Pamela Aall

Director of the Education Program at the United States Institute of Peace

Topics: peace education, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international mediation, peacekeeping, definition of intractability

Interviewed by Julian Portilla — 2003

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Q: First question that I ask everyone is will you please give me a brief overview of your work?

A: I would be happy to. I am the director of the education program at the US Institute of Peace and in that program we do two or three principle activities. One is to work with teachers and especially teachers, but teachers and students in the United States and get them to understand conflict better. The second is that we prepare materials and it is in that, in relationship to the materials that our overlap with intractable conflicts comes because several of the volumes that we have worked on have been related to mediation in long, ongoing conflicts. And the third thing that we do is to work in very specific zones of conflict with educators who themselves are trying to effect positively the conflict in that country. So we work in the Philippines. We are starting to work in South Asia and we are starting to work in the Middle East.

Q: Is the education component in your work more geared toward prevention of conflict, or towards reconciliation or resolution right in the middle, or all of the above?

A: Well, it depends on which audiences you are talking about because in the United States what our goal is to get people to understand conflict better. And we work with partners on defining what it is that their faculty is working on and would be interested in knowing more about. So we are very open to all parts of the conflict cycle if you want to call it that and putting together programs and materials on any part of it depending on what the needs are of the people we are working with. For instance, right now my colleague is at the University of Notre Dame participating in the conference on peace building. Another of my colleagues has put on a faculty seminar on education in conflict. We have done human rights and conflict, we have done mediation. So it just depends on what the needs are. When we are working abroad, in the three areas which we are working, there are active conflicts. So without making any kind of particular decision about what phase of the conflict we are coming into we are actually working with ongoing conflicts while they are still pretty hot. So we can't prevent them. You know you couldn't help people who were trying to resolve them or you know prevent other outbreaks of violence or whatever.

I find that once you get into that situation it is analytically muddy. You are kind of doing everything at the same time. And since we ourselves are not actually trying to facilitate conflicts, we are not trying to bring people together to get them to talk over there about their disagreements and so forth, we want to help people who are doing that in their own country. You know, we come in at a step back from the conflict and sometimes all we are doing is allowing people to have some space to think, not some space to make peace but some space to think.

Q: When you say "doing", what do you mean exactly? This is the education component when you go in and give seminars or you talk to people about the role of education in conflict or what does "doing" mean?

A: We use the model of the faculty seminar because academics are academics and they are very comfortable with you know kind of model where people will present short papers and it is not a training program. We usually bring in some people from the United States, obviously us, plus maybe one or two other people. But we also recruit people from other conflict zones to come in and talk about their conflict. So it is not us telling them how to think or how to look at conflict. It is us providing the opportunity for both people from inside that specific conflict, say inside the Philippines who are interested in doing something about Mindanao To think about Mindanao now, to think about the Philippines, to hear a little bit from us on the outside but also to talk to people who might come from in Indonesia or might come from the Middle East or might come from Northern Ireland who have dealt with the same kinds of issues that they are dealing with. So it is a combination of some short papers, usually on a somewhat academic theme but having to do with conflict. And some discussion about how does an academic actually... How does the conflict affect an academics life and what does that academic person or institution doing about it?

Again to take the example of the Philippines, we have worked with several higher education institutions in the Philippines, one in Manila and three or four in Mindanao. And the educational institutions in Mindanao, they are all universities, have programs who are trying to go out in their community and effect conflict in positive ways. Some of these institutions are Catholic and some of them are largely Muslim. They don't necessarily, they like each other, they don't necessarily work together and what was interesting when we had a meeting bringing them all together, even though everybody in the room was for peace, they all had a very different conception of what that peace would be.

So as I said we don't try to facilitate anything, but we do try to give people who are active in their own conflict room to broaden their perspective perhaps meet other people who are working the same things, maybe see how they differ from these other approaches but also to hear from other people who have had very similar experiences because you know what happens in a conflict often is that you start to feel very isolated or you don't feel isolated, it is just that you don't have any room for any other information, you are focused on your own conflict and you become isolated because it's all absorbing. So just sort of opening the window to the idea that there are other people who struggled with the same things and come up with some sort of solutions which may or may not work, can be enlightening. So we use a case method a lot in terms of, I don't know mean by using case studies, but we do bring in other cases of responding to the same sets of issues. So that there is a sense of you know, a global community that is facing the same things.

