Transformations and Critical Moments in Negotiations

Transformation is not a new concept in the conflict literature. It forms the foundation for a particular school of thought in mediation and plays a major role in the analysis of international conflicts. More-over, it shapes the goals and processes for managing public conflicts through dialogue and democracy. Although transformation surfaces in a variety of conflict management arenas, this concept has received only a modicum of attention in the negotiation literature. This article centers on the definition and features of critical moments in negotiation that might foster conflict transformation. It draws from the literature on conflict transformation and applies this work to negotiations. First, the author explores the definitions, characteristics, and types of shifts that set up transformations. Then she examines internal and external factors that contribute to transformative moments. Finally, the essay concludes with a discussion of distinctions between transformation and related constructs, suggestions for conducting research, and implications of this work for negotiation research.     

Anxious Moments: Openings in Negotiation

Even experienced negotiators often feel anxiety about beginning a new negotiation. Subjects in this study described these opening moments with vivid imagery and metaphors, among them: lurking wolves, alligators, tightropes, and rushing trains. People's deep-seated worries can be triggered by several factors: doubts about personal competence, fear about the attitudes and behavior of other parties, and the inevitable uncertainty about what path negotiation will take. The author compares openings in other contexts, notably in the arts, to illustrate how the impact of anxiety need not be entirely negative. These feelings can also spark creativity and support constructive relationships.     

Transitions through Out-of-Keeping Acts

Within a negotiation, when an act by one party is out-of-keeping with the previous moves and underlying logic of the interaction, the act and those that follow hold the potential for creating a transition to a new logic of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the presence and role of seven distinct types of transitions resulting from out-of-keeping acts across ten complex legal negotiations. The data reveal that a critical feature differentiating across the types is the abruptness/gradualness of the transition. We explore the combination of relational, informational, and procedural acts comprising the transitions and find that all three components are present across transitions, but in different proportions and orders. Understanding the role of out-of-keeping acts in negotiations facilitates a more complete picture of the microprocesses involved in the creation of critical moments in negotiations.     

Cultivating Dialogue: From Fragmentation to Relationality in Conflict Interaction

This article builds on the tendency in recent decades in the field of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to analyze conflict and its transformation from a relational perspective. It surveys developments in twentieth‐century philosophy that support the ongoing quest to explore the self in ADR from a relational perspective. It then shows how the concept of dialogue provides a framework for understanding conflict transformation from a relational perspective, by exploring the relational foundations of dialogue. It also draws a connection between the growing use of mindfulness practices in conflict settings and the practice of dialogue, suggesting that Buddhist philosophy and practices can help cultivate relational awareness and dialogue. The article therefore suggests that incorporating dialogue and exploring its relational characteristics can assist ADR scholars and practitioners to develop further practices that can promote collaboration by shifting disputants from adversarial and fragmented orientations to more relational mindsets.     

Veneers and Underlayments: Critical Moments and Situational Redefinition

Surface agreements about the social definition of a situation, or what Erving Goffman calls veneers of consensus, are necessary for social interaction to be coherent. But why and when do social definitions change? In this article the author examines critical moments as points at which change may potentially take place. The author suggests that change is possible when a breach has occurred — an event, action, statement which is inconsistent with the current social definition. However, change depends on whether individuals ignore the breach, oppose it, or legitimize it. The author introduces the notion of an underlayment: the attitudes, that is, the beliefs, knowledge, preferences, and normative commitments individuals have about a particular social situation. He argues that whether a particular veneer of consensus will change in the face of a breach is determined, in part, by the underlayment that supports that veneer.     

Negotiated Exits from Organized Crime? Building Peace in Conflict and Crime‐affected Contexts

This article contributes to a growing discussion in peace mediation and peacebuilding circles about the issue of dialogue and negotiation with organized crime groups. The article seeks to demystify this issue by exploring the range of practice from confrontation to accommodation and transformation. The article argues that there is nothing unusual about engaging in dialogue and negotiation with organized crime groups and that those strategies have been used for decades in crime and violence reduction efforts in urban and civil war settings. In their quest to resolve conflict in violent and fragile contexts, mediators and negotiators can adapt existing peacebuilding practice to help structure dialogue processes with organized crime groups.     

