A BSTRACT This article examines how the non-party 'Yes Campaign' orchestrated the successful passage of the 1998 referendum for the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. It argues that the Campaign's use of strategies based upon the tenets of prospect theory -focusing on the risks of failure rather than the benefits of success -had numerous impacts throughout the six-week campaign, ultimately resulting in the referendum's passage with enough unionist support to insulate the Agreement from some degree of criticism. The article does this by tracing the Campaign's main themes and the narratives surrounding their use by the Campaign itself, by other pro-agreement individuals and parties and by their reflection in voter choices and rationales for supporting the Agreement. More than 200 documents were analyzed, largely focusing on news accounts, but also including books, journal articles, websites, images and interviews with key players in the Campaign.
This paper examines different conceptions of ripeness to evaluate their usefulness to war termination theory and practice. After examining the objective and subjective elements of ripeness, it suggests that the first definitions can be linked by using bureaucratic decisionmaking models and "two-table" negotiating models. This article concludes that ripeness can be enhanced through a systematic combination of its objective and subjective elements within a framework of possible policy options and intervention actions. It stresses that collaboration and communication between Track I and Track II intervenors is the key to transforming ripeness from a condition to a goal.
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