All manner of the rich and powerful have passed through the doors of the mountaintop Hotel Petersberg in Bonn, Germany. But perhaps never as motley a cast as the one that arrived on Nov. 27, 2001, to negotiate an end to the wars in Afghanistan. Warlords, exiled monarchists, intellectuals, and enemies so fierce that some had already been trying to kill each other for decades. But a key element was missing; The Taliban were not invited. Australian Iranian investigative journalist and author Soraya Lennie got the story from some of the negotiators who were in the room.

By 2006, the United States and the Afghan Republic had been fighting the Taliban for five years. Neither side was poised to win. That’s when U.S. political scientist Barnett Rubin received a phone call from a Taliban intermediary that would mark the beginning of a four-year, clandestine process of “talks about talks”—even as fighting was intensifying on the ground and as U.S. troops found and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Veteran Afghanistan reporter Andrew North talks to some of the key players involved for a behind-the-scenes look at the negotiations.

As a candidate for the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump vowed to end the war in Afghanistan. But seven months after his inauguration, he changed his mind, saying that the United States should “fight to win.”

A year later, with the Taliban controlling or contesting more territory than at any point since 2001, representatives from the Trump administration traveled to Doha, Qatar, to open direct negotiations with the Taliban. Finalized in February 2020, the Doha agreement was hailed by the Taliban as a victory. The Afghan government called it a historic betrayal.

Veteran Middle East correspondent Sebastian Walker has the story.

As soon as the Doha Agreement was signed, the clock started counting down to May 1, 2021—the day the United States had agreed to withdraw all troops. That gave the Afghan Republic and the Taliban 14 months to negotiate a power-sharing deal. That’s not a lot of time, even under the best of circumstances. Afghan American reporter Ali Latifi has an insider’s look at how friction within Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s administration delayed and derailed the negotiations. But there’s enough blame to go around, with the Taliban playing a waiting game and Washington refusing to intervene.

When a diplomatic deal goes bad, the blame usually falls on the politicians. Often, we don’t even remember the names of the negotiators. But in the wake of the return of the Taliban, a lot of people have blamed one man: Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation. Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan but had served in the U.S. government since the 1980s. He was at Bonn, and he later served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations. Khalilzad sat down with reporter Andrew North to discuss what went wrong—and right—during the negotiations for peace in Afghanistan.

Once it became clear that U.S. troops were leaving Afghanistan, the situation on the ground turned to panic. In August 2021, radio reporter Shirin Jaafari found herself in the middle of the effort to find safe passage for Najiba Noor, a 27-year-old Afghan policewoman who was the target of threats and harassment by the Taliban. For this episode, Shirin reconnects with Noor and speaks with other people directly involved in Digital Dunkirk—a mostly online, grassroots effort to help vulnerable Afghans get to safety.

Since taking power, the Taliban have cracked down on human rights and deprived Afghan women and girls of fundamental freedoms. The outlook for productive engagement is dim. Yet there may have been a window, in the early months after the fall of the republic, to do things differently. Researcher Ashley Jackson speaks to aid workers and activists involved in direct negotiations with the Taliban as well as representatives from the U.S. and Taliban governments. And she takes a look at two intertwined questions: What might have been done differently then? And what should, or could, be done now?

Our podcast The Negotiators launches its third season this week with a look at one of the most famous diplomatic deals ever: the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland.

Jonathan Powell was U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief negotiator for the Good Friday talks. He was also Blair’s newly appointed chief of staff. In an interview on the podcast, he describes the painstaking negotiations that led to the deal—followed by years of additional diplomacy over its implementation. Powell now advises other groups and governments about resolving their conflicts, working with his nonprofit Inter Mediate. He told his story to our senior producer, Laura Rosbrow-Telem.

As with all peace talks, there are multiple perspectives to the Good Friday negotiations. We encourage listeners to seek out other sources.

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy and is hosted by Jenn Williams.

