Publication / Initiative on Fast-Track Negotiation

“Fast-Track Negotiation”: A White Paper

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 new and different paradigm – “fast-track negotiation” – offers enlarged options for reaching agreements and surmounts the problematic overdependence on a single model.

Fast-track negotiation relies on principles, practices and assumptions that promise greater speed and realism and thus help to 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 Mark Freeman, Founder and Executive Director of IFIT and author of the White Paper. “It is time to return to first principles by recreating a model that prioritises the reaching of settlements. It is time to acknowledge that sustainability is a vacant ideal in the absence of negotiated outcomes.”

The DOI registration ID for this publication is: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14646340

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