US State Department launches unit to improve peace negotiations

The U.S. State Department on Thursday publicly launched its new Negotiations Support Unit, which will provide technical and advisory support to U.S. diplomats working on peace processes around the world.

NSU — which is housed in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, or CSO — will act as an internal consultancy for the State Department on both the process and substance of peace negotiations, from strategic planning through implementation. It will also be available outside the department to agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense, which can also play roles in negotiations.

Anne Witkowsky, assistant secretary at CSO, said diplomats have told those in her bureau that while it is their job to know the people, region, and politics in a conflict situation, they could benefit from internal experts to help think through negotiations.

“The NSU addresses this challenge by offering a permanent team whose sole purpose is to provide expert technical advice on peace processes and complex political negotiations,” Witkowsky said at a launch event. “Looking at just the last few months, our negotiations experts have contributed to U.S. engagement in peace processes and complex political negotiations around the world, including in Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan, Georgia, and Venezuela.”

The NSU staff of three, who joined the unit from other areas of the State Department, is already looking to expand. The team has experience in more than 30 peace processes around the world, both in government roles and as direct advisers to negotiation parties. They will support people involved in track 1, 2, and 3 negotiations — different types of dialogues that comprise various levels of government officials, unofficial representatives, peace builders, and other experts.

CSO launched the unit internally in December, and Meghan Stewart, NSU adviser and team lead, said the response from colleagues so far has been overwhelmingly positive — even as she acknowledged that “the bureaucracy is real” and that getting government agencies to adapt to something new can be a challenge

The unit is operating on demand, said Ariel Eckblad, deputy assistant secretary at CSO, with diplomats currently engaged in negotiations able to solicit support from NSU.

Eckblad sees the work of NSU staffers as falling roughly into three buckets. The first is behind the negotiating table, advising on process and substance, while also determining things such as what the agenda is, who should be participating, and how to deal with potential spoilers.

The second is across the table, providing real-time support to people in negotiations, which may eventually lead to embedding staffers from NSU into the State Department’s special envoy teams. The last bucket is what happens once the table is cleared and negotiations end — that is, how the unit can support implementation of an agreement once it is reached.

It is currently working on conflicts of all sizes, Eckblad said. She declined to comment on whether the unit was directly engaged on any negotiations related to the war in Ukraine but said, “We’ve been asked to engage across the spectrum of all types of conflicts, be they internal or [if] we’re talking international.”

The concept of a specific unit to support peace processes is not new. In conceptualizing NSU, the State Department considered how entities such as the United Nations and European Union had set up such units.

Before the unit formally existed, negotiation support was provided on an ad hoc basis within the State Department. By centralizing the expertise, people will know exactly where to go for assistance, Stewart said. A major goal of the unit is to be a hub of institutional knowledge that informs front-line diplomats of what has been done in the past and what lessons have been learned.

Liz Hume, the executive director at the Alliance for Peacebuilding, said there is a direct tie from the unit’s work to making U.S. government negotiators more successful at reaching peace.

“This unit will help push forward the agenda on conflict prevention and ending … conflict so that we can assist in building sustainable peace. We’ve hit a 30-year high on global violent conflict, and this was even before the Ukraine war,” Hume said, adding that NSU could also contribute to the overhaul of the U.S. strategy to prevent conflict, which was mandated by the 2019 Global Fragility Act.

“The GFA is also about changing the way we do diplomacy in conflict-affected and fragile states. … We need to make sure that diplomacy is connected with peace building and conflict prevention programming,” Hume said. “I’m confident that this unit will be a critical step forward in changing the way the U.S. does business [in] preventing conflict, ending violent conflict, and building sustainable peace.”

NSU also intends to engage with NGOs and those in civil society working on peace processes, in a bid to tap into expertise outside of government. The ultimate goal, Stewart said, is to ensure that peace processes are more effective.

“The international community will focus on a crisis and then move on usually. And one of the things that we know is that if we put more work into figuring out how to do things better now, we can help to prevent the cyclical return to violence in the future,” Stewart said. “Building better agreements now can help to prevent a potential return to violence in the future.”