STRUCTURE

Structural approaches explain outcomes of negotiation by examining the distribution of the parties' means of attaining them, frequently referred to as power.¹ Power can be thought of as exercises or measures of contingent gratification and deprivation that a party attaches to negotiating offers and security points in order to change their value, the elements which provide an ability of the parties to move each other in an intended direction (Dahl 1951; Zartman & Rubin 2000).

When the parties are not able to change each other's calculus to provide a jointly acceptable alternative to violence, they may require the services of a mediator (Wall, Stark & Sandifer 2001). Mediation is con­sidered here to be a subset of negotiation, an activity made necessary by the inability of the conflicting parties to overcome their conflict and produce a joint agreement on their own; it is, however, such an important subset, with its own characteristics provided by the presence of a third party, that it deserves a separate treatment, fully presented in the next chapter by Jacob Bercovitch.

Structure refers primarily to the relative position of perceived power of the parties. It is known that a sense of equality, or symmetry, is beneficial to the efficient and effective achievement of results, and nego­tiators are well advised to cultivate that sense so they can move from tending the atmospherics to resolving the problem. But, in fact, symmetry is nonexistent in the real world; even close equals are never sure of their relative position and parties base their perceptions on different aspects of power. All negotiations are asymmetrical, to a greater or lesser degree; there is no absolute equality in the real world, equality between parties, and parties that are nearly or presumptively equal will spend much of their time protecting that equality or seeking to overturn it in their favor. While symmetry has long been thought to be the most favorable situation for efficient and effective negotiations, both social psychology and political science have recently shown that its real-world equivalent, near-symmetry (small asymmetry), is the least productive structure because the parties will spend most of their time and effort in position politics, seeking to maintain or upset (and therefore counter-maintain) the near-symmetry (Hornstein 1965; Vitz & Kite 1970; Hammerstein & Parker 1982; Pruitt & Carnevale 1993; Zartman & Rubin 2000).

Weaker parties have a potential array of means at their disposal to reduce the degree of asymmetry, by borrowing power from third parties, opponents, context, and process (Zartman & Rubin 2000). Whether the conflict is interstate or intrastate, parties weaker in power also tend to overcome their power deficit by emphasizing commitment. Smaller parties tend to concentrate on a single issue whereas larger parties are burdened by many issues and are easily distracted; the latter focus on setting the formula for a solution at the beginning of the negotiations, leaving the smaller partner to win back initial losses in the detail phase (Crump and Zartman 2003). In intrastate conflicts, the government has the structural advantage but the conditions and tactics are the same, as the rebellion emphasizes commitment and concentrates on recognition— formal symmetry—as its goal and the key to its equality (Zartman 1995). The role of imperfect information in conflict decisions between asymmetrical parties is currently the subject of a surge of rational choice literature, but it ignores negotiations, assuming bargaining failure instead of exploring it.

Weaker parties also have other elements outside the power structure that can compen­sate for their weaker position. One, already noted, is commitment, the determination to overcome odds. Since power is sometimes characterized as “resources + skill + will,” commitment emphasizes the last element over the first. Commitment also returns the negotiation setting to its formal equality, in which each party holds a veto. The other element, which often underlies commitment, is justice. Even when outgunned, parties may hold out because they hold their cause to be just, and negotiators have been known to turn down deals offered by stronger parties because they were judged unjust.

Power structures also operate within insti­tutional structures, which can have important effects on power relations. Much of the work in this approach has been done on multilateral, cooperative negotiations rather than on violent conflicts. States institutional­ize their relations into international regimes, informal and formal, in order to reduce transaction costs, and such regimes both expand and limit their negotiating possi­bilities (Hasenclever, Mayer & Rittberger 1997; Jonsson and Talberg 1998; Spector & Zartman 2003). Regimes provide information, monitor progress, expand linkages, establish agendas, and generally reduce uncertainties and regulate expectations; but they also limit options and strategies (Odell 2005). In this, they tend to equalize member parties and reduce asymmetries. Multilateral bargaining (and analysis) also depends largely on the formation of temporary, informal institutions such as party and issue coalitions, involving some very distinct strategies, typologies, and negotiations (Hampson 1994; Zartman 1994, 2006; Sebenius 1996; Bottom et al. 2000; Nalikar 2003; Crump & Zartman 2003; Odell 2005).

Since institutions have their own rules, relations and constraints, drawn in turn from their own internal structures and from their relative positions toward each other, they can have an important impact on nego­tiators' capabilities. The European Union, for example, is essentially an institutional­ized negotiating system where outcomes are strongly affected by the paths the process is required to take, although it has only rarely been analyzed as such (Meerts & Cede 2003; Elgstrom & Jonsson 2005).

Another form of structural analysis that has developed some insights in regard to coop­erative negotiations concerns the negotiatory relation between the negotiations and their domestic constituencies in two-level games. The approach has not been used as much as possible in regard to either interstate or intrastate conflicts (Druckman 1978; Evans, Jacobson & Putnam 1993; Putnam 1998). The idea that negotiating parties need also negotiate with their home constituencies and reach an agreement on the domestic level that corresponds to the parameters of an agreement on the inter-party level is as applicable to conflict negotiations as to cooperation. It opens up a window of enormous complexity, however, when relating to intrastate civil wars, where the internal politics of rebel movements are often inchoate at best. For that very reason, analysis would be useful, even if difficult.