Most studies of negotiation take completed negotiations as their subject and explain how the outcome was obtained. For historians, an accurate account (or accounts) of the proceedings is a reward in itself. For social scientists, the process as a causal path becomes the focal point, whether political science, economics, sociology, psychology, or another discipline is used to provide the terms of analysis for explaining the outcome. For the practitioner, these analyses need to be translated into practical insights and advice if they are to be useful.

Some negotiations, however, do not end in a signed agreement but rather break up...

Rarely have negotiations in the Security Council been so unanimously regarded as a failure as the debates on the disarmament of Iraq in early 2003. Considering the months of increasingly bitter discord before the talks finally fell apart, the fact that the un members were united again, if only in frustration with the system, almost came as a relief. The gravity of the criticism, fueled by the oil-for-food scandal, led to a reform process that culminated in the un Reform Summit in September 2005 and to an ambitious agenda to improve the work of the organization throughout the un system....

Many perceive the 2000 Israeli-Palestinian Camp David summit as a failed negotiation because it failed to reach an agreement and was followed by the deadliest cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. However, the following analysis, presented from a practitioner’s perspective, suggests that these negotiations should be better defined as “incomplete” rather than “failed” as they did frame several conceptual breakthroughs on almost all contested issues, formulated the principles of the two-nation-states solution, and still await future detailed negotiations that ought to be conducted through a better designed process.¹

This chapter will present the fourteen days of negotiations at Camp...

The international deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program was not always characterized by coercion, threats, and unilateral action. During one period, there were direct negotiations for the purpose of achieving international oversight of the nuclear program and strengthening safeguards against nuclear weapons proliferation. Ambitious negotiations between Iran and the European Union (first led by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom and later joined by the high commissioner of the European Union for the Common Foreign and Security Policy [the e3/eu]) beginning in 2003 ultimately failed to persuade Iran to cancel plans to develop its own nuclear fuel cycle in exchange for...

The goal of this chapter is to describe factors that have contributed to the persistent failures of peace negotiations on Cyprus. Although there are several causes of this protracted deadlock, such as identity issues (see P. Terrence Hopmann’s chapter, “Issue Content and Incomplete Negotiations”), and the power issue for the two communities, this chapter attempts to delineate an essential impact that multiple and competing external stakeholders (influential foreign powers, supranational institutions, intergovernmental organizations, and ngos from various countries) have had on the peace process. Then, to show how these third parties (first level Greece and Turkey; secondary level United States,...

The Biological Weapons Convention (bwc) entered into force in 1975. It was negotiated in Geneva during the period 1968–71. The negotiations were multilateral, but they occurred during the Cold War. A deal between the United States and the Soviet Union in mid-1971 presented other states with a fait accompli on the text of the convention through the submission of identical texts of the bwc in September 1971 (Chevrier, 2006:325). While a number of states were unhappy with the text of the convention (Myrdal, 1976:272–75), the bwc was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1971 and...

History teaches us that at times a small power, due to its geographic location and relevance, can play a key role in international politics. Nineteenth-century Belgium was a rare “jewel of Europe,” a battlefield, the most sought after “prize,” and an intriguing puzzle for both eager conquerors and presumptuous European diplomats.¹ Due to its appealing strategic geographic location, this “crossroads of Europe” and “keystone” was the easiest path between France and Germany and the best avenue for entry of British goods to the Continent.² This paper will analyze Belgium’s turbulent fate in the nineteenth century, when the country found itself...

Any incomplete negotiation can be frustrating and disappointing and can often result in a sense of failure for all concerned. This outcome may be politically detrimental or personally demoralizing, but often the scope for renewed initiatives at some future date will continue to exist. But there are some negotiation situations where an inability to resolve the dilemma cooperatively can, and does, result in destruction and loss of life as the ultimate consequence. Siege situations, hostage-taking incidents, and any circumstance that explicitly involves a threat to life are replete with both the urgent drive to resolve the crisis cooperatively and the...

Rational actor models loom large in the study of international relations. When rational actors engage in bargaining and negotiation, such exchanges are then understood in terms of game theory. Some of the pioneering theory-building efforts in the field of international negotiation in the 1960s drew heavily on game theory. To be sure, game theory remains an important source of inspiration for students of international negotiation. Yet it is noteworthy that one of the most influential early works, Thomas Schelling’sThe Strategy of Conflict(1960), supplements game theory with psychological insights.

Later approaches to international negotiation emphasize the structural uncertainty experienced...

International negotiations are exchanges that involve parties who come from different nation-states. When these negotiations fail, culture is an oft-cited culprit. A search (in January 2012) on Google.com using the keywords “negotiation,” “failure,” and “culture” produced over ten million hits. One link on the first page is generally representative as it discusses how “no situation presents greater risks to strategy execution and bottom line than a cross-cultural negotiation.”¹ Moreover, a contemporaneous Google search on the keywords “why international negotiations fail” and “culture” produced over sixty million hits. The content of the hits similarly implies that intercultural competency is a challenge...

