Negotiating in a Complex World

Drawing on the literatures on negotiation and conflict resolution as well as research on international diplomacy, the author proposes a framework for understanding complexity in real-world negotiations. Rejecting models of the process that are simplistic, sterile, or static, he argues that complexity is inherent in negotiation. In ten propositions, he lays out key dimensions of complexity and ways that skilled negotiators can manage it. The propositions focus attention on the ways negotiators create and claim value, shape perceptions and learn, work within structure and shape the structure, negotiate and mediate, link and de-link negotiations, create momentum and engineer impasses, and work outside and inside. The author also highlights the importance of organizational learning in negotiation, noting that most negotiators manage multiple negotiations in parallel, and most organizations have many negotiators doing similar things.     

From Aristotle to Sadat: A Short Strategic Persuasion Framework for Negotiators

Persuasion is undoubtedly a critical negotiation skill. But while the literature has examined its role in negotiation, few, if any, scholars or practitioners have offered a clear strategic framework for putting persuasion into negotiation practice. The ethos, pathos, and logos modes of persuasion elucidated by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. provide a clear, understandable, and easy‐to‐apply framework that students and trainees can use to prepare for negotiation, to deploy during the negotiation process, and to conduct debriefings following a negotiation. In this article, I describe how to apply this Aristotelian framework and explain an additional dimension of persuasion in negotiation that I believe is also critical: timing. Through the real‐world example of Anwar Sadat and his trip to Jerusalem, I demonstrate how this framework has worked in practice.     

Sources of power in coalition building

This article analyzes the coalition-building tactics employed by the Bush administration during the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–91. To provide a basis for generalization to other situations, we have developed a conceptual framework for understanding sources of power in coalition building. This framework draws upon research in the social psychology of persuasion, mass communications and negotiation analysis. While the actions of the Bush administration during the Persian Gulf crisis provide a textbook case for applying our conceptual framework, we believe that it could be employed much more broadly to analyze the efforts of leaders to effect political and organizational change.     

The Global Importance of Illiberal Moderates

In contrast to the claim that the most significant fault line in contemporary global affairs is between the civilisation of the West and all others, this essay argues that the schism between those who advance their values through violence and those who rely on persuasion, both of which are present in all civilisations, is the greatest source of conflict in the post-Cold-War era. Moderates come in many stripes: some are liberal, such as Reform Jews and Social Democrats, while most others are illiberal, including many Muslim religious leaders. All moderates, however, share in common a principled rejection of violence. Polls and reports from around the world bear out that a conviction of the value of persuasion over coercion does not depend on faith in democracy or secularism. The West should ally itself with such moderates, no matter how liberal or illiberal their orientation.     

Leaders Without Borders: Familiarity as a Moderator of Transnational Source Cue Effects

The role of source cue effects in transnational persuasion (in which a foreign actor attempts to persuade an audience in another jurisdiction) is largely unexplored in both the political communication and international relations literatures. This article investigates transnational source cue effects using two source cue experiments that test the persuasiveness of German chancellor Angela Merkel and UK prime minister David Cameron in a Canadian context. The experiments were embedded in an online survey administered to student participants at a Canadian university in January 2011. As might be expected, the foreign leaders exerted positive source cue effects among participants who held positive impressions of the leaders and backlash effects among those who held strongly negative impressions. These effects, however, were moderated by participants’ level of political awareness, with the largest effects observed among participants who had an intermediate level of awareness. It is argued that this nonlinear moderating effect can be attributed to the countervailing effects of attitude stability and source familiarity (both of which are associated with political awareness) on individuals’ susceptibility to source cue effects. Finally, cueing David Cameron had approximately equivalent source cue effects on participants’ attitudes towards government spending on foreign aid and welfare, suggesting that foreign leaders may be able to move opinion on domestic as well as on foreign policy issues. Overall, these results validate existing models of source cue effects in a transnational context and point to the scope and limitations of national leaders’ ability to engage in direct public diplomacy.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix: Question Wordings for Survey Experiments; Table A1: Balance Tests for Afghanistan and Cameron Cue Experiments; and Table A2: Underlying Salience of Domestic and Foreign Policy Spending.]     

