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This chapter examines whether and how peace agreement language aims to induce compliance through the way in which provisions are framed. This examination confirms the importance of precision to certain types of peace agreement obligation, but demonstrates how peace agreements rely equally on constructive ambiguity. Here too lies an alternative challenge for drafting of peace agreement obligations. Rather than a challenge of attempting to maximise precision over ambiguity, this challenge lies in the difficulty of crafting obligations that will serve both short term ceasefire commitments and longer term conflict transformation goals, and assists a transition between the two. Thus, precision has drawbacks in limiting the peace agreement's development in the long-term, while constructive ambiguity can be used to begin to build shared constitutional frameworks in divided societies.

This chapter argues that the UK territorial constitution rests upon a profound ambiguity about its central principles. Parliamentary sovereignty remains at the core of how the English understand their constitution. Yet in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, alternative doctrines have flourished, especially since devolution, which conceded the right of each nation to determine its own form of government (popular sovereignty) and established a non-majoritarian system of power-sharing and cross-border governance in (Northern) Ireland. These developments imply that the UK is a voluntary ‘family of nations’ not a unitary state. Yet Westminster has never formally conceded this point and devolution could in theory be reversed by a simple parliamentary majority. Constructive ambiguity has been retained. However, the historic tendency to allow constitutional theory and practice to diverge may be unsustainable in the light of the EU referendum result and the wider mood of English political disaffection that Brexit has tapped into.

Chapter 5 takes a different direction to the rest of the book by considering positive transformation in protracted conflicts. Theoretically informative cases of peace transformation are those which initially demonstrated high levels of entrenched ethnocentric framing, majority nationalist mobilization and human rights violations yet actors have nonetheless managed to catalyze a process of transformation. The chapter focuses on four examples of partial transformation in the Eastern Mediterranean region namely the Macedonian name dispute (i.e. the 1995 Interim Agreement), the 1999-earthquake diplomacy between Greece and Turkey; the ‘democratic opening’ of the AKP government in Turkey and finally successful confidence building measures in Cyprus. It argues that intelligently designed and mediated institutional frameworks could neutralize the impact of ethnonationalist frames or co-exist with them in a stable symbiotic relationship, allowing ethnic communities to adapt narratives at their own pace and in their preferred direction as the peace process evolves.

Lord Bew has argued in his Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006 that the failure of the power-sharing experiment in 1973-74, and especially on the proposal for a Council of Ireland, was largely the product of inflated nationalist aspirations encountering raised unionist anxieties amidst exaggerated official assumptions about what was politically achievable. These three As can be said to have fostered a fourth A - ambiguity - which was destructive of the project for political stability. If these four As together constitute a template for instability, there appears at first sight to be an irony. Has not ‘constructive ambiguity’ contributed to the enduring peace since the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement? This chapter suggests that the experience of 1973-74 still applies in Northern Ireland and that it is the absence of ambiguity which makes aspiration, anxiety and assumption institutionally manageable.

This chapter takes up the issue that the LOLR function may cause moral hazard by banks who may rely on it ex ante and therefore relax even further their liquidity risk management. Different approaches to addressing this problem are presented, such as constructive ambiguity, interest rate surcharges, stigmatization, or liquidity regulation. Simple examples are provided in which liquidity regulation is shown to be welfare-enhancing. It is however also shown that the currently envisaged liquidity regulation framework interacts in a suboptimal way with monetary policy implementation, which leads potentially to distortions, more central bank risk-taking, and an undermining of the effectiveness of regulation.