To what extent might the failure of a negotiation be due to structural factors? This chapter attempts to shed some light on the role of negotiation “structure” on international negotiations that do not end in agreement. To some degree the analysis extends to negotiations that resulted in an agreement but failed when it came time to implement. We argue that the inherent structure of international negotiations indeed is related to the failure to reach agreement. However, we note at the outset that “structure” is also a verb: negotiators structure a negotiation by their actions and omissions. The set of contextual...

Optimism and pessimism aside, the reality is that many negotiations do not end; many negotiations do not end on schedule; and, if and when negotiations do end, the outcome may be less than optimal, or worse, unsatisfactory for one or more of the parties. Cases of incomplete or unsuccessful negotiations are certainly just as commonplace as successful ones. Yet, as the editors of this volume point out, few studies have systematically examined this phenomenon from analytical and practical angles. Extending William Zartman’s (1992) fitting description of the division of labor between these two perspectives, the practitioner’s job is to avoid...

Negotiations that encounter significant obstacles in reaching agreement may be referred to as “incomplete negotiations” in that they may either continue on at great length with little or no evident progress or may be suspended, whether or not the parties intend to renew the process at some indefinite time in the future when conditions appear “ripe.” The premise of this chapter is that in at least some portion of these cases the content of the issues under negotiation may be partly responsible for the inability to bring these negotiations to a successful conclusion.

However, at best the relationship between issue...

Many international negotiations fail to result in an effective agreement. It usually takes many parties to make them succeed, but a single party alone can make them fail. Yet research in the field, both theoretical and applied, has focused almost entirely on explaining successful results. In international negotiations, as elsewhere, there should be at least as much to learn from failure as from success.

This chapter discusses how strategy affects the outcome of negotiations, and particularly how it can contribute to failure in the sense of failure to reach agreement. Of course, this is not the only aspect, because many...

Uncertainty is one of the most important causes of bargaining failure. If diplomats had complete information about one another’s preferences and bargaining power they would usually be able to craft deals that spare their countries the costs of conflict. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, acknowledged that if the United States had known that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, it would not have invaded. Saddam did not want to reveal his lack of such weapons for fear of looking weak before domestic and regional actors. Given that uncertainty—a...

There is more debate these days about the reasons for the durability of some negotiated settlements than there is about the success or failure of the negotiations in the first place. It is generally noted that negotiated settlements are usually failures at bringing an end to internal wars (the most frequent kind of wars at the moment), one-sided victory being more common, and that even negotiated settlements are not very durable (Collier et al., 2003). Similar findings occur on interstate wars (Pillar, 1983; Stedman, 1991; Wallensteen and Sollenberg, 2000). International war data for the 1946–97 half-century show twenty-four cease-fires,...

In recent years, we have witnessed several peace negotiations collapsing and peace processes being stalled. The odds of such negotiations failing are especially high in cases of internal conflict. The peace that follows an agreement is often unsatisfactory and marked by continuation of interethnic tensions, lack of order, and eruption of violence. The lack of sustainable peace is illuminated in the body of literature, which conceptualizes peace as temporary and contested, using such terms as “fragile,” and “unstable,” which reflect the acute problem of durability.

The notion of liberal democratic peace has been widely promoted by the international community and...

Let a researcher open the file of a negotiation that did not lead to agreement and interview participants in that negotiation, and he is likely to be offered too many explanations for comfort rather than too few: interpersonal relations were unusually bad; the politics were intractable; party x or y was just unamenable to reason; small procedural incidents had major effects; the difficulties in the science and the technicalities of the topic being negotiated were too complicated or controversial; and so forth. Each such explanation seems sufficient alone to explain the absence of agreement. Paradoxically, however, since each one seems...

In principle, a party engages in a negotiation because he thinks he can obtain something he would not otherwise. This difference is the added value of negotiating. Ultimately a party signs an agreement because this agreement brings an added value sufficient to justify his signature. It is obvious that an agreement must include the implementation so that it is not just a piece of paper. Thus, the Munich Accords of 1938 fall into the vast category of unfinished business, for they were not respected. The negotiations aiming to end World War I in 1916 belong to the same category. The...

For those involved by profession in international negotiations, the explanation for the collapse of a negotiation in which they have participated normally lies on the other side of the table. It seems to be part of human nature that participants in negotiations are biased when it comes to identifying the root causes of failure. Usually they take a defensive line by offering their own version of the case. When engaging in a negotiation the actor is obviously convinced that his own arguments are the right ones. Quite understandably he identifies himself with the position he is supposed to present. He...