Towards global relational theorizing: a dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relationalism

Abstract

What is ‘relational theorizing’ in International Relations and what can it offer? This article introduces a thematic section that responds to these questions by showing two things. First, relational theorizing is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of analyses that begin with relations rather than the putative essences of constitutively autonomous actors. Second, relational theorizing has emerged from different geo-linguistic traditions, and a relational approach to International Relations (IR) can offer the language and space for increased and productive engagement beyond Anglophone scholarship. This thematic section takes a significant step in this direction by staging a dialogue between Sinophone and Anglophone scholarship on relational IR theorizing. Such an engagement shows points of comparison and contrast, convergence and divergence. In this way, the essays presented here contribute to developing a more ‘global’ IR.     

Responding to Critical Moments with Humor, Recognition, and Hope

Having "a sense of humor" when negotiations get tough has very little to do with being funny. Enacting rather than claiming, performing rather than arguing, mediators' humor reveals multiple meanings and uncertainties, multiple perspectives and their limits, and parties' needs while generating opportunities to learn. Humor can go wrong, and mediators stress a sine qua non: it must be respectful, never used at the expense of a negotiating party. At critical moments in negotiations, humor can be an important tool, if improvised with regard to tone, timing, affect, and respect. Mediators use humor to deconstruct and reconstruct parties' presumptions of mediators' authority; to recognize vulnerability, create moments of intimacy, and suggest possible community; to acknowledge painful histories and enable difficult conversations; to provide safety, release, and new collaborative openings. Mediators' use of humor can signal possibility and hope and, not least of all, level power to encourage autonomy and build capacity — thus creating deliberative space and encouraging deliberative practice as well.     

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.     

Dumb Barter: A Seminal Form of Negotiation

Negotiation requires communication, but not necessarily verbal exchanges. Adjustments can be achieved incrementally by other means. This article will examine how some parties have managed to strike a deal in situations characterized by total distrust and even hostility, asymmetric power relations, major cultural differences, extreme logistical difficulties in reaching the place in which the trade is to be made, and several additional process risks by employing a type of bargaining known as “dumb barter.” This process presents a distinct paradigm with a specific and unique rationale. Sometimes called “silent trade,” it has been observed in many places (especially West Africa) for more than two millennia. It may well be the oldest form of trade negotiation and is still practiced in some parts of the world. An examination of this unlikely but real and effective process can also provide negotiation theorists with some useful insights into the fundamental nature of negotiation.     

Analyzing Complex Negotiations

Complex negotiations have been conducted for a long time, although until somewhat recently analysts had yet to conceptualize their fundamental nature, their essential elements, and the relationship between these elements. Over the past forty years, however, scholars have gained increasing understanding of the forces that shape negotiation complexity. In this article, I first review literature that has explored complex negotiations, which is found primarily in negotiation studies, and studies of international negotiation. I then develop a five‐part theoretical framework for analyzing complex negotiations: (1) identification of negotiation architecture, (2) context analysis, (3) process analysis, (4) structural and relational analysis, and (5) decisional analysis. I then demonstrate the utility of this five‐part framework by examining the U.S.–Australia Free Trade negotiations that produced the Australia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 2005. Finally, the article closes with some observations on complex negotiations and their analysis.     

Departures in Negotiation: Extensions and New Directions

The conception of turning points advanced in this essay emphasizes events that occur in a chronological sequence which the author, in his previous work, has incorporated into a framework for case analysis. The framework covers three stages: precipitants that trigger change; departures which are the reaction to the precipitant; and consequences, which refer to the direction the negotiation takes as a result of the departure. Building on his earlier work, the author uses examples of a less-bounded international negotiation and cases culled from the headlines to demonstrate the framework's generality. He then considers the concept at the individual, relational, and collective levels in an attempt to probe the psychological and social processes that occur before, during, and after departures (turning points); and may be in fact, the underlying impetus for departures.     

