (Ettmayer 2014; Kuniholm 2014). These disputes were then discerned as zero sum: the when a country gained more, the more its counterpart lost (Sharp 2004).
In such a world of national interests, international conflicts were chiefly managed by traditional diplomatic efforts, economic influences and by military means, and seemingly to include threats or forceful means (McMillian 2013). Thus coalitions or individual states mitigated violence through economic sanctions, military means (coerced diplomacy, defensive alliances, and deterrence) and other discernable non-military scourge and penalizations including foreign aid withdrawal; and contrived military force for the establishment of non-military zones (Kissinger 2016; Chakma 2012). Countries also became wary of the delicately balanced international nuclear power that potentially could be threatened by coercive diplomatic effort (Cronin and Art, 2003; Ronzitti 2016). Citing this, diplomatic efforts among security regimes devised norms that would prevent and mitigate conflict escalation.
In light of the varying interests of nations, negotiations signified trading or balancing of conflicting state interests against each other or at least found common interests which potentially formed the foundation of agreement (Kuniholm 2014; Bazerman and Sondak 1988). Finding common interests became the prominent attribute of post-Cold War diplomatic negations aimed at the prevention of military conflicts between the Soviets and the US (McMillian 2013; Pritchard 2007).
The neglected elements of diplomacy
Entailed within the fabric of diplomatic efforts, striking developments surround the relative obscurity around many formerly underutilized international armed dispute resolution methodologies. A common theme among these strategies is the deviation from the zero-sum logics of armed disputes as the bold challenge of interests (Kissinger 2016; McMillian 2013). Observations made on the current extensive use of these strategies is not an implication that they are always used efficiently. The use of these strategies conjunctively can also be impaired (Maness and Valeriano 2015).
Conflict transformation is the direction of diplomatic efforts to reach an accommodation between the conflicting parties through interactive processes that lead to the redefinition of interest, reconciliation of tensions, or the finding of common ground. According to Schultz (2001), such a strategy radically departs from the reasonably judged endurance of a country’s interests by fashioning two cardinal assumptions. First, a nation’s interest and arising disputes are to some level both malleable and socially constructed. Secondly, there exist possibilities of the warring parties to give a different definition to their self-interests thereby lower intergroup suspicion and tension thus making it possible to settle disagreements peacefully (Pigman 2010; Cotter 2014). Notably, some of the intergroup disputes linked to the politics of identity, are perceived as entailing significant emotional and perceptual elements which can be efficiently transformed by a careful organization of intergroup courses of action as to allow for the identification of new possibilities for solutions and thereof reconciliations (Schnabel and Carment 2004).
Conflict transformation approaches are clearly seen in their purest forms as a set of methods initiated in the early years of the 1960s by NGOs and academics under terms as citizen diplomacy, interactive conflict resolution, and problem-solving workshops. Wiegand (2011) notes that such an approaches characteristically entail expatiated meetings at which the warring parties seek to garner insight into the positions of each other and views on a global scale leading to the creation of an environment for the peaceful conclusion of conflicts. It is intended that during the series of these formal gatherings, the warring parties will redefine the relationships existent amongst them and what the possible future of the relationship could be. Secondly, the changes in perception of a small number of persons will form a clear path for more peaceful futures for the groups either directly (peace proposals) or indirectly (people accepting the new ideas).
In light of this, such ideas are now being promoted by NGOs through the spread of cognitions as alternative conflict resolution methodologies to emergent democracies around the world. The so-called truth commissions established Latin America and South Africa use the conflict transformation technique when working to build shared understandings of the past which then can form the basis for tension reduction, emotional reconciliations, and thereby creating political climates that are cooperative (National Research Council 2000).
Schultz (2001) posits that another highly underutilized strategy for the resolution of conflicts has sometimes been referred to as structural prevention, distinguished from “operational prevention,” which entails the dealing with the immediate crisis that is more likely to transform into deadly violence. Structural prevention requires the creation of a standardized system of rules and laws or organizations that thereof establish, strengthen and promote nonviolent channels to accommodate conflicting interests, adjudicate intergroup disputes, and transform differences by the establishment of common grounds (Hamilton and Langhorne 2011; Anderson 1999).
