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Introduction:
Power plays a key role in the success or failure of Track II efforts according to University of Hawai'i peace researcher Carolyn Stephenson.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Power and Track II Efforts
Carolyn Stephenson
Professor of Population Studies, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai'i
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A: Paying attention to political power is another critical thing. Years ago when
I started looking at Track II, I said, "Why can't we all just get along, if we
just treat each other nicely and so forth," it doesn't work. There are ways in
which that can be useful but one has to pay attention to the power implications
of that when one is doing it.
Q: What does that mean, the power implications? How do they affect Track II?
A: If in this situation, a political administration on one side could simply
deny passes, then everything that you've done in the last 3 months, including
the ground work simply collapsed, so you had to be able to know, what was going
on in terms of the political dynamics of the negotiations at the same time that
you might be planning your Track II event. Some of it was who knew who, who was
in your group, who's brother happened to be this, who's father-in-law happened
to do this who knew that yesterday they did this on the other negotiations.
Q: So just having that knowledge of what's going on in Track I process can
prepare you better to do, I guess in some cases you might even decide to call
off whatever Track II project you were doing.
A: Yeah, that's it.
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