IFIT / WELCOME TO The Initiative on Fast-Track Negotiation
The Initiative on Fast-Track Negotiation
Negotiation is among the best known and most used tools for advancing peace and political transition. Yet, the dominant model of the last few decades is built on methodological premises which, in aggregate, produce very slow negotiation. A “fast-track” model is needed to match the more urgent local change needed in the majority of crisis and conflict situations.
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Millennial in origin, peace negotiation is the lifeblood of conflict resolution. There would be far less peace in the world without it. Yet, as explained in “Fast-Track Negotiation”: A White Paper (M. Freeman, January 2025), negotiation in the 21st century is stumbling badly on account of two interrelated but fixable problems: 1) practice is dominated by a single model of what is considered effective and legitimate negotiation; and 2) the dominant model’s underlying tenets, in aggregate, produce a form of negotiation that is very slow.
Fast-track negotiation is a model of conflict resolution broadly oriented toward the goal of “negative peace” (i.e., the absence of direct violence). That is because the predominant choice in most conflict and crisis situations is not between the heavenly ideal of “positive peace” and the practical need for “negative peace”. It is between negative peace and no peace.
The discomforting truth is that today’s dominant but slow paradigm of negotiation rarely produces a settlement, thus eviscerating the very case for its core principles, practices and assumptions – namely, that legitimacy of process produces sustainability of implementation. It is time to return to first principles by recreating a paradigm that prioritises the reaching of settlements. It is time to acknowledge that sustainability is a vacant ideal in the absence of negotiated outcomes.
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