This research seeks to understand the reasons for failures of Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Ehud Barak's Camp David Summit that was held in July, 2000. The Summit was arranged to complete the last phase of Oslo Peace Process. Numerous researches have attempted to reveal the facts of the summit but, so far, they have failed to present the complete details of what happened before, during, and after the summit. This research explores all aspects of the problem including the various variables that would have had effected the breakdown of the Middle East peace process. Finally, the researcher determines the parameters needed to maintain a substantial peace in the Middle East and what proposed strategies might be followed in order to avoid the previous mistakes in future peace negotiations.

Civil society inclusion in peace processes has been recognised to be crucial in achieving sustainable peace. The author first reviews the existing academic literature on this, before looking at how civil society, and especially civil society in non-western contexts and armed conflicts can be conceptualised. The variety of approaches and the limitations of Western actor-based concepts in non-Western contexts explains the choice of a function-based model of civil society being chosen to analyse it in the context of international peacebuilding efforts. Its involvement in formal peace processes and negotiations meanwhile is analysed using nine models of inclusion.  The case that is chosen for this exploration is Afghanistan. As a multi-facetted country with a long history of armed conflict and foreign involvement, the developments in the past two decades provide an interesting case study. The inductive desk research, using secondary data, is guided by the questions; which concept of civil society has informed the peace building process in Afghanistan in the past twenty years, how civil society in Afghanistan can be conceptualized and how this has affected the peace building process.  The findings paint a distinct picture of a country that has been shaped by armed conflict, tracing its roots back to the early days of modern Afghanistan and contrasting existing societal and political structures with Western concepts of civil society and state building. Civil society involvement is being analysed using exemplary stages of peace processes and external peace building efforts.  The research concludes that civil society inclusion has been limited by Western concepts of civil society being unfittingly applied to far more complex local realities, thereby excluding relevant actors and limiting the legitimacy and ownership of the peace process, with the prospect of peace being a long way off.

This master thesis deals with past mediation attempts of Turkey to solve the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and with the potential of future Turkish mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been for several decades one of the biggest problems for the international security, therefore, analysing possible solutions is very important. Turkey is an actor with a special position, because it is a regional power with ties both to Islamic culture and to the West. That is why it has in theory a potential to play successful mediation role in this conflict. In this thesis, we will evaluate Turkey's existing role and after that, we will analyse the future potential with the help of the mediation conceptual framework that is described in the scholarly literature on conflict resolution and conflict management. Our research questions are: Can Turkey play a successful mediator role in the future? If yes, what conditions have to take place? Turkey tries to play a role in this conflict since the early 1990s and despite the fact that there has been a disruption of the diplomatic relations between Israel and Turkey, it is very likely that in the future a normalization will occur. If that happes, can Turkey broker peace?

This thesis examines the processes of the peace negotiations in Cambodia (1987-1993) and El Salvador (1989-1993) in order to address the following question: What does the interplay between the national factions and the external interveners in peace negotiations tell us about their chances of achieving their goals? By using the concept of ‘interplay,’ this study reinterprets the negotiation processes as the negotiating actors’ exchanges of strategic moves. In particular, it explores how the negotiating actors’ attitudes towards the core negotiation issues changed in the two cases and how the changes affected their counterparts’ negotiating strategies. There are two aspects to the findings of this thesis, one descriptive and the other explanatory. First, this study has investigated the characteristics of the negotiating actors’ strategies and the pattern of the interplay between them. As for the interveners’ strategies, this thesis finds that impartial third parties generally employ diplomatic intervention methods, while advocate states enjoy a wider range of options. In addition, national factions’ behaviour is generally affected by three factors: their fundamental goals, the domestic resources under their control, and the incentives or pressure from external interveners. It is also observed that the stronger the intervention becomes, the more that national factions’ provisional strategies are inclined to be receptive towards the intervention. Nevertheless, the national factions rarely fully accepted proposals that they deemed harmful to the achievement of their fundamental goals. Second, based on the descriptive findings, this thesis highlights the importance of mutual understanding between national factions and external interveners. The case studies of Cambodia and El Salvador show that the effectiveness of a particular intervention depends not so much on the type of method employed but on the context in which it is applied. An intervention is more likely to be effective when it is used in a way that national factions can understand and is supported by the consistently strong attention of external interveners. In addition, it is observed that actors’ ethnocentric perceptions on core concepts of conflict and negotiation as well as their lack of an effective communication capability are some of the common causes of the misunderstandings that arise during negotiation processes.

Thesis (M.A.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2000. / Title from title screen (viewed Aug. 20, 2003). "December 2000." Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in paper format.

