NEW CHALLENGES

As scholarship has come face to face with the growing number of cases in reality, and as it has focused increasing attention on the negotiation process itself, it has spread out in new directions.

2006), diagnosis (Zartman and Berman 1982), prenegotiation (Stein 1997), ripening (Haas 1990; Zartman 2008), escalation (Zartman & Faure 2005), entry (Crocker et al. 1999; Maundi et al. 2006), etc. Whileripeness theory provides an important key to the decision to negotiate, it is dependent on perception, a condition the parties often cannot achieve alone or together. Much negotiation is usually required by a mediator and within the parties themselves to come to the subject realization of the need and opportunity to negotiate. Conflict itself is the preparation for its own resolution; how can this preparation be accelerated more economically, and the costs of conflict reduced? The important work already done on these topics does not exhaust the subject; to the contrary, it only opens it to further research.

In the analysis of the process itself, the strategic situation demanding coordination, as in CDG or the Battle of the Sexes where there are two Nash equilibria and the challenge becomes the choice or combination between them, as opposed to the PDG challenge of collaboration, poses a major problem for analysis and practice, as Avenhaus discusses in his chapter on game theory. Since many situations do not fall under Homans Maxim or have a Nash Point where compensation and trade-offs are possible, the challenge of concession or construction is mighty.

The other of the processes calling for further study has to do with closure, a topic on which there is essentially nothing. When is enough and when can one side ask for a little more without breaking down the process? The question is crucial to the judgment of whether the parties did the most they could or whether they left unclaimed gains on the table. Do the negotiations in question end on an agreeing formula or a resolving formula, and how can the one lead to the other?

The third direction concerns what hap­pens after successful negotiations, as in implementation, postagreement negotiations (Spector & Zartman 2003), reconstruction, durability (Licklider 1995; Walter 2002; Fortna 2004a, 2004b), fully discussed in the chapter by Gartner and Mellin in this volume. More than the previous subject area, these topics are open-ended and so hard to subject to bounded inquiry. In fact, one of the problems plaguing durability studies is, How long does an agreement have to have lasted (meaning?) to be judged durable? A challenging implication of postagreement negotiations is, How constraining is a regime if renegotiation is a normal part of its nature?

Indeed, some have indicated that negoti­ation should not be regarded as a process with an end but rather as the beginning of a process of continuing cooperation (Thuderoz 2003). This may be a cultural question: Americans like their negotiations to end with a solid agreement and go home, whereas other cultures (not necessarily Asian) and particularly students of social negotiations see negotiation as merely opening a door. In any case, the viewpoint would be a useful addition to conflict resolution approaches, where parties not only conduct forward-looking negotiations to take care of future possible conflict but where they also seek to build mechanisms for transforming relationships (Zartman & Kremenyuk 2005).

Probably the most challenging issue of the time concerns the profound change in negotiation brought on by a changing nature of the parties.

There is still much life left to live in the old practice and its relatively new analysis.