How the Good Friday Agreement ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland

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JENN WILLIAMS, HOST:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Negotiators, a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m your host, Jenn Williams.

We are thrilled to start our third season with one of the most famous diplomatic negotiations ever: the Good Friday Agreement. Twenty-five years ago, leaders in Northern Ireland painstakingly negotiated an end to decades of violence known as The Troubles. More than 3,500 people were killed in that conflict. Now, a lot has been written and said about this agreement, but for today’s show, we’re going to hear from one of the key negotiators, Jonathan Powell. Powell was UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief negotiator for the Good Friday talks, which began in 1997. He actually had another big job. He was also Blair’s newly appointed chief of staff. 

Now, as you’ll hear in the episode, the agreement itself was just the beginning. Negotiating its implementation took another decade. As with all conflicts, the one in Northern Ireland was really complicated with lots of factions, lots of claims and counterclaims, so I’m just going to simplify here. In this conflict, one side wanted Northern Ireland to continue being part of the UK. They were known as the unionists. The other side wanted Northern Ireland to break off from the UK and become part of the Republic of Ireland. This group was mainly represented by Sinn Féin. On the unionist side, the leader was David Trimble. You’ll hear his name come up a lot. Sinn Féin was led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. One other thing about Sinn Féin: their armed wing was known as the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. So that’s your cheat sheet. David Trimble on one side, and Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness on the other. As you’ll hear in the interview, the main goal of the talks was to get the two sides to agree to some form of power sharing. 

OK, I think that’s enough background. Powell told his story to our senior producer, Laura Rosbrow-Telem.

JONATHAN POWELL:

I became the chief negotiator in Northern Ireland largely by accident. Essentially, it was because I knew the unionists quite well. I had been at the British Embassy in Washington, and one of my jobs there was to look after the unionist politicians when they started coming over in the 1990s; they gradually started coming to Washington, trying to see the administration going up on the Hill. And to be honest, the reception they got on the Hill was not all that friendly from Irish American congressmen. So my job was to go up and try and help defend them. So they came to trust me a bit. And then when we started in governments and started the negotiations, my job for Tony was to try and, initially, to carry the unionists with us to go and talk to them and carry them along. And once I started doing that, then I ended up having to do it also with Sinn Féin and the Republicans and other Catholic parties. So it was largely by accident. Normally, the chief of staff in Downing Street—a job I actually created because it didn’t exist before—would not have been doing this kind of thing. But because Tony Blair cared so much about Northern Ireland and devoted so much political capital to it, he asked me to take it on. And it was difficult to manage being chief of staff at the same time as doing Northern Ireland negotiations. But it was about Tony Blair’s commitment to making peace in Northern Ireland.

So Tony Blair set a deadline of one year from coming into office, for when he wanted to get to an agreement. We were determined to get the IRA back on ceasefire again, and then get them into talks very quickly. And the civil servants, the officials, often tried to persuade him to change that. They said it’s very dangerous to have a deadline like that. What if the deadline isn’t met? What if it collapses? The whole thing will be over. But he was determined and he stuck to it after we’d come to office.

I think that, probably late 70s, British Army realized they could contain the IRA forever, but they weren’t going to defeat them militarily. And that is what the academics call “a perceived mutually hurting stalemate.” I think mid-1980s, Adams and McGuinness, who were past fighting age by that stage, could see this could go on forever; that they were never going to win militarily. They were never going to be defeated, but they were never going to win militarily. That’s when they started reaching out to the British government. But first, the Irish government, and even before that, John Hume, who deserves great credit for talking to Gerry Adams. So I think that perceived mutually hurting stalemate was the fundamental thing. That’s what motivated Adams and McGuinness to try and lead the movement into a peace agreement, which was contrary to their constitution, because the IRA constitution says they should keep their weapons until there’s a united Ireland. They didn’t do that in the end, in this agreement. And there’s a remarkable act of leadership by Adams and McGuinness to get them into that position through the agreement. So I think things like power-sharing were crucially important to the Catholic population as a whole, and the right thing to do, because you can’t just govern a place like that with just one sect, one religion governing the whole thing.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were complicated people. The first time I met them, in October 1997, I refused to shake their hands. Tony Blair was more sensible. He did shake their hands, although he then faced a protest for having done so. But you know, the IRA had shot my father during the 1940s and injured him. They’d put my brother, who worked for Mrs. Thatcher, on a death list for eight years. I didn’t feel very warm and cuddly. 

