Always Negotiating

It’s hard to read the news these days! There’s a bloody war in Ukraine, and that’s one of over two dozen conflicts in the world today. Domestically, people of different politics and ideologies demonize each other, each vying to reshape their countries in a different image. Companies engage in battle with each other, and as the economy and climate fall apart on us, we fight over the very meaning of facts, data, and truth. Why is there so much fighting and so little negotiation to resolve these disputes?

When a conflict erupts, it’s not always certain whether it will be resolved by force or through negotiation. This is true whether we’re talking about an international conflict over borders and territory, a commercial conflict between two corporations, or an interpersonal conflict between family members. As the parties square off against each other we wonder what they will do. Will they try to talk and come to a mutually acceptable solution or will they take unilateral actions, recruit allies, and fight? But in fact, everything is part of a greater negotiation in which people strive to meet their interests while trying to anticipate the other party’s moves. They calculate the risks and benefits of different actions and go in different directions as circumstances require.

Every negotiation takes place in the shadow of the alternatives available to each party. When negotiating with a distributor to sell our products, we also evaluate the market opportunity, interview other distributors, and consider selling our products directly. If we find a better or cheaper alternative, we need this distributor less, and therefore have a stronger hand in the negotiation.

In territorial matters between nations, most conflicts do eventually get settled through negotiation, because the cost of winning outright is generally too high for either side to bear, but there is often a period of sometimes bloody conflict whose purpose is to put either side at a competitive advantage during the final negotiations. During this time, the nations might engage in diplomatic maneuvers to recruit allies and put political, economic, and military pressure on the other side to further strengthen their hand.

It’s helpful to think of both the conflict and the negotiation process together as part of a greater whole. This helps us understand and predict the likely actions of either side, giving us a better chance of resolving the matter with less pain and bloodshed. It’s not helpful to think of one course of action as good and the other as bad, since they are generally linked in the minds of the disputants as they decide their way forward.

As we look around the world today, there is quite a bit of conflict both between countries and within them. If we want to move humanity away from the use of force and toward more peaceful conflict resolution, we need to see the alternatives through the eyes of both parties, and take action to make unilateral moves less palatable and negotiated solutions more likely.