Managing Regional Conflict: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Embargo of Qatar

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This article will explore the arrangement of and relations between states inside ROs as they move from conflict to negotiation, as well as the different types of negotiations that they choose – bilateral, mediated, multiparty, or hybrid. In doing so, it will illuminate the opportunities that exist at the regional level to develop inclusive regional frameworks for mediation and negotiation and, in the right circumstances, effective security communities. Broadly defined, a security community exists when sovereign states can overcome a lack of mutual trust and difficult regional environments to develop new forms of cooperative security that prioritize self‐restraint and the peaceful resolution of differences and reduce the expectation of the need to resort to organized violence to settle interstate disputes (Adler and Barnett, 1988; Adler and Greve, 2009).