Funnily enough, I then got a call from Martin McGuinness not long after that, asking me to visit Derry to see him incognito—not to tell the securocrats, the police in the army. So I asked Tony Blair, “Should I do it?” And he said, “Yeah, you’re expendable. Why not? Off you go.” So I took a plane to Belfast and a taxi to Derry and stood on a street corner feeling rather foolish, until two guys with shaved heads turned up and pushed me into the back of a taxi. They drove me around for about an hour until I was completely lost. Stopped outside a little modern house on the edge of an estate and pushed me out. Knocked on the door. Martin McGuinness answered on crutches, making a very unfunny joke about kneecapping, which was the IRA way of punishing people, by drilling holes in their knees, ankles and elbows. I spent three hours with him. We didn’t make any breakthroughs, but understood finally that to end a war like this, you have to build trust. And building trust means taking shared risks, going onto their territory, not just expecting them to come to Number 10 Downing Street, expecting them to come to castles in Stormont. So I got to know them quite well over that time. 

And they were very good negotiators. I mean, you know, they’d seen nine prime ministers come and go before Tony Blair, while they’d been leaders of the Republican movement. So they were very experienced. And they divided the roles between them. There was a certain amount of good cop and bad cop. Gerry Adams was the harder guy, and Martin McGuinness was a more pleasant guy, although he’d probably killed more people with his own hands.

Negotiating with them was difficult. You know, they would give me a very hard time. There’s one occasion I remember negotiating with them in West Belfast, where it’d been a really hard day, and they’d been really giving me a hard time. And Gerry Adams leaned across the table and said, “The thing I like about you, Jonathan, is that when you lie, you blush.” And my Northern Ireland Office colleague sitting next to me immediately leaned back across the table and said, “Unlike you, Gerry.” And that is true. I think the way I managed to win them over was by being very straightforward, trying to be as honest as I could be about what we could do and what we couldn’t do. But they were both from underground movement. They were used to keeping secrets and not revealing their hands. So I was negotiating with a very different set of people.

If I look back at it, in the first meeting we had with Adams and McGuinness in Downing Street in December 1997, at the end of the meeting, Gerry Adams took Tony Blair and me to the end of a room—the Cabinet Room, which is separated off by some pillars, so other people can’t necessarily hear what you’re saying. And he said that, conceivably, he could take the IRA into an agreement very quickly, but he would only take part of the IRA. And if he wanted to take the whole IRA, he needed time and space. And essentially, the gamble that Tony Blair took was to give the time and space for that to happen, to move gradually to getting to peace. And that’s why it took so long—which David Trimble used to complain about, why were we giving them so much time? But I think that was the only way to make a lasting peace.

David Trimble, who was the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, the moderate Protestant party, David Trimble was a very unusual character for a politician. He was an intellectual. He’d been a law professor at Queen’s University in Belfast. He’d actually been a radical as a young politician. He’d helped bring down the moderate unionist government at the time of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973, the last time there’d been an agreement with the parties in Northern Ireland. He, as a radical unionist, had helped defeat the moderate unionist leader. And he could be very difficult. And he was very bad, as a politician, either at communicating to his public or at carrying his people with him inside his party. So we had this agreement on a document called the heads of agreement. Heads of agreement was something we agreed in February 1998, which was, if you like, a framework agreement for the Good Friday Agreement. It was quite short. But what it did was, it ruled out all those things we were not going to negotiate about. We weren’t going to negotiate about a united Ireland; that wasn’t included in the heads of agreement. And that took a very difficult negotiation. And I’d got David Trimble to an agreement on Sunday night. Finally, he’d agreed to something, and I’d sent it to him overnight. I went to bed having made, I calculated, 120 phone calls in the course of Sunday. And I thought, this is pretty fragile, but I hope it’s going to stay. The next morning, I was woken up by David, calling me in tears, saying he tried to sell the document to his colleagues, because he’d not discussed the document with his colleagues in the process. And they’d all said no. [CHUCKLES] So he was going to have to reject the agreement that he’d already signed. So I had to then start rushing around, and cobbled together another agreement that would manage to get us through. So he was both actually a very brave man—particularly when it came to the Good Friday Agreement and subsequently—but he was also quite difficult to negotiate with because he wasn’t a traditional leader. But in the end, I grew to be very fond of him and thought that he was a brave man who did manage to deliver his party and his people into peace.