Based on Wiegand’s (2011) position, structural prevention is tailored to focus on the problems existent between culturally divided nations. Best in countries with deep ethnic divisions, those that lack a firm establishment of democratic traditions, and those that have a rich history of perpetration of collective violence by past governments against civilian populations or one group against another. Tools presented in structural prevention include truth telling, institutions for justice and reconciliation; constitutional and electoral designs, and laws and policies to promote the accommodation of religious and linguistic differences (Cahill, 2013). Others include autonomy arrangements within federal structures of governance; the training of law enforcers after establishing a state of order; establishments that assure for civilian military and the creation and support of establishments of civil societies (National Research Council 2000; Cotter 2014). These institutions include NGOs with a dedication to their countries and shared peaceful outcomes, a free and pluralistic press, organizations for alternative peaceful conflict conclusion, and such, which in part are to serve as arenas for integrative discussions to ending disputes (Anderson 1999; Berridge 2016)
Normative change is the development and institutionalization of formal principals, and informal exceptions tooled for the creation of new contexts for managing deputes (National Research Council 2000). Created norms define responsibilities for states in the preventing conflicts. Previous diplomats failed because of the principles of non-interference in the internal matters of sovereign countries – which put across that these states had the permit to determine the progress of conflicts in their borders, free of external influences (Aboukhadijeh 2012). Whereas such norms were broken by affluent states in interests’ interior to their spheres of influence, overturning such was rare as the prevalent global principles, which posited that all countries were held accountable for common standards (Mellisen 2007).
What does this hold for the persons conducting diplomacy?
Diplomacy involves relations of a country to another (Kiiza, 2006). It also entails the relations among the many countries, whether in regional organizations, alliances or the UN as well as relations of states in alliances to other powers or groups of powers (Christensen, 2011). Bilateral negations as simplify defined in the traditional way are the paramount technique of diplomatic activity. Multilateral diplomacy, including parliamentary and conference diplomacy presently also plays a major role. The changing nature of diplomacy holds that diplomats understand the characteristically changing nature of modern diplomacy (Kissinger, 2016).
Humans as a consequence of not dealing with this reality will be affected by diplomacy if it falls into ‘deserved oblivion.’ Diplomacy today is faced with the realities of a dynamic world, in which international organizations, as well as countries, are the key agents of change (Kiiza, 2006). Concurrently, diplomacy in its fabric has to reflect this rapid transformation inevitably. Not only have the subject matters of diplomatic efforts, the interests of a country, become both complex and numerous, but also the actors in this global arena. That is, admittedly, that the number of countries has increasingly enlarged and the leaders of the past have been reduced to just supporting the roles of the new principals (Mellisen, 2007).
Conclusion
Whereas to a considerable extent contemporary diplomacy entails the techniques of negotiation which already are being practiced by envoys and ambassadors, diplomacy in its nature has evolved with the fluctuating conditions in the international system. Conceptualizing diplomacy in its simplicity – as a way of solving problems – by reasoning and discussions based on assumptions that the best arguments will prevail is at best misleading. It is prudent that from the outset we conceptualize the dynamics of the issue at hand by firstly acknowledging that something more than mere differences of opinion, or the failure of understanding the other parties’ view as a possibility. Initially, diplomacy proves essential because of the apparent conflicting wills, which perhaps result from the collision of interests, with each party anxiously in pursuit of its way, even though, it clearly comprehends the viewpoint of the other party or is aware of all the realities surrounding the issue.
In these situations, the reasons for persuasion are less likely to suffer because what is required is more than simply appealing to the human intellect. It is a case of acting upon human wills probably on their willingness so that more dynamic issues unfolded are introduced, in which the important thing is to skillfully put every possible inducement. In attempts at implementing such, negotiators perhaps have appealed to interest, used promises, attempted bargain strikes and even employed cajolery tools. Resorting to the use of coercive means, ranging from bluffing, bullying, to threats, should never be the first means of resolving a conflict. Preventing a strong country from invading weaker countries as should not entail the use of mere beseech or reason, nor should it involve actual war, but rather dig up methods that prevent the use of guns. Indeed, rarely, if ever, is the justification for the use of one method in exclusion of others by an affluent in the conduction of foreign policy.
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