Language: English
Mariana Valderrama Arriola is a Research Officer at the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), based in Bogotá.
She has a BA in Political Science with an emphasis in conflict resolution and peacebuilding from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and holds a master’s degree in Peacebuilding from Universidad de los Andes. Mariana has also taken courses on Women, Equity and Empowerment from the Universidad de Salamanca.
Prior to joining IFIT, Mariana worked at the “Programa de Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio” (PDPMM), where her responsibilities included the reparation of victims of enforced disappearance in the region, through the reconstruction of the victims’ life stories, and community work alongside with social leaders. She has over 2 years of experience working as a volunteer in different foundations such as Eudes, Jeymar and Colombiacrece.
Working languages: English and Spanish
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Country Brain Trusts
IFIT’s pioneering brain trusts creatively pool and harness the unique strengths of local ‘go-between’ leaders to bridge national and community-level processes of dialogue, peacebuilding and transition.
Typically, an IFIT brain trust consists of a multidisciplinary group of 15-18 social, business and political leaders from the particular country, chosen for their policy expertise, personal integrity, influential local networks, and capacity to connect elites and ordinary citizens. A single brain trust might include, for example, the rector of an important national university, the head of the national business council, the country’s chief religious leader, the director of a top local think tank, and so on. These are the go-between leaders whose role is critical in bridging national and community-level processes of dialogue, peacebuilding or transition.
Once the brain trust is in place, IFIT’s permanent staff and thematic practice groups offer the brain trust customised training and policy support based on a continuously evolving set of priorities tied to an overall strategic aim (such as facilitating a political settlement or ensuring a successful peacebuilding process) that is embedded in a long-term local vision.
In supporting each brain trust’s impact goals, IFIT seeks to:
- Nurture the brain trust as an independent space for local reflection, strategic brainstorming and idea formulation on advancing the particular negotiation, transition or peacebuilding process;
- Ensure the systematic transfer of key concepts, lessons and know-how from other contexts;
- Assist the brain trust to channel its most important ideas to key national and international audiences.
The benefits of an IFIT brain trust vary from one case to the next, but above all they offer a catalytic local platform to:
- Develop creative and realistic strategies that are not narrowly filtered through one ideology or set of interests;
- Bring key local actors together who otherwise would not meet regularly, allowing them to support each other and overcome previously hard-to-solve collective action problems;
- Offer interdisciplinary and real-time analysis and advice to decision makers at critical junctures.
The kind of outcomes achieved by IFIT brain trusts are wide-ranging and include to:
- Shape the content of local/national policies and decisions;
- Create new paradigms to expand the range of perceived solutions;
- Launch formal negotiation or transition mechanisms or processes;
- Strengthen local institutions;
- Foster alliances between divided actors;
- Increase local actors’ knowledge of key international lessons;
- Mould better international understanding of true local realities;
- Generate formal accords (across major groups) in favour of a particular solution or approach.
Martha Maya is Deputy Global Director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) as well as Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Martha holds LL.M and MSc (Economics) degrees from the University of Bologna, and undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in public law, public management, policy and institutions from the Universidad de Los Andes. She specialises in political participation and citizenship, constitutional law, and international law.
During the past ten years, Martha has worked extensively in different areas of public policy. Among other things, she supported the peace process between the Government of Colombia and the FARC, including as chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior and subsequently as chief of staff of the High Commissioner for Peace, where she served as the official liaison in Havana on the issue of political participation. She has also worked with different international organisations, including the International Organization for Migration.
Working languages: Spanish, English, and French
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Andrés García Trujillo is a Senior Associate at IFIT based in Bogotá where he works primarily on projects in Latin America. He currently leads the Venezuela project aimed at providing advice on reaching a negotiated solution to the country´s crisis. He has worked on rural development in transitional contexts, peacebuilding, citizen participation, and social policy since 2007.
