The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Other negotiating dilemmas used for this exercise emphasize such concepts as searching for integrative agreements, power asymmetries, prenegotiation planning, flexibility, and boundary roles. The focus of our work to date on negotiation is due to the existence of a large research literature on the subject. Research-based narratives can also be written for research on mediation and arbitration. Fewer research-based themes are likely to be found for other conflict-resolving or -managing approaches, including peacekeeping, interactive conflict resolution, coercive diplomacy and sanctions, institutional system design and intervention, justice in truth and reconciliation processes, and the many facets of peace building. These topics are on the agenda for further development of the narrative or argumentation approach to teaching and training.

  The focus of this section on communicating research findings dealt primarily with the learning process, particularly for conflict resolution practitioners. I regard this as a step toward the goal of using the findings in conflict situations. A next step consists of providing opportunities for applying the new knowledge. These opportunities take the form of exercises that resemble the actual situations that often confront practitioners. The exercises are discussed in the next section.

  APPLYING RESEARCH FINDINGS

  The key idea for application is to recreate the situations often confronted by the practitioners who participate in our training workshops or courses. With regard to negotiation or diplomacy, four situations are created corresponding to functions performed by negotiators: analysis, strategy, performance, and design. In each of these situations, course participants are encouraged to apply research findings from relevant narratives. A difference between the situations is the way that the findings are applied. I describe how this is done with each type of exercise.

  The analyst and strategist exercises are performed with case studies of historical negotiations. The goal of the analyst role is to achieve an understanding of the case; the strategist role is tasked with resolving an impasse in the same case. The cases are drawn from the archive of Pew Case Studies in International Affairs held by Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. Cases that are frequently used are a negotiation between South Korea and the United States in the later 1970s over running shoes (Odell and Lang, 1992) and the Panama Canal talks (Habeeb and Zartman, 1986). Participants are guided through these exercises with sets of questions linked to relevant narratives. For the Korean running shoes negotiation, these are emotions, relationships, alternatives, time pressure, rewards, and power. For Panama Canal, these are alternatives, time pressure, integrative agreements, two faces, and power. Here is an example of a question asked of Panama Canal analysts:

  The cornerstone of the U.S. negotiating strategy was the overwhelming advantage they possessed in terms of available alternatives to a negotiated agreement. How does the narrative on alternatives help explain the dynamics of the negotiation? What shifts in alternatives eventually permitted a negotiated agreement?

  Other questions asked for Panama Canal are

  Would you describe the 1977 treaty as an integrative agreement? How does the narrative on integrative agreements help explain the final outcome?

  With regard to strategy, Korean running shoes strategists were given the following task:

  Suppose that the negotiators refused to adjust their positions to get an agreement. An impasse was caused by Korea’s demand of a higher export quota than the U.S. was willing to give. Using the information in the relevant narratives, develop a plan that can be used to advise the respective delegations (either together or separately) on strategies that they might use to get the talks back on track.

  These guiding questions provide a focus for the exercises. Small teams simulate consulting groups working together for roughly an hour and a half to deliver their advice to the delegations. Completing the analyst task first provides preparation for the strategist challenge, which is usually completed in about an hour. Each workshop team debriefs their report with an added feature of appointing another group to serve as the “client.” That client group, having worked on a different case, is asked to render a judgment about the report, including a decision about whether to retain their services in the future.

  The third exercise focuses on negotiating performance. They participate in a multi-issue bilateral negotiation on security issues concerning inspection of facilities and border troops. The workshop (or class) is divided into quartets with each two-person team assigned the role of either Anice (resembling the United States) or Izeria (resembling Iraq prior to the war). One member of the team acts as the chief negotiator, and the other serves as an advisor-observer. Simultaneous plays, with multiple quartets, create an atmosphere of noise not unlike the tenor of conference diplomacy.

  Central to this exercise is the application of the narrative themes. Negotiators are primed to address the following questions: When should alternatives be brought into play: early or late during the negotiation? How might you encourage a switch from making concessions to sharing information? When should you hold firm, and when should you convey flexibility? How should you convey anger or flattery to avoid misperception of your intentions? These are the types of questions that are repeated during a debriefing session following the negotiation. They provide a focus for a discussion of lessons learned from the role-play experience. They also provide a basis for comparing processes (including tactics and ideas for resolving impasses) and outcomes (impasse, compromise, integrative solution) obtained by the different teams.

