Show Notes
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 rival gangs in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. It had a significant impact: Gang-related murders reportedly dropped 44 percent in Watts in the first two years after the treaty was signed. Aqeela Sherrills grew up in Watts and was one of the key negotiators of the truce. He is currently the co-founder and leader of the Community-Based Public Safety Collective, and recently partnered with the White House on preventing gun violence. He shared his story with Negotiators host Jennifer Williams. The Negotiators is a collaboration between Doha Debates and Foreign Policy.
More from The Negotiators
In a special season-ending bonus episode recorded live at Doha Forum, International Peace Institute President Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein sits down with former U.S. negotiator Rob Malley to reflect on the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal. In this wide-ranging conversation, Malley revisits why earlier talks failed, the realities shaping diplomacy today, and what future negotiators must understand if these conflicts are ever to be resolved.
The United States and Iran have sparred for decades. But in 2015, during President Barack Obama’s second term, the two countries successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known more plainly as the Iran nuclear deal. The deal was hailed as a breakthrough in much of the world, but it also had its critics. In 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA, and Iran went back to expanding its nuclear program.
When her son went missing in Sri Lanka’s civil war, Visaka Dharmadasa began organizing other families of missing soldiers. What started as a search for answers led her and a small group of mothers across front lines to meet with the Tamil Tigers. Soon, Dharmadasa found herself shuttling messages between the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government, opening a rare channel of communication that helped build trust. In this episode, Dharmadasa reflects on loss, shuttle diplomacy, and why women’s participation in peace efforts still matters 25 years after U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325.
In 2000, Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini arrived in New York with a simple yet radical idea: to lobby the U.N. Security Council from the outside and ensure women were recognized as central to peace and security, not sidelined from it.
Developing countries are the least responsible for climate change, but they are the most affected by it. That’s why the Alliance of Small Island States first proposed a fund to mitigate that damage back in 1991.