A ‘Greater Chinese Union’

Lasting peace across the Taiwan Strait cannot be reached before the leaders in Beijing and Taipei agree on the framework within which a political settlement can be discussed. This article examines one possible end goal for lasting peace in the Strait, a ‘Greater Chinese Union’. This model is founded on principles guiding the unique relationship between Finland and the Åland Islands as well as centuries old Chinese practices of governance. The article intentionally distances itself from the present, day-to-day antagonistic politics of the Taiwan Strait and instead describes the framework within which a peaceful settlement could be negotiated.

     

Leaders,Tenure, and the Politics of Sovereign Credit

Sovereign creditworthiness is as much a function of politics as economic fundamentals. Previous research has focused on the relationship between creditworthiness and political factors such as regime type, regional effects, and international organization membership. These factors, while important, often change slowly and do not always capture the more dynamic political determinants of creditworthiness. As an alternative, this study focuses on the role of leaders. We argue that leaders’ tenure reduces uncertainty in the sovereign credit market. Time in power allows leaders to better manage expectations related to sovereign credit policy of both domestic supporters and market actors. As a result, we expect that creditworthiness improves as a leader’s tenure increases. We find supporting evidence for our argument using two distinct empirical approaches: panel data analysis and a natural experiment. Our findings provide a better understanding of the relationship between leaders, politics, and sovereign credit.     

When Negotiations Become Routine: Not Reinventing the Wheel While Thinking Outside the Box

In this article, we seek to apply the insights of recent research on routine to the context of repeated negotiations. To demonstrate the link between both concepts, we introduce an analytical framework in which we identify different negotiation situations in which routine can develop. We distinguish two dimensions of the negotiation process: a problem-solving dimension and a communication dimension. Our framework for analyzing the role of routine in negotiation is built around these two dimensions. We define those skills that we argue in repeated negotiations can help negotiators manage particular kinds of negotiations depending on the level and type of routinization that type of negotiation involves. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework is inherently dynamic, which we illustrate with simplified business examples.     

Enhancing Community Leadership Negotiation Skills to Build Civic Capacity

Most intra‐ and interorganizational decision making entails negotiations, and even naturally talented negotiators can improve with training. Executive trainings for managers and leadership programs for publicly elected officials, public managers, and nongovernmental organizations frequently include negotiation modules. These efforts, however, have yet to reach community leaders who also need to develop their negotiation skills. We propose that members of disadvantaged low‐income communities who lack educational and economic opportunities, and are less able to advocate for their own interest, need to build and strengthen their civic capacity, including their negotiation skills, to become more effective parties to decisions affecting them. While many professionals and executives have access to training, such opportunities are less accessible to the leaders of these disadvantaged communities. Although such leaders draw from their own heuristic knowledge, skills, and abilities, they could also benefit from sharpening their negotiation skills. We propose that the multidimensional understanding of their community that members accumulate through direct experience is indispensable, nontransferable to outsiders, and not teachable through in‐class activities. Leaders with the ability to leverage knowledge and assets to connect effectively to community insiders as well as to outside people, institutions, and resources, however, possess some specific inherent personality traits as well an understanding of social structures, strategies, and agency, which can be taught and learned. Such skills as how to conduct negotiations around the table and away from it and how to identify community members who can help and how to rally them are also teachable. The cases were chosen to illustrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that make these leaders effective in and beyond their communities. We highlight those KSAs that we think are teachable in the framework of a negotiation module in community leadership training to enhance civic capacity for community betterment.     

Leaderisation in foreign policy: performing the role of EU High Representative

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the mediatised context of foreign policy provides new opportunities for political leaders to both frame and project their own leadership role to new audiences. The past ten years have witnessed a sharp rise in political leaders’ use of new social media to communicate on a range of foreign policy issues. We argue that this new media context of foreign policy, combined with a bolstered leadership mandate, has been central to the construction of a more visible public leadership role for the EU High Representative in the post-Lisbon era. Departing from recent scholarship on performative leadership and new media in International Relations theory, we develop an original theoretical framework drawing on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy of impression management. We employ the concept of “leaderisation” to analyse how mediatisation shapes the leadership process in terms of personification and drama to enable new forms of interaction with followers. We apply this framework in an illustrative case study focusing on the process of negotiating the EU Global Strategy. This diplomatic process provided the High Representative Mogherini with a stage on which she could frame herself in a central leadership position vis-à-vis European citizens to mobilise greater legitimacy for the EU as a global actor.     