People‐to‐People Dialogue between North and South Korea: Looking Ahead

The division in the Korean peninsula has lasted more than a half century, and the people on both sides have become quite different in their values, beliefs, behaviors, and lifestyles. As the two sides have increased their exchanges and communications for the last several years, the biggest challenge Korea and its people face is: “How should human relationships be rebuilt after suffering from chronic conflicts between adversary states?” This article considers track two diplomacy/people‐to‐people dialogue as a response to this question and reviews the issues and obstacles related to initiating such a dialogue.     

Intersection of disability and gender: multi-layered experiences of Ethiopian women with disabilities

This article explores the intersection of disability and gender through the experiences of Ethiopian women with disabilities using household chores as an example. As these women are often hidden at home, little literature is available on them. Thus this article aims to highlight the lived experiences of women with disabilities who are or have been at home. The interviewed women introduce peer support as an important means to increase their self-esteem and face stigma in their daily lives in a positive manner through dialogue and negotiation. The paper further suggests employing women with disabilities as a means to enable them to play a significant role in development cooperation by changing the status quo towards equality.     

Terrorism and trust in Northern Ireland

While terrorism produces certainty that the ‘other’ intends to do harm, and chronic uncertainty about the potential for terrorist attack, trust requires the negotiation of uncertainty. This paper begins with a review of the existing literature on trust and terrorism, as a point of departure for analysing the usefulness of thinking about trust as the negotiation of uncertainty. The four substantive sections that follow examine the 1981 Hunger strikes, the beginnings of political dialogue, the construction of cross-border institutions, and the potential for developing emotional trust in the Northern Irish context. In each of the areas, the development of a rudimentary trust has hinged on the destabilisation of mutually exclusive identity categories, defined in conflictual opposition to the ‘other’, and the opening of a space for the construction of multiple and overlapping identities and the negotiation between them.     

Regionalism's multiple negotiations: ASEAN in East Asia

This article explains East Asian regionalism as the product of two sets of negotiations. The first negotiation is between East Asia on the one hand and global forces and structures on the other. The second negotiation is intra-regional and includes a critical negotiation between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-Southeast Asia and East/Northeast Asia, which also provides the primary focus of this article. This article details ASEAN's extensions into East Asian regionalism as part of interdependent efforts to adapt transitioning global and regional systems. Conceiving these regional negotiations to be not just economic and utilitarian but first and foremost normative, this article details the opportunities and dilemmas represented by ‘East Asia’ for ASEAN, ASEAN-Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia as a meaningful organizing principle. Dilemmas associated with the ASEAN Plus Three process, an East Asia free-trade area and the ASEAN Charter provide illustrations of East Asia's understood challenges for Southeast Asia in addition to the ways that Southeast Asian agencies have been shaping the form and content of recent East Asian efforts and also how regional-global and intra-ASEAN negotiations continue to provide key constraints.     

One Reasonable and Inquiring Man: 12 Angry Men as a Negotiation-Teaching Tool

The film 12 Angry Men is often shown in law school and business school to teach lessons about negotiation, group process, communication, decision making, team building, leadership, and critical thinking. It effectively and powerfully depicts the ways in which a successful negotiator can make critical moves and capitalize on turning points in a negotiation. It also illustrates vividly such key negotiation concepts as the difference between positions and interests and the role of such skills as coalition building, framing, and active listening. For these reasons, 12 Angry Men can be a powerful negotiation teaching tool.     

Negotiation and Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis focuses on the ways that language and symbols shape interpretations of negotiators' identities, instrumental activity, and relationships. These meanings arise, in part, from language patterns that bargainers employ while they are involved in a negotiation. This article provides a brief overview of research findings on language use in six areas of negotiation: strategy, relational development, identity management, emotional expression, issue development, and framing. It also employs a case example of a real estate negotiation to illustrate how discourse patterns discursively construct the nature of risk, certainty, and loss–gain through framing and issue development.