Esra Cuhadar

Assessing Transfer from Track Two Diplomacy: The Cases of Water and Jerusalem

This article focuses on the evaluation of transfer from Track Two diplomacy to negotiations and policymaking by examining four Track Two initiatives between Israelis and Palestinians over the issues of water and Jerusalem. The article first discusses the transfer process for the water and Jerusalem cases and then presents lessons drawn from the comparative study. The comparative assessment reveals similarities concerning transfer in terms of what the contributions of Track Two are to the process of negotiations, which transfer strategies are used, and what conditions are necessary to make a contribution to the outcome. Initiatives in both cases employ primarily the strategy of working with influential people and they are more successful in impacting the process of negotiations rather than the outcome. Their contribution to the process of negotiations shows regularities in the types of learning acquired and used. Successful transfer to outcome is observed in one occasion when transfer strategies were implemented effectively, the negotiators were open to outside information, and there was political willingness. Asymmetrical transfer of people, and of ideas, from Track Two initiatives to negotiations was a barrier to effective transfer.

Turkey's Search for a Third Party Role in Arab–Israeli Conflicts: A Neutral Facilitator or a Principal Power Mediator?

This paper examines Turkeys increasing involvement in the Israeli–Syrian and Israeli–Palestinian conflicts as a third party in the last decade. The paper first discusses the underlying reasons and motivations behind the change in Turkish foreign policy. In this section we answer the following question: While the traditional Turkish policy in the Middle East was non-intervention, what factors contributed to this recent change? We discuss these as systemic factors and domestic factors. In the second section of the paper we summarize the theoretical literature on third party intervention and mediation especially focusing on strategies, modes, activities, and tactics used. This section lays the background for the following section which classifies the various Turkish third party strategies and activities in the Israeli–Syrian and Israeli–Palestinian conflicts so far. In the final section we focus on the challenges to this new Turkish role from Turkish, Israeli, and Arab perspectives. We also discuss the crises between Israel and Turkey in the last year and how they constitute a barrier to Turkey acting in an effective third party role.

Representative decision making: Constituency constraints on collective action

This chapter focuses on the role of group and national identity in various types of collective actions. It features the decision to take action and asks about factors that influence that decision. Thus, our perspective is from the standpoint of the decision-maker who usually represents a collectivity (group, organization, nation). The interest is less about those decision-makers’ own identities and attachments than about various drivers and constraints on their decisions to act.

Representative Decision-Making: Challenges to Democratic Peace Theory

An attempt is made in this chapter to evaluate hypotheses derived from democratic peace theory. The key tenet of this theory is that democratic nations do not go to war with other democracies. Thus, regime type drives decisions to pursue war. The research to date has focused attention on regime type. This study expands this focus by examining the influences of a variety of variables on decisions made by role players to mobilize for war. In addition to own and other’s regime type, we include motivational, readiness, and identity variables. Further, the study examines two types of decisions: response to threats of violence and response to a humanitarian crisis in another country. The results show that the other’s regime motivates decisions to go to war when that nation is autocratic. However, that decision is contingent on the severity of the threat and the spread of public support for the action. The other’s regime type is not a source of decisions to act in humanitarian crises. The key factor in that situation is spread of support for the action. Interestingly, one’s own regime type (democracy) is the most important influence on both types of decisions when the other nation is democratic. These findings expand and refine democratic peace theory as well as provide a basis for further research.

A Greek–Turkish peace project: assessing the effectiveness of interactive conflict resolution

This paper evaluates a Greek–Turkish peace project, which was composed of three interactive workshops and was held with university students from Greece and Turkey. We evaluate the project by combining a two-way evaluation methodology. The first is a process evaluation where we examine the project’s ‘theory of change’ through interviews with the organizers and participant observation. A theory of change map has been created as a result depicting the beliefs of the organizers about the conflict, the conditions they see as necessary to transform the conflict, the programmatic activities and macro-level goals. In the second part, we conduct an outcome evaluation measuring empathy and trust towards the members of the other ethnic group. We employ a two-group, post-test experimental design. The findings of this phase suggest that the participant group has significantly higher level of empathy and trust towards the other group than the non-participants. Finally, we compare the results from the two phases of evaluation and draw both practical lessons for peace practitioners and theoretical implications to guide future research.