When we got to the eve of the Good Friday Agreement, George Mitchell had presided over the document on the internal issues, on the first strand. Not that it had made much progress, but there was something to write down. But the North/South had to be agreed, in the end, between the two governments. And so George Mitchell was waiting for us to conclude that, and that was going to cover the North/South bodies. And my colleague John Holmes—who had been John Major’s foreign affairs private secretary and stayed with us, who was a very good guy—he negotiated, with his Irish opposite number, the document for this. And the Irish, of course—because they were being asked to give up a lot, they were being asked to give up their constitutional claim on Northern Ireland, amongst other things—needed to show they’d achieved something and wanted to show that they had got a lot of North/South bodies, they’d got some shared sovereignty, because that’s what they really wanted. And what we ended up doing was conceding a lot of those bodies, because we knew they didn’t have great meaning, because they were, literally, on technocratic things like water management. But what we hadn’t thought about, I think, sufficiently, was how that would look, optically, to the unionists. So when we finally gave that agreement to George Mitchell and he published it, John Taylor, the deputy leader of the Unionist Party, the one who’d lost the leadership to David Trimble, came out and said he wouldn’t touch it with a 60-foot barge pole. And so when we went flying over to start the Good Friday negotiations, George Mitchell actually said to Tony Blair, “I don’t know why you’ve come. There’s no chance of an agreement.”

JENN: How did they save the Good Friday agreement from collapsing? Find out after the break.

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JENN:  Welcome back to The Negotiators, a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. I’m Jenn Williams. Before the break, US senator George Mitchell, who was chairing the talks, thought there was, quote, “no chance” of getting to an agreement because of one key group. Jonathan Powell, the chief negotiator for UK prime minister Tony Blair, picks it up from here.

JONATHAN: We realized we had a really big problem with the UUP, with the Ulster Unionist Party. They couldn’t actually address this agreement because of the optics of this annex, with tens of pages of North/South bodies. It looked like they were giving up British sovereignty. So we had to sort that problem out first, and we were saved in that by Bertie Ahern, the Irish taoiseach, or prime minister. He actually—his mother had just died, just as we were starting the talks, so he very kindly flew up after sitting through her wake. And Tony Blair sat down with him and told him, “Look, we’re going to have to reduce what you’ve managed to get us to give you. We’re going to have to row back from that long list of North/South bodies if we’re going to get any chance of starting this negotiation.” And Bertie, to his credit, agreed that his team should work on that, and he went back to Dublin for his mother’s actual funeral, and then came back again for the Good Friday negotiations. His officials were not very keen on negotiating a reduced list. So actually, in the end, he had to do it when he came back. But that was a big political step, because he was taking a real risk politically, at home—coming from the party that was a Republican party, that believed in a united Ireland. To give up what it had gained was a big concession. But if he hadn’t done that, there would’ve been no Good Friday negotiation

In the actual Good Friday negotiations, really, looking back at it, it’s remarkable how little of a role Sinn Féin played. For example, the power-sharing provisions, which were very similar to provisions in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, were actually agreed by the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party very quickly. They agreed them in a matter of hours, and Sinn Féin wasn’t really involved. John Hume went to tell Sinn Féin what he’d agreed. Sinn Féin tried to reassert that a few times, by going out to brief the press they weren’t going to sign up to an agreement, which got everyone nervous. And as a result, people paid more attention to them. Bertie Ahern spent a long time talking to them. They came up, at one stage, of a list of—I think it was 40 demands they had on changes. And Mo Mowlam and Bertie Ahern went through the night talking to them, going through changes one by one. The one change that Adams absolutely insisted on was prisoner release. And we on our side hadn’t really thought about prisoner release very much. It had been handled by the Northern Ireland office, and we hadn’t really focused on the consequences. So it came as a bit of a shock to us when Mo Mowlam told us that actually, as part of this agreement, we were going to have to release hardened terrorists after just two years. Even if they’d killed someone, they got out after just two years. So we were a little bit shocked about that. And then Gerry Adams came to see Tony Blair and asked to see him privately, and said he’d need the prisoners to be out in one year, not two years. And Tony, who was desperate enough to get to an agreement, said, “Well, we’ll think about it, but it’d be very, very hard for us to do this, so I think we’ll leave it as two years, but you come back to me if we have to have one year as the only way of moving forward on this.” Gerry Adams never called that in, but it would’ve been a big problem for us, because when prisoners were released, it really undermined support for the agreement on the unionist side. But that was the main issue that Adams insisted on, although I—looking at it in retrospect, I think for him, the most important thing was when Tony Blair said that he would—in response to a question from Adams privately—that he would stay committed on Northern Ireland. He wasn’t going to go away. He wasn’t going to sign the agreement and then just carry on governing other issues. He was going to stay committed to sorting that out. And I think that was the key thing, because if you look back at the history of Northern Ireland, the basic problems happen when the British stop paying attention. When we just dismiss it and say it’s not our problem, then that’s when we have difficulties in Northern Ireland. It’s when prime ministers are directly engaged, as Tony Blair was for 10 years with huge amounts of time, then you have a better chance of solving it and keeping it solved. 