Coordinating intermediary peace efforts

Multiple peace-making efforts by intermediaries can be a blessing or a curse, particularly in ethnic, religious, or other types of communal conflicts. The author outlines four general ways in which multiple interventions can hamper peacemaking, as well as the different types of intermediaries and de-escalating activities that can help efforts to achieve conflict resolution. Multiple intermediaries can work effectively either in sequence or contemporaneously; coordination of such activities is vital. Based on the analysis presented here, the author offers four different strategies to maximize the benefits of multiple intermediaries in peacemaking.He was the founding director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflict at Syracuse, has written extensively on international conflict resolution, and is completing the book,Toward Constructive Struggle.     

A Conceptual Framework for Modeling Automated Negotiations in Multiagent Systems

In fully automated e‐negotiation all involved parties are software agents, so negotiation takes place in a multiagent system between software agents that have been developed as a computer system for automating tasks in a specific application domain. A multiagent system is a group of agents that interact and cooperate with each other to fulfill their objectives or to improve their performance. How do these agents negotiate with each other to manage their task interdependencies? What negotiation mechanisms are needed? These are important questions. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for modeling and developing automated negotiation systems. This framework represents and specifies all the necessary concepts and entities for developing a negotiation system as well as the relationships among these concepts. This framework can also be used to model human negotiations scenarios for analyzing these types of negotiations and simulating them with multiagent systems. The work reported in this article is the first unified framework that represents all the needed elements for modeling and developing automated negotiation systems and existing relationships between them.     

Decision Making in Autocratic Regimes: A Poliheuristic Perspective

This paper applies the poliheuristic theory of foreign policy decision making to non-democratic states. Poliheuristic theory asserts that state leaders assign primary importance to their political survival; however, the meaning of "the political" varies dramatically from country to country. Furthermore, the types of actors who hold leaders politically accountable also vary between countries. Consequently, leaders often pursue vastly different means of ensuring their political survival. The author uses the common distinction between single-party, military, and personalist autocracies to show that apparently arbitrary differences in autocratic leaders' political concerns actually vary in systematic and potentially predictable ways. Because this argument is generalized to non-democratic states as a whole, it has important implications for the ways in which democratic states craft their policies toward autocracies.     

Ripening Within? Strategies Used by Rebel Negotiators to End Ethnic War

This article explores what strategies rebels use to prepare their ethnic community for negotiated peace. Proposed strategies are distilled from relevant theory and systematically investigated in case analyses of peace negotiations in Sri Lanka, Indonesian Aceh, and Senegal. The empirical findings indicate that although a coercive military capacity underpinned claims to ethnic representation, coercion did not dominate during the prenegotiation phase. During negotiations, noncoercive persuasion, as well as collective and selective incentives, clearly dominated. Moreover, the most important measures were internal to the negotiating rebel group. The successful rebel negotiator appeared to “mobilize in reverse” by initially targeting the core of military leaders followed by competitor groups and constituents. The article systematically examines across cases what measures rebel negotiators have used to “ripen” their own community, how these measures have been sequenced, and against whom they have been directed. The findings have important implications for the concepts of ripeness and prenegotiation and their requirements. The study underscores in particular the relevance of rebels' nonviolent commitment signals, something that has been largely overlooked in the research on nonstate armed actors. The policy implications suggest the possible benefits of third‐party assistance to efforts to promote communication, public outreach, and procedural transparency on the nonstate side in connection with peace talks.     