Q: Do you find that there is as a result some cross-germination of approaches to dealing with those conflicts?

A: It depends on whether people have time to do that. But I think there is, I don't think we always know about it because particularly if we introduce somebody, bring them in from say... Let me give you another example. Several years ago we were at a program in Cairo, not on Egypt's relation to the Middle East but in a way Egypt's relation to the conflicts to its south in Africa. And so there were people there from Egypt and Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya. And we brought somebody in from Albania, who had been active in setting up mediation centers. It turns out the people who came from Kenya had been struggling with this idea of how do you set up mediation centers. And they among everybody else were fascinated by this Albanian story. Do they keep up after we leave, probably, under those circumstances they probably did. We have no way necessarily of knowing that unless we directly ask them.

Another example where we're pretty sure there will be an ongoing connection is a Pakistani scholar, he is actually a scientist who has done a very scientific study of textbooks in Pakistan, not the curriculum that comes out of the Madras schools, but the state curriculum. And in social studies and in teaching of English and in ... I can't remember, there were several areas that this study group that he had looked at and they went through these books spotting where there was a hidden biased or a very blatant bias in these textbooks. And he came down here, he was in the United States this summer, came down, and we gave him a platform to talk about his work. This is someone that I am working with now. But to that meeting came one of our fellows, our future fellow here who is going to be looking at curriculum in the Middle East, he himself is Egyptian. And they really understood that they had important things to say to each other. And it was a connection that you know happened right there in the room and we saw it and I am quite sure that that will lead to something. So it depends, you hope so but you don't know. They certainly maintain their connection with us.

Q: Is that, in this particular instance anyway, the institutional rule that USIP wants to play as sort of a gatherer of information on conflict in various parts of the world and then a relater of that information where it is relevant to other people?

A: Yes, we want to establish networks. That is a part of what we want to do. But we also want to give support to people who are actively working in their own conflict. And through the education program and this is, I am just talking about the education program, it is our approach because we have found it works and you know academics are alike the world around. They are substantive experts in a field and you know, we stole the title "Herding Cats" from the academic and administrative field. You don't come in with anything but a kind of, almost suggestive, sort of approach to introducing new ideas. Or as I said an academic setting, which they are very, very use to, but yeah, we want to effect how they do this, we do have certain ideas about how third parties or outsiders can help. So we do have certain ideas about what our role is and for instance, we are quite aware of our selves as a government entity.

We are not an NGO and we make this very clear to our partners and hopefully they understand that when they are working with us. If they have any hesitancy about working with a government agency no matter where, then they shouldn't work with us. But having said that, I think that a lot of our partners understand that we also can bring in some resources like better contact with our own government. There are a number of things that we can do in these programs. And I say we have our own ideas about how we can operate and how they can operate in conflict. They are not very complicated ideas but we believe very strongly that it is necessary to have a profound, analytical grasp of what you are doing so that education is very important even if it is just in the classroom, even if you are not going out into the community. You know, how you get your students to see the world around them is the first step here. And it is surprising how often that step is more or less ignored, particularly when, it is not always true that conflicts are well taught in the country that is in conflict. In fact, it is often true that conflicts are very, very badly taught or they might teach other conflicts in a great way but they teach in a terrible way about their own conflict because they are dealing with probably a lack of information. And they are also dealing with the kinds of prejudices that you know float around in the background in everybody's life.

Q: And when you say terrible understanding of a conflict or good understanding of a conflict the criteria for those are what?

A: Well, you know it is very analytical. I mean I don't think you will ever get away from the fact that you will have a point of view no matter who you are. But to at least understand the parties, who the parties are, to be able to articulate what each of those parties interests and their needs, if you want to be sort of very simplistic about it, you know what is their stand, to understand the role that perhaps the neighbors are playing in this conflict. To be at least able to articulate what the other side wants and needs and resents and you know and plans.

Q: In terms of other than they want to kill us or they want to drive us out to the sea?

A: Or they are bad.

Q: Or they are bad.