Some of these negotiations were very—sort of bizarre. Like at one stage, the unionists, very late at night, started insisting that there should be a body that was dealing with Ullans. Ullans is a dialect of English used by some Scots in Northern Ireland, and they were demanding equal rights for that with the Irish language. And they tried that on Bertie Ahern, with Tony Blair there late at night, and nearly came to a punch-up.

The problem for David Trimble, as leader of the unionists, was he didn’t want to share power with a political party, Sinn Féin, with an army behind them, a private army. So he needed them to give up their weapons. And the problem for us was that he didn’t really raise this issue in a big way until very late in the negotiations. By the stage he came to really push on this, we’d already agreed to everything else, and a draft agreement had been circulated to all the parties at the negotiation headquarters in Castle Buildings—it’s an awful decrepit 1960s building that stank of sweat and stale food and people who hadn’t slept for a very long time. People milling around. It was just a very unconducive place to do negotiations. So he came up to us at about … sometime after midnight, very late at night, saying he just couldn’t see how he could sell this agreement to his party if he didn’t have clarity about the IRA giving up its weapons, because he couldn’t share power unless they gave up weapons. And Tony Blair said to him, “Look, we can’t reopen this agreement now. That would be a whole new chapter. And we could be here a very, very long time if we tried to persuade the IRA at this stage to commit, in writing, to giving up all its weapons. So if you do that, we’d shoot the whole agreement.” And David Trimble went back and said, “OK, well, I’ll go back and talk to my party.” And he went downstairs, and—they had a very big office on the ground floor, and a lot of people in the course of that morning of Good Friday came in from the party; it wasn’t just five or six people who had been in the negotiating team. There were tens of people there. And they worked themselves up into a sort of a lather about this and other issues. And Tony said to me, “Look, I don’t think he’s going to be able to sell this. We’re going to have to do something to make sure he gets over the line.” 

And we had with us an official, John Steele, I think his name was, he was from Northern Ireland, but he was a unionist. He was in charge of security. And so we started asking him about how this could be expressed, and Tony Blair told me to get my laptop out and I started typing, and he dictated to me, with John Steele occasionally correcting it, the terms of a side letter to David Trimble, a letter that would actually reassure him on this point of decommissioning weapons by saying that the British government expected the IRA to give up its weapons if there was power sharing. So putting ourselves on the side of the unionists, and saying that’s what we expected to happen out of this agreement. And I typed up on my laptop, pushed “print” on it, pulled it off the printer, and ran downstairs, because I knew this argument was running away from us amongst the unionists. And I got down to their office and they had the door locked so no one could come in and lobby them, and they wouldn’t let me in. I tried knocking, but they wouldn’t let me in. Eventually, I stuck the letter under the door, and a young unionist pulled it through and then opened the door and let me in. I took the letter up to where David Trimble was sitting at a table with John Taylor—the two of them on a slightly raised dais, as if, you know, in a school or something, the stage. And I took and gave the letter to David, and David started reading it, and John Taylor read it over his shoulder, and I heard John Taylor say, “We can run with that.”

