The 57th Session of the Commission of the Status of Women (CSW57) was an international platform for state and regional representatives to present their outcome reports and resolutions, as well as to engage in dialogue sessions on the theme of the elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls. This paper, published in the Social and Behavioural Science journal, examines the language of negotiation involved in reaching the Agreed Conclusions of CSW57, based on research that analyses a corpus of discourse samples taken from nine days of dialogues between state and regional representations.
The selection of corpus for analysis is based on discourses that deal with three contentious issues: reproductive rights, domestic violence and violence sanctioned by custom, tradition and religion. Analysis of the written texts is based on discursive strategies in their various forms: thematic structures and underlying assumptions; key words as a mode of hegemony and focus of struggle; interpretative perspectives that underlie choice of words; and politeness/compromise strategies.
The analysis revealed many properties of the language of negotiations between member states of diverse cultural, socio-economic and religious backgrounds, including but not limited to: semantic changes, whereby controversial words and listings offensive to the cultural sensibilities of certain member states are couched in general, ambiguous, or more palatable terms; that all suggestions for change, deletion and alternatives are equally entertained, discussed and painstakingly recorded for a democratic airing; and that reaction to criticism is expressed either by rejecting comments as unfounded, misplaced or irrelevant and making a case against it, or by reframing the narrative so that it no longer appears as a problem.
The authors conclude that, on the whole, it can be justly claimed that the Agreed Conclusions was well received by member-states and nonstate members of CSW, and that this augurs well for the implementation of its blueprints at the regional and state levels. Furthermore, although the process of coming to an agreement in a formalised international setting is shown to be tedious, time and energy consuming, and requiring a lot of tact and patience, there is no doubt that the language of negotiation has played a significant role in leading over 100 countries to a place of acceptance and agreement.
[adapted from source]