Further Directions: Toward a Cognitive-Oriented Post-Graduate School of Negotiation and Mediation

International negotiation may typically advance in tandem with the actual or threatened use of power, whether military, economic, or of other sorts. The respective powers of the actors and the resulting rapports de force (balance of power) may condition the process and the results for those involved in the negotiation process and consequentially for international actors behind them (with whom they work in tandem). Because the actual or threatened use of force may also provoke conflict spirals and escalation, a psychological perspective of this kind of strategic thinking is highly useful. As Harold Nicolson stated in his famous book, Diplomacy (1963): “Because the psychological vigilance is a vital factor of the negotiation process, if a diplomat becomes so presumptuous to lose interests for the psychology of the counterpart he goes in hibernation and, in the field of the negotiation, he becomes useless.” Rubin (1991-2002), instead, paid a tribute to a multidisciplinary perspective: “The challenge is to find ways to co-ordinate psychological expertise with the expertise afforded through other disciplinary perspectives and to renew the role of psychology.”