So I left the room immediately, went upstairs, told Tony we had agreement. We immediately summoned the plenary, before anyone could change their minds, and just really railroaded everyone into an agreement before they could think too much about it. And actually, we also brought it to a conclusion very quickly. No one signed anything. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern went outside, did a press conference, announced the agreement, and left before it could be all unraveled. David Trimble went out and did a press conference a little bit later on the steps. By then it had started to rain, and the letter, he had the letter and he read it out at his press conference, and the ink started to run. The only problem was in my rush, I hadn’t saved a copy of this letter. [CHUCKLES] So we didn’t have any means of knowing what we’d originally said, and rather shamefacedly, a few months later, the Northern Ireland Office had to approach David Trimble to ask to see a copy of the letter so we could reconstruct what we’d actually promised. And had it disintegrated entirely in the rain, no one would ever have known what we promised, and that’s the way negotiations work. But that was what got him over the hump. It didn’t solve the problem, because then we had this problem of decommissioning for the years that followed.

As soon as Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern had done their press conference, we rushed to the helicopters that were waiting for us, just a very short distance away at Stormont Castle, to take us back to our planes and back to London. Tony Blair had been very worried about this whole negotiation, because he’d been supposed to spend Easter with Prime Minister Aznar of Spain, in his official residence in the country in Spain. And his wife and mother-in-law had gone ahead of him, and he was terrified about what his mother-in-law would be saying to Aznar. So he’s very keen to get moving. And we came out of the negotiation, we’re just about to get on the helicopter, I got a call from Buckingham Palace, the Queen wanted to speak to Tony. So I put her on the phone to him so he could say a few words. We took off; we were very, sort of, full of gallows humor, because we just couldn’t believe we’d escaped this nightmare of three days and nights without sleep. But basically, we had some gallows humor about thinking, “Thank goodness that’s over.” But if we thought that we’d solved the problem of Northern Ireland, we were sadly mistaken.

JENN: Much to Powell’s surprise, the Good Friday Agreement was only the first of many painful steps. Implementing the agreement, now, that was another story. And honestly, I think most of the world isn’t fully aware of just how long it took. Powell and Blair, they stuck around for this entire process. So Powell is going to end our episode by describing how the parties did it.

JONATHAN: The next nine years, because it took us nine years to implement the Good Friday Agreement, I thought, what a waste. What a shame. Why couldn’t we just cut to the chase and get it done? But then when you think about things like the Oslo Accords, where you had all the celebration when there was agreement, but no effort to implement it, you understand that people don’t trust each other any more just because you have a piece of paper. In fact, you have a piece of paper because you don’t trust each other, but you only begin to trust the other side when they implement what’s on the paper. So those nine years weren’t wasted, they were actually negotiations to build confidence between the two sides and really do what they said they were going to do. So it was necessary to go through those steps to get to—the assembly up and running under Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in a lasting way. And I think, whenever I look at another peace agreement that I’m working on, I always think this implementation phase is really the most important. If you don’t have that implementation phase, it’s never going to work.

The unionists didn’t want to go into government with people who were backed by a private army, because they were afraid that would be used to oppress them. So that was the central issue. But there were other issues. There was the Irish language—was it really going to be used, encouraged, funded, used sometimes in official functions? There was the issue of the protection of human rights, that Catholics in particular wanted, for minority rights. There was the issue of policing, actually—perhaps the most difficult issue in the Good Friday Agreement. We couldn’t agree what would happen about policing. Policing had been very dominated by Protestants, throughout the history, the overwhelming majority of the police force had been Protestant, it had been very biased towards Protestants and wasn’t accepted in Republican areas of the country. And no one would give any information to the police. So what we agreed in the Good Friday Agreement was there should be a commission on policing, which was headed by Chris Patten, a conservative minister who was quite popular in Northern Ireland, being a Catholic—was a Catholic, but had been a Tory. And he did a very good job. He produced an excellent outcome to the policing reform. And then the reform was put in place by Hugh Orde, the chief constable, very successfully. But even then, we hadn’t solved the problem, and we had a whole series of negotiations—the end of 2006, beginning of 2007—to get Sinn Féin to accept the police, the reform police, and participate in the policing bodies governing it. So there was a whole series of bodies. But at the heart of it was this issue of trust, which was symbolized by the issue of weapons and the IRA not being prepared to give up their weapons.

