International Negotiation: Some Conceptual Developments

Negotiation is a central activity in international affairs, but it tends to be studied indirectly through particular cases. Considering it as a subject in itself brings out some important principles. The general literature on negotiation falls into five categories: advice from practitioners, studies of particular cases or contexts, statistical tests of data, psychological theories with experiments, and game theory models. Each approach complements the others, but there has been too little interaction among them. Game models, in particular, are important for the international context, which involves more planning and more experienced actors. They resist the generalizations to which other approaches are prone, often showing that whether a move is well-advised or mistaken depends on some easy-to-overlook detail.