Anthony Wanis - St.John
Page 19
3/14/2005
BCD alone will not manage spoilers for long. At best, BCD defers the audience effect noted in
social-psychology negotiation research.
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This postponement only works as long as the audience
(spoilers, in this case) does not guess or learn about back channels. They react against their exclusion
and can then accuse their own leaders of ‘collaboration with the enemy’. Spoilers can only be managed
by each side implementing its commitments in good faith and demonstrating the political gains derived
by such implementation, to mainstream and militant factions, bureaucratic actors and armed forces.
Shifts in popular attitudes in favor of a peace process would be highly valuable and may both stimulate
and be the result of good faith implementation. Unfortunately such critical shifts in mainstream support
become more remote as a peace process unravels.
3. Risks of revealing preferences and interests in back channels
Managing the informational uncertainties is also a complex task. Parties may find it hard to
truly ‘model’ solutions without knowing if the other side is willing to commit to them. If agreement is
not reached, one party may want to start anew while another may wish to start at the point where
previous negotiations left off. After the failure of the Camp David negotiations, Barak sometimes
asserted that Israel would not go back to the Clinton proposals as a basis for negotiation while
Palestinian negotiators wanted to build on what progress had been made. If trust is not present among
the negotiators or if the parties intend to leak information to damage their counterparts, modeling of
possible solutions involving concessions is highly risky because it exposes negotiators to their spoilers.
A leak about one critical pre-Camp David back channel helped put an end to its work on May 20,
2000, and seemed to indicate that internal political pressures for each side had left little flexibility for
the permanent status negotiations.
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Confusion can also be a problem. Whenever a party adopts two contrasting positions on the
same issue as may be the case when front and back channels are used together, or willingly discusses a
possibility in the back channel that it will not contemplate in the front channel, an astute decisionmaker
Convention