Before joining IFIT, Andrés worked between 2012 and 2017 at the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace of Colombia, during which time he was involved in the peace talks between the Colombian Government and the FARC as an advisor on the issues of rural development, gender, reincorporation and implementation planning. He was in charge of coordinating the government’s financial, legal and institutional preparatory process for the implementation of the peace agreement, and served during the first six months of the implementation as the government’s technical secretary of the Follow-Up Joint Commission.
Andrés was also an advisor to the Ministry of Agriculture where he was responsible for designing and executing a program geared towards supporting small-scale producers. Earlier in his career, he worked as an independent researcher and consultant, leading various studies and project evaluations in Latin America for public agencies, NGOs, multilateral institutions, and private companies.Andrés holds BAs in International Development Studies and International Political Economy from Trent University, Canada, a master’s degree in social policy from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and a PhD in global governance from the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada. Andrés is the author of Peace and Rural Development in Colombia: The Window for Distributive Change in Negotiated Transitions (Routledge 2020). He is also currently a professor at the Economics Faculty, Universidad Externado de Colombia.
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Introducing the analogy of the ‘narrative tree’, this IFIT discussion paper draws on the expertise and experience of IFIT’s Inclusive Narratives Practice Group to provide a framework for understanding how narratives form and function, as well as an approach for facilitating narrative enrichment at the national or subnational level.
In countries with histories of political crisis, polarisation or violent conflict, social groups often have different stories about what happened in the past, why it happened and what it will take to create a lasting peace that benefits their group and larger society. These established narratives together form a narrative ‘landscape’ that is specific to each context, which can either deepen or mitigate divisions.
The paper argues – counterintuitively – that lasting peace does not come from everyone holding a common narrative; instead, it emerges in environments where many diverse narratives are encouraged to thrive together.
The DOI registration ID for this publication is: https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.11612.51847
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Horizontal inequalities (HIs) are political, economic, social, and cultural inequalities between socially significant groups in a particular country. A wealth of evidence in the last 15 years has shown that severe HIs significantly increase the risk of political instability, but they are rarely systematically targeted during transitions. To the contrary, in most places, HIs have actually worsened – thus creating a long-term source of instability and threat of conflict. This IFIT policy brief shows how transition leaders can act to reduce this risk, resulting in a more just and fair society as well as a more economically productive one.
Successfully addressing HIs in transition countries is an inherently political process. Policymakers need to address the HIs of disadvantaged groups while minimising the chance of backlash from advantaged groups and avoiding policies that harden group identities. With this in mind, this policy brief analyses 1) key policy options for addressing HIs – including direct, indirect and integrationist approaches; 2) trade-offs between HIs and other policies; 3) how to time HI policies; and 4) how to make change politically acceptable.
The DOI registration ID for this publication is: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10474300
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NOVEMBER 11, 2020 | This Remembrance Day, the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) launched a new global initiative to help develop an international law of peace negotiation. Filling a critical gap in the existing laws of war – which mainly regulate how to fight – the Peace Treaty Initiative aims to facilitate global consideration of a purpose-built international legal framework to incentivise warring parties to choose the pathway of negotiation, in order to prevent armed conflicts in the first place and to end them once underway.
“Needless suffering and destruction could be prevented if peace negotiation was more attractive at the start, more flexible and organised in the middle, and more secure at the end,” said Mark Freeman, Executive Director at IFIT. “This initiative to develop the first-ever, multilateral treaty on peace negotiations will draw on decades of lessons in negotiation to make international law more directly helpful in addressing the hard choices involved in peace talks, helping to bring peace one step closer.”
Governments, multilateral organisations, academia, faith-based entities, NGOs and think tanks from around the world will be invited to shape the content of the treaty through participation in thematic and regional workshops and outreach events. Additional expert interviews and a public comment process will also inform the future content of the treaty.
The launch of this initiative follows three years of private research, expert interviews, and global consultations by IFIT and its partners. These include a high-level International Law and Peace Summit hosted by IFIT in Barcelona, Spain in July 2019, and the formation of an Expert Advisory Group to guide the Peace Treaty Initiative.
