Emotions and the communication of intentions in face-to-face diplomacy

Abstract

Countries often seek to resolve their disputes through negotiations. However, diplomats meeting face to face are under the incentives both to cooperate by revealing one’s preferences and to compete by misrepresenting them. How, then, do they express and assess each other’s intentions? Theories of International Relations that have studied communication in diplomacy — structural realism, rationalism, and the theory of communicative action — offer insufficient answers. To break through, I highlight the communicative function of emotions, leveraging insights from the latest research on negotiations in social and experimental psychology. I argue that when diplomats negotiate, they pay attention not only to what others say, but also to their emotional cues. One’s choice of words, tone of speech, and hand and body gestures carry emotive information that reflects how one appraises a situation. Diplomacy is therefore unique as a conduit between states because it enables practitioners to exchange individual-level expressions of intentions — and, by extension, the intentions of the government they represent — that are otherwise lost, attenuated, or distorted if communications were to occur through other impersonal and irregular channels. To illustrate my argument, I discuss episodes of face-to-face diplomacy during the Fashoda Crisis (1898), July Crisis (1914), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and US–Syria negotiations on the Middle East (1991).