Diplomacy has long been neglected as a preoccupation of international theory. To repair this deficiency, this essay focuses upon bargaining over interstate disputes and makes two distinctions. One is between diplomacy as independent and as dependent variable. Analysis of diplomacy as independent variable studies diplomatic practice as causal influence, as when overcoming pressures that increase the danger of war or deadlock. This perspective is important for developing a diplomatic ‘point of view’. Dependent diplomacy analysis is preoccupied with constraints upon diplomatic statecraft and with adaptation to them. A second distinction is between negotiated bargaining, to reconcile divergent state interests, and non-negotiated bargaining that converges upon common interests between states. The essay dwells upon the link between independent diplomacy and negotiated bargaining, on one hand, and dependent diplomacy and convergent bargaining, on the other.
Successful third-party diplomatic mediation illustrates diplomacy as a causative, independent element in world politics. This article asks how mediators forge agreement between force-prone, deadlocked parties in intractable diplomatic conflict, and why some such conflicts are more difficult to mediate than others. It compares three interstate and three intrastate mediation cases, each probed as a deviant episode, and tests the conventional view that intrastate conflict presents the more difficult mediation challenge. Confirming that intrastate conflict is more difficult to mediate than its interstate counterpart, the study narrows and refines the sources of the added difficulty.
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