The Negotiators

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 podcast, we look at the Watts truce in 1992—a peace agreement between ri...

This bonus episode from the podcast The Closer is a complement to our recent episode about the U.S. Soccer equal pay negotiations. While the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team is among the most decorated teams in the game, until recently, its players were paid only a fraction of what the men took home.  On The Negotiators, you heard from Cindy Parlow Cone, the president of the U.S. Soccer Federatio...

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 U.S. Soccer Federation President.   On the latest episode of The Negotiators podcast, Cone describes how far apart the two sides were at the start and...

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 UK 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 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. U.S. soccer negotiations for gender parity. How Kofi Annan mediated a political crisis in Kenya.  The Negotiators podcast is back on Sep. 19 with all new stories from people resolving some of the world’s most dramatic conflicts. Hosted by Jenn Williams, the Negotiators is a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

President Vladimir Putin recently announced that Russia would suspend its participation in the New START agreement with the United States. Putin’s move puts the last remaining nuclear arms deal between the two countries into question. Last season, we spoke with the chief U.S. envoy to the New START talks, Rose Gottemoeller. She shares the grueling process of negotiating that treaty—which was final...

Earlier 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 w...

The negotiations that led to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union lasted more than four years. During that grueling process, three different prime ministers came and went in Britain, shifting positions and occasionally roiling the talks. The one constant was Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner in charge of Brexit talks.  This week on our podcast The Negotiators, Barnier te...

The uprising in Libya that ended Muammar 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 stalle...

Criminal justice advocates have tried for decades to pass legislation to reduce the United States 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...

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 more than three decades earlier. Nearly eighty percent of the population voted in favor of a negotiation that would lead to a new charter for the country. But the negotiation pr...

In 2009, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia was about to expire. The START 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 p...

Military officers in Burkina Faso seized power last month, in the country’s second coup this year. In both cases, the main justification was 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...

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 and 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 r...

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...

This is part two of negotiator Mickey Bergman’s story about the American journalist Danny Fenster, 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.

A nuclear arms deal with Russia. Reparations for indigenous communities in Canada. A hostage release negotiated by the hostage himself.  The Negotiators podcast is back on Sep. 27 with all new stories from people resolving some of the world’s most dramatic conflicts. Hosted by Jenn Williams, the Negotiators is a production of Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.

This week, we hear from Jussi Tanner, a Finish ambassador and special envoy who negotiated the release of some 30 women and children from detention in northern Syria.

In 2014, members of the Islamist Boko Haram group abducted around 300 mostly Christian girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria, prompting outrage around the world and triggering an unparalleled social media campaign that included A-list celebrities and world leaders. Despite global attention, it ended up taking three years to negotiate the girls’ release. Many of the girls had died by then or...

Libya will hold its first-ever presidential elections on December 24th, after decades of dictatorship and years of civil war. The vote marks an important turning point for the country and is due in part to the creative diplomacy conducted there in recent years by the United Nations. On the podcast this week, we hear from Stephanie Turco Williams, the former head of the UN Support Mission in Libya,...

The Afghan government spent nearly a year trying to reach a power-sharing agreement with the Taliban—until the group’s fighters swept into Kabul this past August. Those negotiations failed to produce a deal but, in retrospect, they tell us a lot about the Taliban, about why the country fell so quickly, and about what the future holds for Afghanistan.    For an insider’s perspective, we hear this w...

On the show this week, we hear from a former gang member in Chicago who became an interrupter—a person who intervenes in potentially violent situations to prevent people from getting killed.  Ameena Matthews was born into violence. Her father ran a gang and her brother was killed on the streets of Chicago.  Eventually, she left that world and joined a group called CeaseFire. The idea was simple: f...

In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas came close to outlining a shared vision of peace between their two nations—closer than the two sides had ever come. But what really happened in those meetings? And why did they fail to clinch a deal?  This week on The Negotiators, we hear from Khaled Elgindy, who served as an advisor to the Palestinian ne...

In 2019, when U.S. relations with Iran were at a low point, a non-governmental group called The Richardson Center mediated a prisoner swap between the two countries that brought home Xiyue Wang, a Chinese American graduate student.  Mickey Bergman, the group’s vice president and executive director, helped direct the talks. He describes the negotiation on this episode. We want to hear from you! To...

The Iran nuclear deal is one of the most significant diplomatic agreements in recent history. This week on The Negotiators, we’ll hear the inside story from Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. side of the negotiations as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. She now serves as the Deputy Secretary of State. This interview was adapted from FP's First Person podcast with Sarah Wildman.