This thesis examines how the ‘terrorist’ label affects those that are labelled by this designation, particularly with reference on a subsequent choice to use violence in the context of an ethno-nationalist conflict. Drawing on the PKK as a case study, the study asks: what effect did the labelling of the PKK as a ‘terrorist organisation’ by the Turkish government have on the use of violence by Kurds in the Turkish-Kurdish ethno-nationalist conflict? The invocation of the label terrorist in any conflict often means both the labeller and the labelled are predisposed to use violence. This study argues that this process of labelling leads the labeller and the labelled to frame one another as an existential threat. To date, the effects of using the label ‘terrorist’ in an ethno-nationalist conflict context remain relatively understudied in both social and political sciences. The period under analysis extends from 1992 to 2015, corresponding to the period during which the Turkish government continuously designated the PKK as ‘terrorist’. In conflict discourse, belligerents use demeaning labels against each other to gather support, legitimacy or simply to increase combatants’ morale. The study argues that the label terrorist is a constituent element of the conflict. The Turkish government uses the label terrorist as a tool to securitise the Kurdish-Turkish ethno-nationalist conflict. The Turkish government’s labelling of the PKK as ‘terrorist’ places the Kurdish issue in the broader framework of securitisation, a theory in International Relations. While securitising the Kurdish issue has bestowed more powers to the Turkish government to combat violence described as ‘terrorist’, the resolution of the ethno-nationalist conflict became increasingly more complex leading to protracted waves of violence. Analysing data collected through semi-structured qualitative interviews with Kurds from Turkey, the study reveals that the impact of the label terrorist is far more complex than previously assumed in the existing academic literature. The specific effects of the label terrorist on any given conflict, however, are the subject of an empirical question to be settled through rigorous research. Drawing on the Labelling Theory of Deviance fathered by Howard S. Becker and complemented by discourse analysis, this study finds that the application of the label terrorist against the PKK increases the perception of victimization among its wider Kurdish community. Secondly, the research demonstrates that the invocation of the label terrorist against the PKK places the group’s actors and sympathizers in a situation that makes it harder for them to engage in peaceful means of resolving the conflict. The interplay between these two consequential effects of victimisation and political exclusion leads to the conclusion that there is an indirect relationship between designating an ethno-nationalist armed group ‘terrorist’ and the choice to use violence.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:27:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2009-07-02Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:07:02Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 bigatao_jp_me_mar.pdf: 926328 bytes, checksum: e21bd217f05a3026e0ecf71a9b7876c7 (MD5) / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Com base no histórico das atividades de manutenção da paz e resolução de conflitos da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU), analisamos de que maneira esta instituição reagiu à proliferação dos conflitos armados intra-estatais durante a década de 1990. O caráter multidimensional desses conflitos, que em certa medida não são tão novos quanto possam parecer, impôs uma série de dificuldades aos mecanismos tradicionais de manutenção da paz da ONU, que até então se restringiam ao envio de soldados desarmados ou fracamente armados para manter a paz entre Estados, com base nos fundamentos do respeito à soberania, imparcialidade, consentimento de todas as partes em conflito e uso da força somente em autodefesa. A partir do estudo das mudanças conceituais e operacionais das missões de paz da ONU na década de 1990, apontamos as dificuldades enfrentadas por esta organização para responder adequadamente aos conflitos intra-estatais, assim como discutimos os limites de sua atuação frente aos princípios tradicionais do sistema westfaliano – soberania, independência e não-intervenção / Considering the historical development of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, we analyze how this international institution faced the proliferation of intra-state armed conflicts during the 1990’s. The multidimensional character of these conflicts, that are not as new as it seems, imposed a series of difficulties to the UN’s traditional peacekeeping mechanisms, which were limited to sending light armed troops to create space for States to resolve their conflicts peacefully, according to the principles of consent, impartiality and minimum use of force. Following the study of the conceptual and operational changes in the UN peacekeeping missions in the 1990’s, we examine the difficulties that this institution faced to adequately deal with intrastate conflicts, as well as we discuss the limits of the UN actions considering the traditional westphalian system principles – sovereignty, independence and non-intervention

Although the government of the United States of America was established to protect the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness among all American citizens, this thesis argues intractable gang violence in inner-city Chicago has persistently denied these rights, in turn undermining fundamental (and foundational) American political values. Thus, gang violence can be argued to represent a threat to both civil order and state legitimacy. Yet, where comparable (and generally lower) levels of community-level violence in Northern Ireland garnered the sustained attention and direct involvement of the United Kingdom's central government, the challenge posed by gang violence has been unappreciated, if not ignored, by the American federal government. In order to mobilise the political commitment and resources needed to find a durable resolution to Chicago's long and often anarchic 'uncivil war', it is first necessary to politicise the problem and its origins. Contributing to this politicisation, this thesis explains why gang violence in Chicago has been unable to capture the political imagination of the American government in a way akin to paramilitary (specifically republican) violence in Northern Ireland. Secondly, it explains how the depoliticisation of gang violence has negatively affected response, encouraging the continued application of inadequate and largely ineffective response strategies. Finally, it makes the case that, while radical, a conditional agreement-centric peace process loosely modelled on that employed in Northern Ireland might offer the most effective strategy for restoring the sense of peace and security to inner-city Chicago lost over half a century ago.