A: They are bad! You know, they are wrong, they are bad. So it is that kind of thing. Now, you know, frankly I don't think as I said any of us escape our own environments. We are not saying that you have to be neutral about a conflict, because I think it is very difficult even for third parties who come in to be neutral about a conflict. But at least be able to articulate it in ways, in dispassionate ways that may reflect also some of the other side's thinking. The other thing that we have found that happens in a conflict zone is that people who are teaching in a responsible way are often at risk in their own society because they are seen as a threat to the existing powers that be, because the existing powers that be are in a conflict and they want to win that conflict. Mostly they want to win that conflict. Mostly they don't want to mediate that conflict, or you know negotiate that conflict. They usually want to come out ahead. And so this kind of teaching can be seen as a threat to that goal it can be seen as traitorous. It can be seen as seditious.

For instance, Milosevic recognized this in Serbia and he in fact made the professors, I am getting a little vague on this, but he made them sign a kind of a paper that they would be loyal to the regime or that they couldn't teach. And he shutdown universities. He didn't allow, or the universities didn't allow perhaps in their best interests, courses on the conflict and the former Yugoslavia to be taught. I shouldn't say that because I have absolutely no idea, there may have been twenty courses on that, but it was not any course that had to do with conflict resolution was more or less shutdown. And what happened then was that people who wanted to keep teaching these subjects, and there was student demand for it, resorted to going outside the university to set this up. One person that worked with simply started teaching a university course out of his NGO. And as he was a university professor it looked like a university course, it had readings, it had papers, and it had all of these things. Students came and sat in a room, they discussed that sort of thing. But it was in his NGO and there was also the establishment of an alternative school there. It managed to keep on going. I mean, you know these people do this under thread.

I remember when I went to visit this professor in Belgrade, he had been hiding from the authorities. He had not been in his own apartment but he had gone to live with his parents just briefly and his parents lived next to the Chinese Embassy. So while he was on the lamb from the authorities we bombed the Chinese Embassy. So you know, this is a professor, their lives can end, I mean he was teaching this conflict resolution course, he was an outspoken critic, but you know this is somebody who is taken enormous amount of risks in a war zone. And it is that kind of story that you don't hear much of that we are trying to you know, find these people and support them in some ways. This doesn't mean that we only support people who are against their own governments because you know that is not always the case, although there may be some of that in there. But we are trying to support people who are trying to work for reconciliation in their conflict.

Q: That is really interesting because on the one hand, sort of by human nature, conflicts are poorly taught within conflict zones but then beyond that there are some self-enforcing, very structural mechanisms that also prevent people from teaching about conflicts. So to change that you really have to subvert to a certain extent the structure of the system in which the conflict takes place, like the NGO did, or like this professor had to do.

A: Although there are other societies in which the society will self-correct. I am thinking about a conference that we ran last May, I guess, in Sri Lanka with a Sri Lankan partner. The conference was a regional conference, we invited academics and journalists from all over South Asia, or southern Asia, because we included Afghanistan. A topic of the conference was the role of education and the media in the ethnic and religious conflicts in the region. As I said we use the sort presenting paper idea because everybody knows what that is and we had asked people to write papers about the role of education in the conflict and then other journalists who write papers about the role of the media in the conflict.

And what was very clear in this, I mean you are talking about Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, is that in a country like India in which the government is trying to, they call it the "saffordization" of the textbooks and they are including, they are encouraging the inclusion of pro-Hindu language in the textbooks which even if it isn't anti-Muslim is just by being pro-Hindu in a mix country like that is pretty provocative. What we found is that both the academic community and the press were on the government's case on this. So there you have a situation where you can have both education and the media working on both sides of the conflict and you know that the academic community was acting as a watchdog on the government here. But there are also academics that are used to these textbooks that promote this one-sided view.

Q: Wow, that is a great example of a self-correcting mechanism. Lets talk about the other part of your work, the analysis of third parties, mediation, and intractable conflicts. Can you give me a sort of overview of that part of your work?

A: Yeah, we started the book that you mentioned before, "Herding Cats," we started working on this topic of third party mediation and conflicts several years ago and when we put together "Herding Cats" our idea was to go to the mediators themselves and ask them to write about their role in a conflict. And our thought here was not that we were capturing the whole story but that we were capturing a very important point of view that wasn't always brought together in one place. We saw this as a teaching tool for people who were really focusing on mediation, classes on mediation or even providing cases for people who were teaching international relations. And on the basis of that we decided a couple of years later to look at this issue of third party intervention in conflict again, but to look at it in terms of the conflicts that didn't come to an end.