A Temporal Model of Negotiation Linkage Dynamics

This article explores negotiation linkage dynamics (how one negotiation influences or determines the process or outcome of another) by examining three bilateral trade treaty negotiations conducted by the governments of Australia, Singapore, and the U.S. from 2000 to 2004. After developing a temporal framework of negotiation linkage, the study examines how one negotiation can influence another negotiation when time is treated as an independent variable and negotiation process and outcome are treated as dependent variables. The study's findings can be used to help negotiation scholars and practitioners strategically manage the opportunities and challenges inherent in negotiation linkage dynamics. The study concludes with a proposed research agenda and a temporal enhancement of the negotiation paradigm.     

Strategic planning through a participatory learning and action framework: a Kenyan study

This paper reflects on the use of a participatory learning and action (PLA) framework in a strategic planning process (SPP) at a primary school in rural Kenya. Successes and challenges are discussed, focusing on the barriers to fully implementing the PLA framework. Additionally, lessons learnt and ways forward for participatory SPPs are outlined. The PLA framework allowed the project stakeholders to engage in a planning process that gave participants a voice in the process. Although PLA methodology faces shortcomings, the application of this model is a step towards making community development more sustainable.     

Covert Communication: The Intelligibility and Credibility of Signaling in Secret

Can states credibly communicate their intentions through covert policy tools, despite the absence of credibility-enhancing publicity? Most extant research suggests covert action and secrecy in general are uniquely uninformative and often used as an alternative to signaling. Yet episodes such as Richard Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia suggest that leaders have used covert action to convey intentions and coerce adversaries. This article builds a theoretical framework for understanding signaling in the covert sphere, developing reasons why states find covert communication both intelligible (that is, the basic intended message is understandable) and credible (that is, the message is believable). We argue that two target audiences—local allies and strategic adversaries—tend to observe covert action and that the costs and risks incurred by initiating and expanding covert action credibly convey resolve. We assess our arguments empirically through careful process tracing of a set of nested covert interventions by Soviet and American leaders in conflicts in Angola and Afghanistan. Drawing on a trove of recently declassified material, we assess intentions and inferences related to covert signaling. We find that both strategic adversaries and local partners observed and drew inferences about resolve. Covert lethal aid programs thereby served as a credible indicator of resolve through three mechanisms we identify in the paper: sunk costs, counter-escalation risks, and domestic political risks. These findings have important implications for the study of coercive bargaining, secrecy, and reputation. They also shed light on an important policy tool contemporary policymakers will likely use, suggesting the kinds of effects covert action has and elucidating the basic interpretive framework needed to communicate messages with new methods like covert cyber attacks.     

The role of mandates in third party intervention

Conclusion Mandate, as a noun, is the charge that authorizes and legitimizes an intervenor's actions. The intervenor may act at the bidding of the disputants or of third party stakeholders. Mandate provides a functional taxonomy of intervenors—from go-betweens to conciliators to mediators to arbitrators to dictators. Mandate affords a perspective for analyzing initiation, process, and evaluation of intervention. Useful heuristics have been proposed for categorizing the ways in which intervenors restricted to persuasion, such as mediators, can attempt to change beliefs. Future work might seek to determine conditions under which an intervenor's persuasive abilities may change beliefs about available alternatives, about the probability that the alternative will lead to certain outcomes, and about the value of the outcome. Sanda Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio 44115.George T. Duncan is Professor of Statistics at the School of Urban and Public Affairs, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Penn. 15213.The authors thank Mark Kamlet for many valuable discussions, Linda Argote for her thoughtful suggestions, and Christina Duncan for her criticial reading.     

Peer Consultation for Mediators: The Use of a Holding Environment to Support Mediator Reflection, Inquiry, and Self-Knowing

In order to help the parties in mediation address their interests, concerns, and responses to the conflict, the mediator must monitor and manage his or her own inner thoughts, emotions, and feelings throughout the process lest they negatively influence the outcomes of the mediation. Peer consultation offers one approach that can be used effectively to support the mediator's inquiry into practice dilemmas and invite self-knowing that benefits the mediator as well as the parties in the mediation. The effectiveness of a group consultation process, however, depends on the development of "a holding environment" that can provide a safe and confidential space within which such an inquiry can occur. The mediation process is improved when the mediator is able to sustain relational and emotional tension within herself and between the parties long enough for new understandings and actions to develop.