For the first time in U.S. soccer history, the men’s and women’s national teams are getting paid at the same rate. That’s the result of a grueling negotiation that ended last year, led by Cindy Parlow Cone—a former professional player who became the president of the U.S. Soccer Federation.

On the latest episode of The Negotiators, Cone describes how far apart the two sides were at the start and how they reached an agreement. She spoke with producer Karen Given.

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

Gang violence in Los Angeles surged dramatically in the 1980s. Over a seven-year period beginning in 1985, more than 4,000 people died from gang-related clashes. That’s more than the death toll in some high-profile conflicts around the world, including the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

On the latest episode of The Negotiators, we look at the Watts truce in 1992—a peace agreement between rival gangs in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. It had a significant impact: Gang-related murders reportedly dropped 44 percent in Watts in the first two years after the treaty was signed.

Aqeela Sherrills grew up in Watts and was one of the key negotiators of the truce. He is currently the co-founder and leader of the Community Based Public Safety Collective and recently partnered with the White House on preventing gun violence. He shared his story with Negotiators host Jennifer Williams.

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

The Writers Guild of America struck a deal recently with Hollywood studios, ending one of the longest strikes in the union’s history. 

Ellen Stutzman, the assistant executive director of the Writers Guild of America West, was the union’s chief negotiator in the talks. She is our guest this week on The Negotiators. 

The interview, conducted by our senior producer Laura Rosbrow-Telem, is the most extensive one Stutzman has given since the deal was reached.

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who died in 2018, was one of the most famous diplomats of his time. On today’s episode of The Negotiators, we hear about Annan’s mediation of a Kenyan political crisis in 2008—which stands out as one of his most impressive acts of diplomacy.

A disputed election in December 2007 spurred violence and displacement across Kenya. A number of diplomats tried to mediate an end to the conflict. But ultimately, Annan along with human rights advocate and former South African first lady Graça Machel and former Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa were asked to negotiate an end to the violence and a peaceful transition of power. 

Meredith Preston McGhie was an aide to Annan during this mediation. She was also the Africa director at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. She describes how Annan approached the negotiations, including garnering Kenyan and international support for the process. McGhie, currently the secretary-general for the Global Centre for Pluralism, told her story to our senior producer Laura Rosbrow-Telem. The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

You may have heard about the Colorado River negotiations that ended in May. In a monumentally important agreement, several U.S. states along the Colorado River agreed to cut water use. We will cover that deal in next week’s show. 

But for today’s episode of The Negotiators, we hear about an earlier round of Colorado River talks between the United States and Mexico. These binational talks from 2007 to 2012 tell us something about resource scarcity and the delicate negotiations required to address the issue. 

Bruno Verdini, a negotiation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, followed the talks closely and interviewed just about everyone involved for his book Winning Together: The Natural Resource Negotiation Playbook. Host Jenn Williams talks to Verdini about how the agreement not only reduced water consumption but also benefited each side in multiple ways. 

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

The Colorado River provides water to about 40 million people in seven U.S. states, 30 Native American tribes, and northern Mexico. But because of climate change, the river has become significantly drier in recent decades.

On today’s episode of The Negotiators, we hear how the U.S. states and Native American tribes reached a historic agreement in May to reduce water consumption by 13 percent—after an excruciating negotiation. This is Part 2 in our look at negotiations over the Colorado River. Reporter Luke Runyon, who covered the talks for NPR member station KUNC, is our guest on the show. He also hosts Thirst Gap, a podcast about the Colorado River.

Runyon interviewed some of the key negotiators for our podcast. He shares his insights with host Jenn Williams. 

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

The staggering violence between Israelis and Palestinians over the past month has rekindled a question that has long vexed professionals in the negotiating business: Why have efforts to mediate peace between the two sides failed again and again?

To explore that question, we look back to an initiative 20 years ago known as the Road Map, which seemed to hold particular promise. Sponsored by some of the world’s major players—the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union—the Road Map sketched out a two-year path to peace that included independence for the Palestinians and security assurances for Israel.

But, like previous peace plans, this one also was never implemented.

