Negotiating Peace

Sven Koopmans is a peace negotiator, diplomat and international lawyer. As Senior Mediation Expert at the United Nations and as Political Advisor at the European Union he worked on peace processes in Cyprus, Darfur, Kosovo, Mali, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Guyana/Venezuela, among others. He was a litigator at Clifford Chance LLP, studied at Leiden and Harvard Universities, taught at Aix-Marseille University and obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford. His first book, Diplomatic Dispute Settlement, was published in 2008. Early 2017 he was elected to Parliament in the Netherlands.

This book is the first and only practical guide to negotiating peace. In this ground-breaking book Sven Koopmans, who is both a peace negotiator and a scholar, discusses the practice, politics, and law of international mediation. With both depth and a light touch he explores successful as well as failed attempts to settle the wars of the world, building on decades of historical, political, and legal scholarship.

Who can mediate between warring parties? How to build confidence between enemies? Who should take part in negotiations? How can a single diplomat manage the major powers? What issues to discuss first, what last? When to set a deadline? How to maintain confidentiality? How to draft an agreement, and what should be in it? How to ensure implementation? The book discusses the practical difficulties and dilemmas of negotiating agreements, as well as existing solutions and possible future approaches. It uses examples from around the world, with an emphasis on the conflicts of the last twenty-five years, but also of the previous two-and-a-half-thousand. Rather than looking only at either legal, political or organizational issues, Negotiating Peace discusses these interrelated dimensions in the way they are confronted in practice: as an integral whole. With one leading question: what can be done?

This volume provides an academically-grounded, yet practically-oriented, analysis of the recurring challenges and possible solutions for peace negotiation.