  The role-play provides an experience that helps participants implement the final exercise, which is to design a simulation for training. Again, they are encouraged to use the narratives in their designs. Working again in small groups, but not usually the teams that worked together on the Anice or Izeria simulation, designers are encouraged to incorporate selected narratives into their scenario. Popular themes have been balancing alternatives with time pressure, altering the negotiating situation to enhance flexibility, dealing with communicating with constituents and the other negotiating party, and the use of two-face tactics.

  Many designer groups build on their experience with the power asymmetries evident in the case studies used in the Korean running shoes and Panama Cana exercises and in the simulation (Anice versus Izeria). The asymmetry theme is central in a variety of scenarios, including father-son disputes, talks between managers at different levels in a company hierarchy, and police-citizen interactions. The symmetry theme emerges in rock singer versus composer disputes and various intercultural scenarios. Focusing their work on conveying these concepts to a new cohort of trainees, the designer groups are guided through the steps needed to produce a useful exercise. In some classes or workshops, the designs are enacted in role plays conducted by other members of the course. These enactments provide evaluations of the designs and a comparative assessment of the design versus role-play experience.

  The sequence of exercises discussed in this section is intended to capture functions performed by practitioners involved with negotiating delegations. In addition to negotiating, these practitioners provide support to delegations or teams at several stages during the process, including prenegotiation preparation and between-round strategizing. Even the designer role has a place in this environment: simulation is used on occasion to anticipate options that may develop in a next round. An example is the talks over mutual and balanced force reductions during the 1970s. The US delegation regularly designed exercises to anticipate moves made in a next round of these talks. Thus, the training portfolio discussed in this section is tailored to these functions as well. Further modifications could be made to provide experience relevant to implementing agreements.

  Whether these exercises are effective in accomplishing their purpose is a question of interest. Some progress toward evaluating impacts is discussed in the next section. Furthermore, just as the narrative format can be extended to other conflict resolution approaches, so too can the exercises be designed to
capture the functions served by those approaches.

  LEARNING GAINS

  Evaluations are performed routinely following each training session or class. These consist of both self-report ratings of the narratives and exercises and open-ended questions about applications of the concepts. The negotiating dilemmas discussed previously are used also as an assessment tool for semester classes. The results, accumulated to date across sessions conducted on five continents, are summarized in this section.

  An early control group comparison produced interesting results: groups using the narratives performed better in the analyst and strategist exercises than those given only the themes, but not the content, of the narratives (see Druckman and Robinson, 1998). The narratives were regarded by all participants as providing useful information, relevant, easy to apply to the assigned cases, and helpful in implementing their roles. It was also found that performance was further enhanced when narrative groups were first provided with key negotiation frameworks in concert with an overview of this research field. These groups produced more complex reports in each of the roles (analyst, strategist, designer) than did those who were not exposed to the larger field. These differences are also shown in Druckman and Robinson (1998).

  With regard to the long-term impacts of these experiences, a set of questions was asked several weeks following the workshops and classes. The results are encouraging: practically all participants indicated more interest in the scientific literature, noted that they would consult the literature when appropriate, and recalled issues and dilemmas raised by the narratives in their professional work. A smaller number of respondents said that they actually did consult the literature in their everyday work environment.

  With regard to the exercises, both professional and student participants expressed a preference for the analyst exercise. They found this task to be easier to execute than the strategist and designer exercises, particularly for cases where the concepts were evident in the description of the negotiation process. An example of such a case is the Korean running shoes negotiation. Although the quality of the written reports did not differ by exercise, the professionals (but not the students) demonstrated more complexity in their oral compared to their written presentations.

  More generally, four conclusions emerge from the various evaluations: (1) the narratives seem to work well, (2) learning is enhanced when frameworks and overviews of the field are provided prior to the narratives, (3) the analyst role may be the easiest to implement, and (4) there appears to be a long-term interest in using the research knowledge. But it is also likely that long-term impacts would benefit from periodic refresher training. It may benefit as well from adding a unit on constructive controversy. Advantages of the former are to reinforce and update the knowledge base. Advantages gained from the latter are to reinforce the idea that knowledge is subject to debate and to unfreeze any commitments that may occur in the course of learning about research findings.

