Carolyn Stephenson
Professor of Population Studies, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai'i
Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003
This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
A: Paying attention to political power is another critical thing. Years ago when I started looking at Track II, I said, "Why can't we all just get along, if we just treat each other nicely and so forth," it doesn't work. There are ways in which that can be useful but one has to pay attention to the power implications of that when one is doing it.
Q: What does that mean, the power implications? How do they affect Track II?
A: If in this situation, a political administration on one side could simply deny passes, then everything that you've done in the last 3 months, including the ground work simply collapsed, so you had to be able to know, what was going on in terms of the political dynamics of the negotiations at the same time that you might be planning your Track II event. Some of it was who knew who, who was in your group, who's brother happened to be this, who's father-in-law happened to do this who knew that yesterday they did this on the other negotiations.
Q: So just having that knowledge of what's going on in Track I process can prepare you better to do, I guess in some cases you might even decide to call off whatever Track II project you were doing.
A: Yeah, that's it.