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Exiting Indochina: U.S. Leadership of the Cambodia Settlement and Normalization with Vietnam
... On a similar note, mediators might face high domestic political costs for endorsing an unpopular settlement. As the case of Cambodia will illustrate, the US State Department was severely criticized by the American public and Congress once it was revealed that the official US stance to support Prince Sihanouk and oppose the pro-Vietnamese Hun Sen faction, was indirectly empowering and legitimizing the controversial Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot (Solomon 2000). Finally, the mediation process also requires considerable investments in personnel and logistics, which could prove to be burdensome as the peacemaking process becomes more protracted. ...
... The Paris Peace Conference was held in August 1989 and was attended by 18 countries and four Cambodian factions (Chandler 1998, 19). According to Solomon, the US "was not inclined to take the lead on Indochina issues," rather it was inclined to support the French and Indonesians (that organized the conference) in their preparations (Solomon 2000, 21). For the Paris conference, the US had a list of five goals that had to be included in the peace settlement: an immediate ceasefire and the eventual termination of all foreign military assistance to the Khmer factions; the formation of an interim administration headed by Prince Sihanouk; the establishment of a process that would culminate in the internationally supervised election of a new constitutional government the voluntary return of the large Khmer refugee population in Thailand; and the creation of an international control mechanism to implement a settlement process monitored by the UN. ...
... On the one hand, the Soviets refused to accept any significant role for the UN, referring to respect for Cambodian sovereignty, which was a euphemism for the concern that strong UN involvement could endanger the government's chances in the upcoming elections. On the other hand, the Chinese were asking for complete disarmament of the government, claiming that such a move would serve the purpose of creating equal chances for everyone in the elections, while in reality Beijing was trying to weaken Hun Sen's chances (Hampson and Zartman 2012, 7;Solomon 1999Solomon , 2000. While the Soviet Union and China were struggling to find an agreement, the United States was experiencing a serious challenge on the domestic front. ...
... Those talks failed. Then the United States led eight months of negotiations among the Permanent Five, which culminated in August 1990 in agreement on a framework that provided for the second (and successful) Paris conference in October 1991 (Solomon, 1999: Solomon, 2000. The negotiated agreements were subsequently implemented by the United Nations though UNAMIC and UNTAC, which performed a wide range of roles and functions, including fact finding, mediation, verification, monitoring, humanitarian assistance, refugee relocation, and assistance, electoral preparation, electoral supervision and monitoring, civil administration, rehabilitation, engineering and infrastructure reconstruction, cantonment, disarmament, and demobilization. ...
... China, Russia, Vietnam, and the United States were keen to reduce their regional rivalries, exit from military commitments that were increasingly costly, and bring about a withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia. The success of the peace process and the political settlement in Cambodia were intimately related to the shared policies of entente and a systemic realignment of US-Soviet and Soviet-Chinese relations with the end of the Cold War, all of which made cooperation and support for the United Nations' peace plan and Permanent Five-led negotiations possible (Solomon, 1999;Solomon, 2000). ...
The 1990s marked the heyday of UN involvement and success in the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Not only did the UN have more peace-keepers in the field than ever before, but it also played a major role in helping to negotiate and implement many settlements that ended some of the world’s bloodiest and protracted civil conflicts.1 By the time the decade ended, the Secretary-General had fielded more than 20 special/ personal representatives or envoys into conflict zones, most of whom were involved in some form of international mediation or ongoing negotiation activity.2 Today the world looks rather different. There are fewer UN peace-keepers in the field, and although the Secretary-General continues to field a large number of his special representatives in zones of conflict, efforts to reach a negotiated settlement in many hot conflict zones like Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (or “frozen” conflict zones, like Cyprus) have eluded repeated attempts at mediation. Why is this so? In what sense has the world of international negotiation and mediation changed? And what can we say about the actual track record of UN-led (or assisted) mediation efforts in ending violent, international disputes?
... However, Thailand's diplomatic transformation, which aimed primarily at economic growth through regional reconciliation, was not well accepted by those states reluctant to move beyond their ideological ties. While many Western actors considered Thailand's vision too idealistic (Solomon 2000), regional actors and the Cambodian parties were opposed to Thailand's proposals and suspected that behind Thailand's revised diplomatic stance lay hidden motivations. For instance, China was strongly opposed to Thailand's plan for completely ending the coalition between the Khmer Rouge and other resistance groups. ...
... Moreover, China's aid to the CGDK-and to the Khmer Rouge specificallycontinued until 1990 (Buszynski 1994: Solomon 2000. ...