Peter Bartu was a political advisor to the United Nations in Jerusalem at the time and helped mediate between Israelis and Palestinians. The story he tells on the show this week provides a forensic analysis of one particular plan that failed. But it also helps explain a broader history of diplomatic failures in the region.

One of Bartu’s revelations: British Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed the United States to accept the Road Map in exchange for supporting the United States’ invasion of Iraq. But once the invasion got underway and troops became bogged down, the United States lost interest. 

Bartu is now a senior research scholar at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies and a lecturer in the school’s global studies program. 

The Negotiators, hosted by FP’s Jenn Williams, is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

After nine years of war in Yemen, a peace deal finally seems at hand. Representatives of the Houthis met with the Saudis in Riyadh in September in their first official visit to Saudi Arabia since the conflict began in 2014.

On today’s episode of The Negotiators, we talk to Yemeni mediators about how they have advanced the peace process and what they think is needed to end the war. First, host Jenn Williams speaks with Maeen Al-Obaidi, one of the most successful local negotiators in Yemen, about how she has helped facilitate hundreds of prisoner exchanges. Then we hear from Farea Al-Muslimi, a Gulf regional expert at Chatham House and a co-founder of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

William Ury is one of the most famous negotiation experts in the world. He co-wrote the classic book Getting to Yes and co-founded Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation.

On today’s episode of The Negotiators, our last of the season, Ury describes his role in mediating some of the world’s most difficult conflicts.

His forthcoming book, Possible, includes lessons from a long career as an international troubleshooter. 

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

Welcome back to The Negotiators, the podcast that brings you stories from mediators, troubleshooters, and negotiators around the world. The show is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy, hosted by FP deputy editor Jenn Williams.

We begin our second season with a dramatic prisoner negotiation. Danny Fenster is an American journalist who covered the coup in Myanmar in 2021. Months later, while trying to leave the country for a visit with his family in the United States, he was arrested at the airport in Yangon and eventually charged with sedition. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

In this two-part story, we hear from Mickey Bergman, who helped negotiate Fenster’s release. Bergman is the vice president and executive director of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, a charitable organization that helps Americans who are wrongfully imprisoned around the world. On the show, he describes the grueling process of making the right connections in Myanmar and negotiating the deal—at times over the objections of the U.S. State Department.

This isn’t Bergman’s first time on the show. On episode 4 of season 1, he described negotiating a complicated prisoner exchange with Iran.

This is part two of negotiator Mickey Bergman’s story about Danny Fenster, an American journalist who was serving an 11-year prison sentence in Myanmar.

In the first episode, Bergman described how much work it took to get to the gatekeepers. In this second part, he and his boss, Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, are finally in Myanmar for the secret talks.

For decades, Canadian activists have criticized the government in Ottawa for underfunding Indigenous communities, leading to various harms and hardships. The activists, led by Cindy Blackstock of the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society, sued the Canadian government in 2007, claiming that federal underfunding prompted First Nations children to end up in foster care in large numbers once residential schools were closed. The court battle dragged on for 15 years.

But this January, the federal government offered to pay 40 billion Canadian dollars (about $32 billion) to Indigenous children and families harmed by the child welfare system. It was the largest-ever proposed class action settlement in Canadian history—which some people are now calling a form of reparations.

This week on The Negotiators podcast, Blackstock sits down with host Jenn Williams to discuss the tactics used in negotiations with the government and the conditions that led to a successful settlement.

Late last month, military officers in Burkina Faso seized power in the country’s second coup this year. In both cases, the main justification was the leadership’s failure to curb violence from groups linked to the Islamic State and al Qaeda. The insurgency has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced about 10 percent of the population.

This week on our podcast The Negotiators, we tell the story of one community leader in Burkina Faso who set out to negotiate with the insurgents so that members of his community could return to their homes. His story might be familiar to people who follow conflicts in other areas—including Afghanistan—where, in the absence of a broader peace process, people at the local level engage in their own small-scale diplomacy.