If you look at "Herding Cats," most of those cases are what you might term "successes," in that the mediation more or less worked or at least worked for that moment. And we were aware of this when we put the book out but it sort of grew this idea of going back and looking at some of the cases where it didn't work out and seeing what lessons you could draw from that would be interesting. So we selected and it was a random sampling, I mean there were, not completely random, but if you asked us to justify why we selected these cases instead of other cases is a complex set of reasons but it wasn't very scientific. So we selected ten cases, nine something like that, I am not sure where we are because this project is not finished yet. And we decided that we would go ahead with two projects, one is to gather a group of people who collectively had a lot of experience in thinking about conflict to look at these cases. So whether they knew anything about the conflict or not that their perspective of knowing about another conflict or about many other conflicts would be useful for looking at this case.

The second thing we did was to start writing a more or less a guidebook, or not a guidebook, it is a book that will provide in a way a road map to third party mediators in intractable conflicts. This all sounded pretty good to us when we started and little did we know how complex this was going to be. The first thing that we ran into was this idea that nobody agrees on what an intractable conflict is, so you know you spend a lot of time in definitional issues. Especially in this experts group that we brought together. People had different conceptions depending on where they came from and this experts group brought together several people who were in the Burgess' project; Bill Zartman, Lou Kriesberg is part of that, and other people like that. But it also brought in practitioners including; former ambassadors, former secretary of state, and actually one current ambassador but not U.S., the Swedish Ambassador to Washington. So you had a mix of perspectives in that room, not just in the mix of different expertise on geographical areas but very different points of view on what you would do next. The discussion was fascinating but it was clear from the beginning that we would just never quite agree on; (A) using the word intractable was even justified.

What we realized in looking at this issue or this you know complicated problem of definitions is that if you go to the dictionary and you look up the word intractable it actually provides a pretty good framework for what we wanted to look at. Intractable in the dictionary meaning does not mean unsolvable; it means stubborn, you know difficult to move. But there is nothing in, at least if you go to the common dictionary, of hopeless. So we decided we would go ahead because we couldn't think of another word, you could think of protracted, prolonged, you know long lasting, whatever you want to say but intractable people, we sort of settled on that as sort of better than nothing.

Q: Stubborn was to colloquial for everybody's taste.

A: Stubborn conflicts, well you know maybe a very short conflict could be very stubborn. So there was a time element too and we were not, we never came to any definite time limit. Some people say five years, some people ten, some people say twenty and I don't know how you all have coped with this in terms of the time element of it. But it was clear that they had to have gone on for some years and whatever number nobody really cared to take a stand on. And then for our purposes we as part of the definition, we said that and that these conflicts had proven resistance to efforts and resolution. Whether that was victory on the field or it was direct negotiation to be true to the parties or it was third party intervention. So very simple definition: gone on for a long time: resistant to resolution.

Q: Sounds like a virus.

A: It probably is a virus and we probably should have had "mutated into other things" but you see there too we suddenly got into a kind of definitional disagreement about if a conflict goes on for a long time but the leadership changes, is it the same conflict? We just didn't solve any of these things but it was a very interesting discussion, which will be reflected in some ways in this book. So we selected these cases and looked at the role that third party intervention played and we really mean mediation, we don't mean military intervention. And what we were interested in was capturing not only where third parties helped, but where third parties may have been actually part of the problem. There are not a large number of cases but there is evidence that in some cases the third party has made it worse or at least you know put forward some of the conditions that allow these conflicts to continue. I mean you can look at examples, and again I have to struggle back in my memory on this one, but there is an example.

These were controversial because they were not seen as intractable conflicts yet but we agreed they may be intractable conflicts in the making and these are the various conflicts in Eurasia. And a professor at Georgetown, Charles King, presented a paper on Moldova, Karba??? and Georgia, and he was looking at the influences of not only Russia as a kind of third party in most of these conflicts but a third party slash party to the conflict because they were often dealing with Russian populations that were appealing back to Russia. Russia, for instance in Georgia, had peacekeepers there but they also had good relationships with the Russian speaking populations and the same in Moldova. But we also looked at some of the actions of the, what we called the International Community, and the OSCE for instance, in Moldova, by some of their actions were making it possible for cigarette smuggling to be much easier for the transdenistra???side and this is an unintended consequence for some other action that they did. Well, you know if you bring in revenues into a conflict obviously you allow it to go forward in ways that if you starved it you probably can't. We were interested in identifying some best practices but also just to kind of highlight that third party role. That will be one book and that is going to come out probably in a year. The other book that we are working on now which will come out I think earlier is the book that we have written, that is Chester Crocker and Fen Hampson and myself, that we are writing on, as I said it is a kind of road map for mediators in intractable conflicts. What we tried to do there was to be fairly practical. You know, what are the elements that mediators have to think about in any aspect of a conflict?

