ABSTRACT
Reduced to the basics, the lessons of these encounters are painfully simple and obvious. In cases when agreement was reached, someone devised an alternative that was better for both sides than the status quo, and, cutting through the fog of poor information and conflictual perceptions, convinced the other parties that this was so. Where there was no agreement, this did not take place. When it did take place, it did so because at least one party was initially willing to search for alternatives rather than dismiss anything but the status quo—or to take the maximalist alternative offered by the other side as the only alternative to the status quo. Sometimes it was the North that led this creative search, sometimes the South, and in most cases both parties did benefit—or could have benefited—from third-party mediators’ leading the search. In the successful cases, all joined in the search for mutually beneficial alternatives in the end, and—almost definitionally—there was no case in which all joined in which did not end in a successful agreement.
