An Good Agreement
The “instrumental” school does not attribute the same centrality to the agreement, the negotiation of which is only one of the many stages of a complex transition. It should therefore not bear the burden of the whole process alone. Concerns about the inadequacies of the agreement in terms of wording, feasibility or legitimacy should be weighed against the urgent need to maintain the momentum of the entire transition. Ambiguities, shortcomings and even flagrant impossibilities are acceptable costs. Over time, ambiguities will be removed, gaps will be filled, changes will be made to account for impossibilities and, most importantly, the relevance of seemingly intractable problems will erode as parties learn to value concessions rather than confrontation. In this sense, implementation cannot and should not only be seen as a reflection of the original agreement. If you use these phrases, you`re not doing as good a job as you could be. Well, that`s where I went and used the word good, but only because I ask you all to do a good job. I cannot say that quantitatively.
There is more than one school of thought regarding the role and importance of peace agreements in the overall process of negotiated settlement of an internal conflict. An approach that can perhaps be described as “constitutive” considers the content of the peace agreement as the key to the overall process, which will reflect its strengths and weaknesses, its virtues and shortcomings. A “good” agreement will lead to a lasting peace; a “bad” agreement will lead to delays, setbacks or even the collapse of the peace process. This approach thus underlines the strict requirements that the provisions of an agreement must meet: precision of the wording, technical feasibility, international legitimacy, detailed timetable for implementation, among others. One implication is that a mediator is obliged to ensure that negotiations between the parties meet these high standards, even if it means standing up to impatient spectators and the parties themselves. While we`re at it, let`s remove the words “good” and “bad” from the scientific literature in almost all cases. Science is not a place of value judgments. Judgments, of course.
Opinions, observations and speculations are all acceptable if they are marked as such. (“We believe.. is a perfectly legitimate way to start a sentence when you need to tell the reader that you don`t know something for sure.) Your data may or may not correspond to something. He agrees with simulation in the estimated uncertainty, or he does not. He agrees with Dr. X`s prediction [quote goes here] at 5%, or it doesn`t. None of us know what you think is a good deal or why until you give us a number that we can replicate or understand. Let`s face it, these sentences have no meaning and, in my opinion, no place in the scientific literature.
I used them in papers before I realized they have no value. If the deal is good, tell us how good it is: use a number, RMS, percentage, etc. The “good approval” of one researcher is the “non-convergence” of another researcher. Is your agreement good for a picometer? or, just because it`s better than the mistakes you saw when you collected the first data? Does your data “match qualitatively” because the vertices are more or less aligned and the slope is about the same? I could relax a bit if the “good agreement” is somehow linked to the word “qualitative.” .