post / 17 January 2025

“Fast-Track Negotiation”: A White Paper

New “fast-track negotiation” model announced in groundbreaking White Paper

Paris and Barcelona (17 January 2025) – The dominant but slow-moving negotiation model used for preventing and resolving situations of large-scale violence is a mismatch for most modern conflict and crisis situations. A new model is needed and today the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) and the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris (Paris IAS) are pleased to release the groundbreaking White Paper, “Fast-Track Negotiation: A 21st Century Paradigm for Negotiating Peace and Stability”.

“In today’s fragmented conflict and crisis landscape, we cannot afford to negotiate as though time is on our side. It’s not,” says Mark Freeman, Founder and Executive Director of IFIT and author of the White Paper. “We need to expand the toolbox of conflict resolution and incorporate a negotiation model that offers more balance between process and outcome, idealism and realism, product and market. Fast-track negotiation aims to do just that.”

The arrival of fast-track negotiation adds new options without removing existing ones. It offers an organised set of principles, practices and assumptions purpose-built to facilitate greater negotiation speed and pragmatism and thus help to produce more agreements and restore the missing utility of negotiation in preventing and ending situations of large-scale violence.

“The discomforting truth is that today’s dominant but slow paradigm of negotiation rarely produces a settlement, thus eviscerating the underlying promise that legitimacy of process produces sustainability of implementation,” says Freeman. “It’s time to return to first principles by recreating a model that prioritises the reaching of settlements. It’s time to acknowledge that sustainability is a vacant ideal in the absence of negotiated outcomes.”

The paper is available for download here.

For speaking engagements and media requests or to book a fast-track training session, please contact [email protected].

About IFIT. The Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) is an international non-governmental organisation with peace projects worldwide. Often working behind the scenes to bridge political and social divides, IFIT’s 350+ local and global experts are recognised leaders on negotiation and transition. More information can be found here: https://ifit-transitions.org/. To read more about the Fast-Track Negotiation Initiative in particular: https://ifit-transitions.org/initiative-on-fast-track-negotiation/.

About Paris IAS. The Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris (Paris IAS) is a global research centre comprising 14 universities and scientific institutions in the Paris region and supported by the City of Paris, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation and the European Commission. More information: https://www.paris-iea.fr/en/

About Mark Freeman. Mark Freeman is the Founder and Executive Director of IFIT.  A leading expert in political transitions and high-level peace negotiations with more than 30 years of experience, Mr Freeman is regularly consulted for advice on crisis management and conflict resolution. He has worked in countries including Ukraine, Venezuela, Colombia, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Bosnia, Burundi, DRC, The Gambia, El Salvador, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Nepal, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. His most recent book is Negotiating Transitional Justice (Cambridge, 2020), which draws upon his years as an adviser inside the Colombian peace talks in Havana.

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