For more information or to arrange an interview:
Eleanor Weber-Ballard
+44 781 77 77 114
[email protected]
On this annual Armistice Day, many countries will rightly stop to recall the horrors and heroism of World War I: a war that ended with a 36-day armistice signed between Germany and the Allies in 1918. But what we too seldom recall on this occasion is the importance of the international law that emerged from both World War I and II.
It is, in fact, a paradox of politics that the last century’s great wars also produced great law – and global institutions to match, such as the United Nations. Among other things, we saw the mass expansion of international humanitarian law (ie, the laws of war), the emergence of human rights, and the creation of international criminal law, to name just a few milestones.
But international law remains a patchwork, built piecemeal as and when existing law falls behind the times. And such a moment has arrived – and in the most surprising of areas. While we have international law to regulate the conduct of internal armed conflicts, we lack corresponding law to incentivise states to choose the path of negotiation in order to prevent such conflicts in the first place as well as end them peacefully once underway.
Though less common today, the case is the same for inter-state conflicts as it is for non-international armed conflicts. There are general principles, but there isn’t a body of law that could be described as a “law of peace negotiation”.
As a global community, we can do better – and we have the opportunity to do so now that this legal gap has been detected.
Wars rarely end with total victors. Time and again, conflict parties find themselves sitting around a table to talk their way out of the abyss – just as they did on the 11th of November 1918. But just as often, the window of opportunity for making peace is missed. That is because negotiation with a sworn enemy is always a fraught political decision. Governments enter into it hesitatingly, knowing the choice is filled with costs and risks.
For those that do, there is no organised framework of law to turn to, whether for questions of process design or substantive accords. And for the areas of international law that do impinge on a negotiation’s prospect for settlement, they are more likely to suffocate than facilitate its realisation. This is so despite the fact that the structure of a negotiation requires mutual and painful concessions – and thus the greatest legal clarity and flexibility possible.
And even if, against the odds, the parties succeed in reaching a deal, there aren’t any clear standards or available mechanisms to validate its conformity with international law. It’s all a legal crapshoot.
This situation of excess uncertainty serves no one. The law should be an aid and not a hindrance for a subject as consequential as peace making vis-à-vis civil wars.
Will states buy this argument? They will – if the as-yet-unborn international law of peace negotiation is conceived as a help and not a barrier to their interests, offering more benefits than burdens, and with a global rather than Western perspective.
We are already in an era of new and growing kinds of armed conflict: climate wars, cyber wars, and more. New armed groups keep springing up and morphing in ways that endanger civilians in every region of the world. The fighting no longer occurs on a clearly marked battlefield with clear separation between combatants and civilians.
As such, we need to be ready to face the new realities of armed conflict with the most proven tool that history has provided: the tool of negotiation. It deserves all the protection and incentives that the law can offer.
Just imagine how much needless suffering and destruction could be prevented if international law made peace negotiation more attractive at the start, more flexible and organised in the middle, and more stable at the end. This Armistice Day is as suitable a day as any for that process of imagination to begin.
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To mark the 11 November 2020 launch of the Peace Treaty Initiative, Mark Freeman (IFIT Executive Director), Barney Afako (IFIT Alex Boraine Fellow) and Mariana Casij Peña (IFIT Research Associate) participated in a special 20-minute discussion of the key ideas behind this far-reaching global effort to develop the first-ever treaty on peace negotiations.
As seen in recent transition contexts such as Sudan, Pakistan and Haiti, an interim government can serve as an important bridging or stabilising mechanism in times of crisis and dramatic change.
Interim governments are created under diverse circumstances, including regime collapse, negotiated agreement, special election, or international intervention. They can arise at the national or subnational level, and can have a myriad of compositions: national, international or mixed; one party or power-sharing; civilian, military or hybrid. Their mandates range from providing or restoring basic state services to special tasks such as the preparation of a new constitution or the introduction of economic reform.
This IFIT practice brief focuses exclusively on situations where the interim government is a product of negotiations between two or more political actors transitioning out of a severe crisis, armed conflict or authoritarian regime. It offers practical recommendations for policymakers on the two central dimensions of negotiated interim governments: composition and mandate.
The DOI registration ID for this publication is: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10474312
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