Our principle audience here, we are writing thinking this will be read by people who are going to enter some sort of conflict situation but you know it is going to be very useful for students as well because we tried to put mediation in a context. One thing we learned out of "Herding Cats" and there were two really surprising things. One, is that people get into mediation for completely different things, not because they know anything about mediation or even that conflict. ???, who was the person who over saw the mediation effort, it was an effort mediation when the UN came in after the Mozambique peace agreement was signed, when the UN came in you still had to deal basically with the conflict and so he spent a lot of his time mediating there. And he had worked for UNDP but his main experience in this field had been because he was a member of the parliament in Italy. He has a funny story in the beginning of his chapter, he thinks because his last name started with A he was first on the list and then if it had started with Z they would have never called him. You don't know but there was a kind of randomness in his mind about his selection. The other thing that we found is that mediators don't necessarily meet each other. There is not a fraternity of mediators. They don't share those stories and they don't really have opportunities to learn from each other, unless they run into each other in some sort of place. There is a lot of assumptions we make about mediators which is that they know each other, that they trade stories about good trade craft, that they you know have all sort of read the same book. It is absolutely not true. We thought there was room for this book and... You were going to ask something?

Q: I was but I didn't want to interrupt your list of other things that you found. I mean I can ask and then we can come back to that? Okay, you had mentioned instances where third parties actually make an intractable conflict more intractable or at least don't help to solve it, were you talking about mostly Track I interventions or is that a variety of things, sort of all inclusive?

A: No, I don't think we are talking about only Track I. Although with Track II, it is harder for Track II to affect the whole conflict because there are usually small resources, very targeted interventions and so forth. You know, if they are able to come in a way that provides another forum for the parties that is different from for instance, lets say if you have a track I and track II effort going on at the same time and track II provides a different forum for the parties and you know sort of a chance to work around the track I effort then yeah, then track II can be you know a big problem in those circumstances. And there are always arguments depending whether you are in Track I or Track II about how useful Track II is. We have actually, it is very interesting because in writing this book you are bringing together three very different people.

Chester Crocker was in government for eight years running our Africa policy and was the principle mediator on Libya and Angola in the 1980's. So his natural point of view is as a representative of a very powerful state. Fen Hampson is a scholar but he is a Canadian and his natural point of view is he understands the US extremely well but he also understands the role that middle powers can play and the UN can play. And then I have focused again, we all understand each other's perspective but I have focused on NGO's and what non-official organizations can do in these conflicts. So this book that we are writing together will reflect these different points of view. We can not bring them all together and say this is how it should work, we actually did that in "Herding Cats," we don't want to say it again which is that people should coordinate, they should call each other up on the telephone, they should try to support the principle mediation effort, they should not try to make ??? the other parties or provides other forums for the conflict parties to sort of skirt their peacemaking responsibilities. But what I think you will see in this book is these three different perspectives in a way just represented but not merged. What we have understood is there is a lot of mediation that doesn't make any difference whether you have resources behind you when you don't and that is really the principle difference between Track I and Track II. So a lot of this book will be applicable to anyone.

Just to finish this off, there is one very specific area in which we have said that track II can play a very important role and make a tremendous contribution to intractable conflicts and that is in the case of the forgotten conflicts, the one that no one is paying any attention to. Or that if they are paying attention to them they are so far down on the list of priorities they might send out a delegation maybe once every five years and say how is the conflict going. But they are not putting any resources to this. And there are lots of these forgotten conflicts around the world and the role that NGOs can play in that, because they are often engaged, these are often the conflicts that NGOs get engaged in because they can get entry, is to put them on the map. To make sure they are not forgotten anymore and to bring some of this outside experience into that conflict zone. A little bit of what I was saying that we do through our education program here which is to bring in people from other conflicts who have dealt with the same issues just to broaden the perspective of the people in that specific conflict. NGOs can do this and are doing this all over the place and it can make the difference between a conflict which can't find traction in a way, can't get itself together to enter a negotiation and a conflict that is more open to negotiation. So you know in that case we really were talking about what they can do for the good.

