Channels, Fall 2018

Page 48 Holm • A Call to Peace contrast, the Colombian peace process took a more social-psychological approach. The third-party actors involved in this conflict provided forums for the conflicting parties to discuss their grievances. The third-party actors involved facilitated the negotiations, but they did not lead them. There was also a significant difference in the role religion played within the peace process. The Catholic Church was able to act more as a third-party mediator in Colombia than it was in Northern Ireland. According to Naomi Johnstone and Isak Svensson in Belligerents and Believers: Exploring Faith-based Mediation in Internal Armed Conflicts , “Faith-based mediation primarily occurs in situations where religion is not part of the conflict itself, in terms of the incompatibility or in terms of distinguishing the parties’ identities.” In Northern Ireland, religion was very much at the center of the conflict, thus the Catholic Church was in no way an impartial third-party, whereas in Colombia they were able to be so ( Johnstone & Svensson, 2013). Frameworks When discussing peace processes the importance of frameworks cannot be overemphasized. The Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre defines a negotiation as, “Being the process by which two or more opposing parties (either countries or internal actors within a country) decide to discuss their differences within an agreed framework in order to find a satisfactory solution to their demands” ( Fisas, 2015 ). Thus, without a framework a peace process is impossible. The clearest example of the importance of frameworks in the Northern Irish peace process is the 1995 Framework Documents (Crocker et al., 1999), which laid out the blueprint for the ensuing peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement. While the Good Friday Agreement was open to a referendum, the framework document notably was not. Thus, it was protected from the politics of anger that existed in the Northern Ireland at the time. This document institutionalized the three-stranded framework. Strand one referred to relations within Northern Ireland, strand two referred to relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and strand three referred to the relations between both islands. This framework made sense of the difficult number of relationships that impacted the Northern Irish peace process, acknowledging the interconnectedness of the British Isles by denoting each relationship with a strand. As mentioned in the introduction, the pre- negotiation stage is imperative to a peace process as it provides the roadmap that will be used. This concept is illustrated by the following quote from an Irish government official, who said that: We did not think it would serve a useful purpose for everyone to simply show up on day one [of talks] and that agreement would somehow percolate up from the bottom. Rather we thought that it was up to the two governments to give guidance. That’s the background to the Frameworks Document ( Ginty, & Darby 2002 ). The original framework for the Northern Irish peace process was integral to the peace process, exhibited by the fact that much of it was incorporated into the Good Friday