Journalist Sam Mednick, who covered these community-led negotiations in Burkina Faso for the New Humanitarian, reports this episode with us.

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

In 2009, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia was about to expire. The START-1 agreement, and others like it, had helped protect people around the globe from the possibility of a nuclear confrontation between the world’s two superpowers. Barack Obama, who became president that year, was eager to get a new deal in place.

On the latest episode of The Negotiators podcast, we hear from the chief U.S. envoy to the New START talks, Rose Gottemoeller, about the grueling process of negotiating that treaty—which was finally signed in 2010. Even now, as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Russia continues to abide by that same New START deal. Gottemoeller was interviewed by our senior producer, Laura Rosbrow-Telem.

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

When Chileans were asked in a referendum in 2020 whether they wanted a new constitution, the response was overwhelming. The current one dated back to the rule of Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who had stepped down three decades earlier. Nearly 80 percent of the population voted in favor of a negotiation that would lead to a new charter for the country.

But the negotiation process—which included representatives from the left and right, along with dozens of independents—was rocky from the start. Delegates introduced many lofty ideas, but the actual give-and-take required to produce a consensus was missing. Voters rejected a draft of the new constitution in September—by a large margin.

This week on our podcast The Negotiators, we examine what went wrong, with the help of John Bartlett, a reporter based in Santiago, Chile. Bartlett covered the constitutional convention and interviewed many of the key players.

The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

Criminal justice advocates have tried for decades to pass legislation to reduce the U.S. prison population. Yet somehow, at a moment when the United States felt more polarized than ever, lawmakers managed to agree on a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill during Donald Trump’s presidency. It was called the First Step Act, and it reduced the sentences of thousands of incarcerated people in federal prisons.

This week on our podcast The Negotiators, we talk to Jessica Jackson, a lawyer and one of the key advocates for the First Step Act. She and political commentator Van Jones co-founded the group #Cut50, which helped advocate for the legislation. In this episode, Jackson tells host Jenn Williams how she convinced both Republicans and Democrats to support the bill.

For the full story on the First Step Act negotiations, we recommend watching the upcoming documentary The First Step, out in theaters in the United States in early 2023.

The uprising in Libya that ended Muammar al-Qaddafi’s long reign in 2011 was supposed to provide a path to stability. Instead, the country descended into civil war, with regional powers vying for influence and resources. An election brokered by the United Nations last year was called off at the last moment, and the sides to the conflict remain at an impasse.

But while official negotiations have stalled, one peace group decided this summer to bring opponents together in Norway, where they would try to find a way forward. The group, Together We Build It, has been working on peace and security issues since 2011, in part by engaging more women and young Libyans in the process. While the Norway talks were held largely behind closed doors, reporter Amira Karaoud attended the conference and interviewed the participants.

Karaoud, who is originally from Tunisia, is featured in the latest episode of The Negotiators, a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

The negotiations that led to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union lasted more than four years. During that grueling process, Britain had three prime ministers, who sometimes shifted positions and occasionally roiled the talks. The one constant was Michel Barnier, the European commissioner in charge of Brexit talks.

This week on our podcast The Negotiators, Barnier tells host Jenn Williams about challenges he faced in the talks, including one that couples often confront in divorce proceedings: how to dismantle the partnership and still retain a measure of goodwill.

Barnier has published a diary he kept during Brexit. For his full story, we recommend reading My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion.

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

This year, a British Pakistani man took several people hostage at a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas—including the congregation’s rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker. During the 11-hour saga, FBI negotiators posted outside tried to persuade the gunman to come out quietly. Meanwhile, another kind of negotiation was happening inside the temple’s walls: between the rabbi and the hostage-taker.

This week on our podcast The Negotiators, Rabbi Cytron-Walker describes how he tried to humanize himself and the other congregation members in order to stay alive. Cytron-Walker told his story to our show’s senior producer, Laura Rosbrow-Telem.

This is our last episode of the season. We’ll be back soon with more negotiator stories. If you have an idea for a Negotiators episode, feel free to email us at [email protected].

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.