  The role of designer has received more attention recently in training evaluations, sparked by an interest in the issue of comparative learning benefits from designing scenarios and playing roles in scenarios designed by others. The focus of the experiments was on concept learning, in particular, learning three concepts from the narratives: alternatives, time pressure, and power. The question asked was whether designers (role players) learn these concepts better than role players (designers) do. The experiment was replicated in Australia and Israel.

  The results were striking, with clear differences across a variety of dependent variables. The results obtained from self-report and open-ended questions, including learning and motivation, showed that 86 percent of the answers favored designers, of which 52 percent were statistically significant. Only 9 percent of the answers favored role players (Druckman and Ebner, 2008). The design process was particularly effective for learning about relationships among the concepts: designers showed stronger awareness of relationships than role players did, and this was reflected in their scenarios. These findings underwrite the decision to use a designer exercise in our training package as one of the functions performed during the negotiation process.

  Overall, the exercises seem to work well. Participants report learning and motivational gains, as well as indicate, when asked, that they intend to use the new knowledge, or at least consult the literature, in the workplace. This is a step in the direction of using research findings in practice. Next steps include (1) instituting a regular course of refresher training, including updating the narratives with current research findings; (2) incorporating constructive controversy exercises in the training package; (3) bringing the approach to venues where real-time negotiation occurs; and (4) applying the approach to other areas of conflict resolution where research has been active, such as third-party consultation. An aim is to increase the awareness among practitioners of developments in research. This awareness should also make them more sophisticated consumers of what the research community has to offer.

  CONCLUSION

  Above all, this chapter makes evident the variety of approaches to doing research, communicating and applying findings, and evaluating the applications. There are many bridges that can be crossed to connect the islands of theory and research with the territory occupied by practices. In this concluding section, I review what has been learned about these bridges and chart a path forward that builds on the progress to date.

  The chapter began with a discussion of four approaches to doing research. Rather than dwell on the differences among them in philosophy and technique, it would appear more helpful to explore their complementarities. Particularly notable is the combination of the deeper probes done by case study researchers and the wider explorations of comparative researchers. This has been done in several ways. One is to use the insights from particular cases to ground the more general findings from many cases (Gibbler, 2010; Pierskalla, 2010). Another is to search for correspondences between case analyses and experimental simulation results (Hopmann and Walcott, 1977; Beriker and Druckman, 1996). A third is to perform focused comparisons of a small number of cases to corroborative statistical findings (Druckman and Albin, 2011) or to update findings from a large number of historical cases with a few more recent cases (Albin and Druckman, 2012). A fourth is to conjoin qualitative analyses of a case with a quantitative time series of trends in an evolving process (Druckman, 1986). Taken together, both types of probes, emphasizing depth and width, bolster confidence in the kinds of empirical regularities we observe in many settings. They also call attention to the contingent feature of such findings as the relationship between crises and turning points or between hurting stalemates and negotiation.

  The combined research strategy has implications for practice. One example comes from our research on justice in international negotiation. Converging results from statistical and qualitative analyses bolster the conclusion that the distribution principle of equality leads to more durable peace agreements: equality principles in the agreements lessened the impact of conflict intensity on durability, but principles also heightened the impact on durability of procedural justice principles during the negotiation process. These findings were briefed to diplomats, particularly those serving as third parties in the peace processes. They were advised to include equality principles in the crafting of agreement texts. The multimethod research approach used increased our confidence in dispensing this advice.

  The approach of research narratives is one way for communicating research findings to students and practitioners. It has the advantage of organizing the research literature thematically. The themes guide the interweaving of findings; they also contribute categories to broad frameworks that provide coherence to the topic and suggest avenues for further research. This may be more useful for researchers than practitioners. As I noted, the narratives convey received wisdom in the form of what research has produced to date. The learning aids that are provided in the form of discussion questions and application exercises may encourage students to overlearn the
material. One antidote to this possible consequence is to regard the findings as being subject to interpretation. This can be done through a process of debate using the method of constructive controversy (Johnson and Johnson, 2008). It can also be accomplished through scenario design where students have an opportunity to use the concepts in a playful manner (Druckman and Ebner, 2008). A challenge is to achieve the dual goals of learning and flexible application. Another challenge is that of expanding the theory-practice nexus to other conflict resolution approaches.

  References

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