Q: Last question and then I will let you go. I just wondered if you could give me more examples of conflicts where the third party actually contributes to it's protractedness rather it's resolution because that is sort of proactive and not quite as explored as what third parties can do to solve a conflict.

A: Right. An example, which is not an American example. Let me give you an example of the role that we as third parties have played in some conflicts that have made them go on and on and on. Cyprus is one, because of the way Cyprus in a way was, the fighting stopped in Cyprus; it was frozen. But there wasn't enough, no one put in that energy to resolve a conflict. It was very difficult to resolve and particularly for the NATO countries where you had two allies taking the sides of the two different parties. So it was a very, very difficult one and as long as the fighting wasn't going on and people weren't killing each other, more or less the international community was satisfied to let it stay there. And that is not to say that there hasn't been tremendous amounts of efforts to solve it over the years. But you know frankly you can see that if the same kind of effort was put into the Cyprus as has been put into the Middle East they would have solution. So there are times for reasons of it's own a third party or the international community would rather deal with a frozen conflict than with a resolved conflict. North-South Korea may be another example. Now there is a lot of movement, but I am talking about before, it was frozen you know along that DMZ for a very, very long time.

A non-American example of a third-party that came in and got caught in the conflict and then left is India's role in Sri Lanka. India became involved partly because they, in India you have a whole large Tamil population and there was some feeling, some pressure on the Indian government from this population to do something about this conflict in Sri Lanka. So they came in partly as outsiders and signed an agreement with the Sri Lankan government which at that point it wasn't clear, because the agreement was between India and Sri Lanka, not between the warring parties, but India I suppose saw itself in some ways as a guarantor of Tamil rights inside of Sri Lanka. So they signed an agreement with the Sri Lankan government and as part of that agreement they sent peacekeeping troops into Sri Lanka and the peacekeeping troops became targets of attack. And in fact, they were harassed and they got into fights and in fact they started more or less acting like real troops, not peacekeeping troops. And of course then there was Gandhi's assassination, which was interpreted in India as a direct result of it's intervention in Sri Lanka and so that pressure to stay in there turned into pressure to pull out and India pulled out practically the next day and didn't come back. In the mean time it left behind a very inflamed situation. Who knows what the motivations for India, I think they were very complex to go into this but it was very clear that their intervention partly on the side of peace, helped to prolong that conflict in Sri Lanka. Now it is a little bit unfair to pick on that one because it is complex and it is as I said it is non-American so one would want to highlight some of the roles the US government had played. You can look at the cold war, you know, we have prolonged a lot of conflicts as part of our foreign policy. So did the Soviet Union. So you know there are examples of these.

Q: It seems so hard to draw lessons out of something so complex like that. What conclusions do you come to based on the Indian example in Sri Lanka?

A: I think that the conclusions that you come to are perhaps the international community should have put pressured on India to not get engaged. We don't live the whole black box theory of you know foreign policy is gone from both sides, I mean it is not just that we know policy makers are subject to domestic pressures but we also know that policy makers are subject to international pressures. The kinds of lessons that you can draw from that are perhaps a more activist, you know, foreign policy on the part of some other governments. I think one thing we are seeing and we just will have to see what happens, we are in a difficult period now. Actually talking about third party mediation efforts, particularly talking about the United States because we are playing a different sort of role, just after the whole war on terrorism started.

I think we have come far from the thinking that we had in terms of official intervention in the 1960's and 70's which is what goes on inside that country is that country's own business and we are not going to get involved, they are going to work it out. And I think that in the 1990's we understood that that can be very explosive. That them working it out inside their own country can in fact destabilize the whole region. So there are lessons. It is not that you or I could change our behavior and become wonderful peacemakers tomorrow. It is complex. It goes through many systems, many layers, our government, the UN, the parties, this, that and the other. A better understanding of the sources of conflict and what you can do about them. I think there are very specific lessons that you can bring into a conflict as a mediator. For instance, don't forget that there is a domestic community in your own country that may in fact intrude on your mediation effort. Don't forget to call home. Don't forget to take resources with you. Don't forget to talk to the other countries that are going to be affected by your mediation. It is not that people forget this but it is amazing how often it doesn't happen.

Q: Well, thank you Pamela. Do we need anything else?

A: I don't think so.

Q: That was great. Thank you.

A: Thank you very much.