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Talking About A Resolution: Culture in Peace Negotiations
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Introduction
If cultural differences precluded effective negotiations, then international
diplomacy would be fruitless. But if culture does not determine negotiating outcomes, how are we to understand its role in the negotiations process? This question is particularly, but not solely, relevant to negotiations of ethnic conflicts, in which the parties share an intense focus (both militarily and politically) on cultural markers and cultural narratives. This paper uses an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations to argue that culture is best understood as an intervening variable in the negotiations process that operates at the individual, domestic, and international levels of analysis.
The paper is based on analysis by the author and three colleagues in an edited
volume entitled Listening Between the Lines: Culture in the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations.
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The paper will report on the findings of the volume’s contributors with
respect to cultural influences on Palestinian and Israeli negotiating styles, and will discuss the significance of this case for our understanding of culture’s role in the negotiating process. While this paper makes extensive and grateful use of the work done by my co-contributors to the edited volume, the conclusions of this paper are my sole responsibility.
Culture plays a subtler and more multifaceted role in the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations than merely provoking misunderstanding. Cultural factors influenced the selection, assessments and decisions of individual leaders and negotiators, shaped the domestic institutions and political environment in which policy decisions on negotiation were made and carried out, and shaped each party’s perception of their relative balance of power and how third parties were employed to adapt to it. Culture’s role in this case, and in other negotiations of identity conflicts, is best understood as an intervening variable that operates at different levels, through the impact of cultural identity and cultural categories of thinking on political leaders, on the domestic politics of each side that constrain the negotiations, and on each side’s evaluation of the other’s beliefs and intentions regarding the conflict being negotiated. This intermediary and multidimensional role for culture will be explored in the pages that follow. Culture in International Negotiations: An Interactive Approach
Previous work on national differences in negotiations has taken a unitary
approach: analyzing the national culture and the resulting national negotiating style of a given country in isolation. Thus, the United States Institute of Peace (which sponsored the volume on which this paper is based) has published studies of the national negotiating styles exhibited by Japan, North Korea, Russia, Germany, and the United States.
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By
focusing on a single country’s negotiating behavior without reference to its interlocutor, such studies sometimes end up reducing the valuation of cultural variables to either-or dichotomies, such as the distinction between high-context and low-context societies. Considering a single nation’s cultural behavior in isolation risks essentializing the scholarly view of the society under discussion, and at the extreme can send the analyst in
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1
Introduction
If cultural differences precluded effective negotiations, then international
diplomacy would be fruitless. But if culture does not determine negotiating outcomes,
how are we to understand its role in the negotiations process? This question is
particularly, but not solely, relevant to negotiations of ethnic conflicts, in which the
parties share an intense focus (both militarily and politically) on cultural markers and
cultural narratives. This paper uses an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian peace
negotiations to argue that culture is best understood as an intervening variable in the
negotiations process that operates at the individual, domestic, and international levels of
analysis.
The paper is based on analysis by the author and three colleagues in an edited
volume entitled Listening Between the Lines: Culture in the Israeli-Palestinian
Negotiations.
1
The paper will report on the findings of the volume’s contributors with
respect to cultural influences on Palestinian and Israeli negotiating styles, and will
discuss the significance of this case for our understanding of culture’s role in the
negotiating process. While this paper makes extensive and grateful use of the work done
by my co-contributors to the edited volume, the conclusions of this paper are my sole
responsibility.
Culture plays a subtler and more multifaceted role in the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations than merely provoking misunderstanding. Cultural factors influenced the
selection, assessments and decisions of individual leaders and negotiators, shaped the
domestic institutions and political environment in which policy decisions on negotiation
were made and carried out, and shaped each party’s perception of their relative balance of
power and how third parties were employed to adapt to it. Culture’s role in this case, and
in other negotiations of identity conflicts, is best understood as an intervening variable
that operates at different levels, through the impact of cultural identity and cultural
categories of thinking on political leaders, on the domestic politics of each side that
constrain the negotiations, and on each side’s evaluation of the other’s beliefs and
intentions regarding the conflict being negotiated. This intermediary and
multidimensional role for culture will be explored in the pages that follow.
Culture in International Negotiations: An Interactive Approach
Previous work on national differences in negotiations has taken a unitary
approach: analyzing the national culture and the resulting national negotiating style of a
given country in isolation. Thus, the United States Institute of Peace (which sponsored
the volume on which this paper is based) has published studies of the national negotiating
styles exhibited by Japan, North Korea, Russia, Germany, and the United States.
2
By
focusing on a single country’s negotiating behavior without reference to its interlocutor,
such studies sometimes end up reducing the valuation of cultural variables to either-or
dichotomies, such as the distinction between high-context and low-context societies.
Considering a single nation’s cultural behavior in isolation risks essentializing the
scholarly view of the society under discussion, and at the extreme can send the analyst in
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