Malhotra D. Without conditions. Foreign Affairs. September/October 2009: 84-90
Free summary.
The current (and critically important) Climate Countdown issue of Foreign Affairs also contains a brief and thoughtful essay by Deepak Malhotra of Harvard Business School, on the contentious issue of discarding preconditions before negotiating with enemies.
One quote:
"Governments not only impose preconditions on others; they also impose preconditions on themselves. A government may want to wait until there is support among constituents for a peace process or insist on holding multilateral, as opposed to bilateral, talks. More commonly, even governments that are generally willing to negotiate often first set limits on their own behavior by refusing to talk to groups with ties to terrorists. The U.S. State Department, for example, publicly states that it will ‘make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals’.
"This position has the virtue of ideological purity but the vice of impracticality. When everyone at the table has clean hands, governments are unlikely to make progress on what is often the most important issue: the cessation of violence."
No one is claiming this is easy stuff, but Malhotra puts forth his analysis so succinctly that no one can say they don’t have time to listen.
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