Mediation in the shadow of an audience: How third parties use secrecy and agenda-setting to broker settlements

Abstract

How does mediation work? Uncertainty is one of the main rationalist explanations for war. When a leader faces domestic pressure and mediation involves secrecy and agenda-setting, mediation by a third party in crisis bargaining can reduce the risk of war by reducing uncertainty and locking in concessions. As a result, mediation improves the prospects for peace at the price of costlier settlements, and should talks fail, the leader and her audience are more likely to win in any ensuing war. The theory holds implications for mediation, audience costs, and democracies in showing that an enemy with no audience costs can demonstrate resolve credibly in mediation. The argument is also closely related to the delegation literature, in showing that when a principal faces external pressure, she can reduce her risk of worse outcomes by delegating to an uninformed agent who, with considerable discretion, can extract credible information from an adversary.

Secrecy in International Relations and Foreign Policy

“…Countries therefore often choose private bargaining fora (Vreeland 2003, Kurizaki 2007 or secret mediation (Ramirez 2018). These venues reduce the number of interests that must be reconciled.…”

Informal Diplomacy Reinforces Formal International Cooperation: Evidence from Track Two Diplomacy

“…Insulation from audience cost can facilitate cooperation. As Ramirez (2018) showed, when the cost of noncooperation outweighs uncertainty, mediators operating in secrecy can reach cooperation that officials who fear sanction from domestic audiences would not negotiate for. On the other hand, where uncertainty is high, the noncommittal nature of track two diplomacy, which stems from its secrecy and nongovernmental participant pool, allows the relevant parties to explore policy boundaries, reducing the available policy-space into a subset (i.e.…”

“…lower uncertainty) that is more political palatable to the states involved (Böhmelt 2010;Agha, Feldman and Khalidi 2003). Private citizens negotiating at an arm's length from official government apparatuses can uncover actors' resolve, thereby reducing uncertainty (Ramirez 2018). This obtains because explored outcomes can act as screening offers; while the cost of using track two is low due to insulation from audience cost, failed negotiation is costly because it returns the two sides to the undesirable noncooperation status quo.…”

“…From the discussion above, track two's effectiveness comes from its ability to insulate governments from costs associated with commitment and publicity. Following this, track two should be most likely where costs to formal public negotiations are high (McManus and Yarhi-Milo 2017;Ramirez 2018). To test this notion, I look at how the relative likelihood of track one and track two diplomacy varies by dyadic characteristics.…”

“…These notions comport with our understanding of how commitment avoidance and secrecy influence international politics (e.g. Ramirez 2018;McManus and Yarhi-Milo 2017), but while track two meetings are a prevalent diplomatic tool, larger-scale statistical examinations of their effectiveness are rare (Böhmelt 2010). In one of the only statistical studies on this topic, Böhmelt (2010) finds that during third-party mediation to protracted conflicts, track two mediation have both independent as well as synergistic effects with track one (i.e.…”