The problem that came to haunt us was this ambiguity we had about the weapons, and eventually we had to drive that out of the agreement in order to implement it. And that problem of constructive ambiguity is something that haunts many negotiations. You have constructive ambiguity to get over a hump in a negotiation you couldn’t otherwise surmount. But then it comes back to haunt you later. And in our case, it led to support amongst unionists falling to about a third of unionists supporting the agreement by the time we got to 2003. It was phrased sufficiently ambiguously that both sides could project onto it what they wanted. So unionists thought it meant that Republicans would give up their weapons before they came into government, and Republicans thought that it meant that there’d be power sharing and it could be tested before they gave up their weapons. Not unreasonable positions on both sides, but not compatible. So both sides were projecting onto the words, which were ambiguous, what they thought.

And so that was the problem with the unionists, when they saw the IRA not giving up their weapons, but still expecting to be bought into government. That’s why the government kept collapsing, because the unionists would pull out or the nationalists would refuse to decommission weapons. And we tried again and again, different schemes. We tried … Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president, and Cyril Ramaphosa, the current South African president, became inspectors who went to inspect the IRA weapons to prove they weren’t being used. But on the basis of a model used in Kosovo, which had been referred to me by some of our generals who’d been working in Kosovo. That worked for a little bit, but none of it solved the problem until we got right through to 2005. When in the end, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin, appealed to the IRA to give up their weapons—not to the British, not to the unionists, but to him as leader. They should give up their weapons so they could make peace. And that was when it really … we had the final breakthrough, when you got the agreement implemented, and then we had Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness setting up the executive, and it sustained itself for 10 years after that. They became known as the “Chuckle Brothers” because of the way they managed to get on, despite having been two of the people most responsible for the war starting in the first place.

I spend my time now, all my time, working on conflicts around the world, which are of course very different from Northern Ireland. But I think there are two things I take away in particular from Northern Ireland, as well as many technical lessons that are useful, even if the conflicts are different. One is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict. Winston Churchill believed Northern Ireland was insoluble. Mrs. Thatcher believed Northern Ireland was insoluble. Actually, John Major, to his credit, believed it was solvable, but he couldn’t solve it. But there isn’t any such conflict. Even the Middle East is not insoluble. It just hasn’t been solved yet. But it’s important to understand it’s not inevitable that it’s going to get solved. After we signed the Good Friday Agreement, people said, “Well, there was always going to be peace in Northern Ireland because of the economic change,” you know, the Republic of Ireland got richer. Islamic terrorism came along and made Republican terrorism seem less terrifying. That’s completely wrong. It only happened because there were leaders on both sides who were prepared to take risks, who were patient, who kept at it. So it’s really important that people understand everywhere that their conflict may be unique, it may be particularly visceral, but it’s soluble if they put their minds to it. But it won’t get solved by itself. It only gets solved if there are people who are brave enough to make peace. Because making peace is a hell of a lot harder for a politician than making war. It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to sell it to your population. And that’s what I would love to see, is people having that bravery in all sorts of conflicts around the world.

JENN: That was Jonathan Powell, UK prime minister Tony Blair’s chief negotiator for the Good Friday Agreement. He’s the founder and CEO of Inter Mediate, a nonprofit that focuses on the most difficult, complex and dangerous conflicts in the world. Now, Powell, of course, represented just one side in the talks. We encourage listeners to hear other perspectives, so we’ve included some links in our show notes. 

The Negotiators is a partnership between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy. Our production team includes Rob Sachs, Ashley Westerman, Rosie Julin, Claudia Teti, Japhet Weeks, Jigar Mehta, Amjad Atallah and Dan Ephron. Laura Rosbrow-Telem is the show’s senior producer. Thanks to Nelufar Hedayat, Govinda Clayton and James Wolley for helping create the show. 

Foreign Policy is a magazine of news and ideas from around the world, and we encourage you to subscribe. Just go to foreignpolicy.com/subscribe. Doha Debates is a production of Qatar Foundation, where the most urgent issues of our time are discussed and debated. Tune in at dohadebates.com.

On the next episode, we hear about the US soccer negotiations for gender parity.

CLIP OF AMERICAN WOMAN SPEAKING:

If we didn’t figure out how to equalize World Cup prize money, we were never going to resolve equal pay.

JENN: That episode, coming up on The Negotiators. I’m Jenn Williams.