This paper examines the intervention behavior of small or middle-sized neighbor countries in civil war peace negotiations by examining Thailand in the Cambodian peace process and Chad in the peace negotiations over Darfur, Sudan. Firstly, it presents that the primary motivations for the interventions were two types of fear: fear of the potentially critical domestic impact of the external conflicts, and fear of their limited leverage over the conflicts. Secondly, these states pursued proactive but biased strategies for early intervention, which included providing physical/substantial support to one side in the conflicts, submitting unilateral peace proposals, and attempting to strengthen their diplomatic alliances. Thirdly, while both countries changed their intervention strategies in an effort to assume a more constructive role in the respective peace processes, the consequences of their changed strategies differed fundamentally, a difference chiefly due to how their new diplomatic strategies were utilized and supported by external actors.
... The UN provided a framework for the process, through which the biased mediators could settle their differences, and then turn to their sides in the Cambodian conflict. The UN was not the main actor in the drama of de-escalation in Cambodia (Solomon 2000), but provided an important arena. We will come back to that model of peacemaking later in the book. ...
This book examines the effect of biased and neutral mediators in civil wars. Based on analysis of both global data and case studies of contemporary peace processes, including India and Norway in Sri Lanka, China in Cambodia, US in Israel/Palestine, and Russia in Georgia, the book makes two main contributions. First, it explores the role of biased mediators in contemporary peace processes. The author develops a theory explaining why biased mediators are more effective than their neutral counterparts and the book identifies four different mechanisms through which biased mediators can be effective peace-brokers. By developing a comprehensive set of mechanisms to explain bias mediation, the work deepens understanding of biased mediators in general, and their role in resolving civil conflict in particular. The second contribution offered is a novel way of measuring mediation success. Previous research has concentrated on settlement, behavior, or implementation. While these conceptualisations of mediation success all have merit, they fail to address how the basic incompatible positions are regulated. This book focuses on mediators ability to regulate core compatibilities by crafting institutional peace arrangements that generally are considered to enhance the prospect for durable peace. This approach has wider implications for peace and conflict research by bringing together research on durability of peace and studies on international mediation, two fields of research which hitherto have been kept apart. This book will be of much interest to students of international mediation, conflict management, civil wars, security studies and IR in general.
... Multiparty mediation efforts may serve as an important catalyst for advancing systemic change, particularly in those conflicts that threaten to spread across a region or strategic area. In the case of the 1990-92 negotiation in Cambodia brokered by the United Nations, the five permanent members of the Security Council worked together in a combined multiparty effort to mediate the Comprehensive Peace Agreement for Cambodia~Solomon, 1999, 2000 In the process, the Cambodian settlement became an agent of broader, systemic change, serving to redefine relations between China and Vietnam, the United States and Russia, and the United States and all of Indochina. The mediators, as parties to this wider process of structural transformation, not only encouraged changes that were already beginning to occur but also acted as a catalytic force by providing a cover for the normalization of relations between Hanoi and Bejing. ...
In today's environment, the international response to conflict often entails multiple mediators as well as other third-party actors such as peacekeeping forces, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and lone operators. Such a profusion of actors has often made peacemaking efforts messy, difficult, and at times chaotic. The vicious nature of internal conflicts, however, and the high costs for the international community of failing to prevent or end war make it critical to understand these multiple third-party interventions. The principal question is: do these multiparty mediations help or hurt the cause of peace? If the answer to that question is that a multiplicity of third parties can hurt a peace process, does the solution lie in stopping multiple third-party attempts at peacemaking? On the other hand, if the answer is that multiparty mediation can help, are there ways of increasing the chances that it will?
This collection of essays situates the study and practice of international mediation and peaceful settlement of disputes within a changing global context. The book is organized around issues of concern to practitioners, including the broader regional, global, and institutional context of mediation and how this broader environment shapes the opportunities and prospects for successful mediation. A major theme is complexity, and how the complex contemporary context presents serious challenges to mediation. This environment describes a world where great-power rivalries and politics are coming back into play, and international and regional organizations are playing different roles and facing different kinds of constraints in the peaceful settlement of disputes. The first section discusses the changing international environment for conflict management and reflects on some of the challenges that this changing environment raises for addressing conflict. Part II focuses on the consequences of bringing new actors into third-party engagement and examines what may be harbingers for how we will attempt to resolve conflict in the future. The third section turns to the world of practice, and discusses mediation statecraft and how to employ it in this current international environment. The volume aims to situate the practice and study of mediation within this wider social and political context to better understand the opportunities and constraints of mediation in today’s world. The value of the book lies in its focus on complex and serious issues that challenge both mediators and scholars. This volume will be of much interest to students, practitioners, and policymakers in the area of international negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution and international relations.
This article examines the negative role that actors' perceptual limitations play in civil war peace negotiation by reviewing the Sino-Khmer Rouge interplay during the Cambodian peace negotiations (1987–1993). The study contends that China continually failed to challenge the Khmer Rouge's negotiation strategies, which were founded on the faction's flawed understanding of its situation. Moreover, the inadequate communication between China and its client faction and the Khmer Rouge's lack of institutions for obtaining and analyzing information are identified as the two main reasons for the failure of Chinese intervention.
By proposing a perception-oriented typology and applying it to the Cambodian peace negotiations, this study attempts to provide an analytic framework for examining the changes in national factions' negotiation strategies during civil war peace negotiation processes. Specifically, this article stresses that domestic negotiating actors readjust their strategies ‘phase by phase’ according to their subjective consideration of three factors: the contents of the peace proposal, the resources under their control, and the strength of the incentives and pressures from external interveners. Based on this finding, this study further (1) demonstrates that a peace negotiation is a continuous process in which multiple chances for successful conflict resolution also continuously change and (2) highlights the importance of perceptual factors in explaining the behaviour of national factions in peace negotiations.
To explain the post–Cold War transformation of peacekeeping, I employ a "garbage can model" of agenda-setting to explain how peacekeeping came to be considered, in the context of the UN Security Council's agenda, an appropriate solution to problems for which it had previously been regarded as inappropriate. The UN fits the defining criteria of an organized anarchy, to which the garbage can model can be expected to apply: unclear preferences, opaque organizational processes, and fluid participation. Drawing on John Kingdon's adaptation of the garbage can model, I explain changes in peacekeeping as the result of policy entrepreneurs' linking of a solution (peacekeeping) to a problem (intrastate conflicts) in the context of a policy window created by the ending of the Cold War.
This study is an analysis of the explanatory value of I. William Zartman's 'ripeness theory' in the reso- lution of the Cambodian conflict. This is done through the identification and testing of the core con- cepts in Zartman's theoretical approach to the study of conflict resolution in studies ranging from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. The identified core concepts are 'hurting stalemate', 'ripe moment' and 'ripe for resolution'. The development of the conflict in Cambodia is outlined from its background in the 1970s through the different phases of the conflict, from Vietnam's military intervention, launched in late 1978, to the formal resolution of the conflict in 1991. The empirical developments of the Cambodian conflict show that it has to be analysed at three different levels - the internal Cambodian level, the regional level and the global level. The main finding of the study is that Zartman's theoreti- cal approach may have some explanatory value in the case of the resolution of the conflict situation at the internal Cambodian level. No explanatory value is identified at the regional and global levels of the conflict. Thus, if all three levels of the conflict situation are taken into account, no overall explanatory value of Zartman's theoretical approach has been established.
The improvement of bilateral relations between Vietnam and the United States has added a fresh dynamic to the geopolitics of Southeast Asia. This article discusses the laborious process of normalization of political relations between 1976 and 1995. It describes the course of economic normalization from the signing of the Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2001 and granting of Permanent Normal Trading Relations in 2006 to Vietnam's accession to the World Trade Trade Organization in 2007. It reviews current bilateral economic and trade issues and analyses domestic political norms and historical experiences which have acted as powerful forces shaping the foreign policies of both countries. The United States criticizes Vietnam's human rights record, and Vietnam has lingering qualms about alleged US designs for "regime change". The Vietnamese-American community, now 1.8 million strong, and the US Congress are major players in the expansion of bilateral relations. The article discusses the heightened visibility of ASEAN in US policy and implications for regional security. The article notes other positive factors at work in US-Vietnam relations: 13,000 Vietnamese now study in the United States; the sensitive Agent Orange issue is being addressed seriously; and there is bilateral cooperation on global warming, the environment, human trafficking and the Mekong River basin. The article concludes that US-Vietnam rapprochement is on a positive, mutually beneficial track but that its dimensions and durability have yet to be established.
Southeast AsiaSouth AsiaConcluding Remarks
International mediators are often called upon to manage the risks of negotiation leading to a peace settlement. This article argues that important risks are often contained in the terms of a peace settlement, which must also be addressed by international negotiators. These risks are described as incurable covenant risks, curable covenant risks, and legal and systemic risks. This article discusses several different strategies for managing these risks. The article argues that although some of these risks can be managed by international mediators, not all are amenable to negotiated interventions.
Analyzing mediation raises some basic questions about what third parties can do in an intense conflict situation, under what
circumstances, and to what effect. Within the internationalmediation literature,much attention is devoted to discussions of
appropriate bargaining strategies and entry points, as well as about comparative advantage, coordination, and leadership of
different kinds of mediators. As we will argue in this chapter, although the international mediation literature pays some
attention to the concept of risk and the notion of the mediator as a kind of risk manager, the risk management aspects of
international mediation, especially in the context of the design and implementation of negotiated settlements, do not receive
the full level of attention they deserve. In fact, we will argue in this chapter that in situations of intense (i.e., violent)
conflict, international mediators have a critical risk management role to play in the negotiation process both before and
after a settlement is concluded. This chapter discusses some of those key risks, the impact of those risks on the negotiation
process, and how mediators can manage (or ideally control) these risks in a peace process.
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