Negotiation Setting Research Articles

China in the UNCLOS and BBNJ negotiations, yesterday once more?

Abstract This article compares China’s stance during the UNCLOS negotiations – the starting point of contemporary law of the sea, with its engagement in the latest development of negotiations on the United Nations agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). It answers the question, how does China participate in these two important rules-making processes of the international law of the sea? By identifying salient positions China took in each set of lengthy negotiations and explaining the reasons behind, the article also aims to reflect what a rising China may bring to the international legal maritime order in the foreseeable future. The first part of this article, on the nature of China’s engagement in the UNCLOS negotiations, draws on archival study of official records of the UNCLOS III (1973–1982), as has been digitalized by the UN Office of Legal Affairs. The second part examines the period between the adoption of the UNCLOS (1982) and the start of the BBNJ process (2004), paying attention to China’s shifting practice towards the exploration and exploitation of the deep seabed mineral resources, and its concerns over the ratification of the UNCLOS and the 1995 FSA. Then the article focuses on China in the BBNJ negotiations – Working Groups, Preparatory Committee Meetings and Intergovernmental Conferences. Drawing upon the evolution of China’s positions over the past five decades, the article concludes with some insights on the likely future directions and implications of China’s engagement with the international law of the sea.

China in global digital trade governance: towards a development-oriented agenda?

Abstract Existing literature on the behaviour of rising powers in global trade governance has yielded inconclusive evidence about their role and impact. This article contributes to this literature by examining China's role in global digital trade governance, an issue area which so far has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Specifically, it addresses the following question: as a self-proclaimed leader of the developing world in digital development, to what extent do its preferences and negotiation approach align with the interests of other developing countries? Analysing China's participation in three sets of negotiations using process tracing, the article argues that China's dual identity both as a self-identified developing country and as a rising power has contributed to its strategic ambivalence. In principle China supports a development-oriented approach to digital trade governance, calling attention to issues such as the digital divide and preserving developing countries' policy space on data localization consistent with its domestic regulatory approaches. Yet China's interest in promoting Chinese technology firms' global expansion leads to increasing divergence with other developing countries on issues such as the e-commerce customs duty moratorium and the global taxation of digital firms, paradoxically increasing its interest alignment with developed countries and limiting its support for fundamental reforms.

Linguistics of the heart and mind: Negotiating in one's native language is comfortable but not efficient

AbstractWhen negotiating with partners from abroad, which language should we choose: a native or a foreign one? To answer this question, we leverage dual‐process theory to investigate how using a native versus foreign language affects negotiation strategies and outcomes and explore the moderating role of emotions. Across three studies that use dual‐language speakers of four of the five most common languages in the world (English, Chinese, Spanish and French), our findings consistently show that, while the native language is the preferred option for negotiation (Study 1), the consequences are more emotional expression, more passive strategies and worse outcomes (Studies 2 and 3). Anger in a native versus foreign language makes negotiators compromise more, which results in worse outcomes (Study 3). Our contribution is threefold: We are the first to explore the effects of language (foreign vs. native) in an empirical negotiation setting; we separate the intrapersonal from the interpersonal effects of language by using the Actor‐Partner Interdependence Model; and we establish that the language effects are independent of culture. Our results suggest that managers should use their native language with caution when negotiating, since they might unconsciously display higher levels of emotion and use more passive negotiation strategies.

The Rise in Cesarean Births and the Technocratic Medicalization of Childbirth in Late-Reform China

The surge in cesarean section (CS) deliveries in China over the past several decades has led to significant international discussion, yet critical social science inquiry remains limited. Drawing on insights from sociological and anthropological studies of childbirth, this article moves away from the premise that having a CS is a matter of individual choice. Instead, we treat childbirth as ground zero of a set of complex negotiations between multiple actors, and we show how the biopolitical and politico-economic reconfiguration of the process of childbirth governance from the 1990s onwards has contributed to a dramatic increase in cesarean deliveries. Combining ethnographic materials from China’s rural and urban areas with an analysis of documents and quantitative data, we argue that the surge in CS rates in post-1990s China is part of a larger globalized process of the technocratic medicalization of birth, which has had a profound impact on the normative procedures and conditions shaping the process of childbirth, including the methods and forms of knowledge guiding childbirth management. This has contributed to the increasing normalization of a highly medicalized and interventionist model of childbirth, which has in turn facilitated the routinization of cesarean procedures.

Coffee and cigarettes in industrial relations: A comparative network analysis of the role of informality

Literature commonly links the role of informality in collective bargaining to industrial relations systems based on voluntarism and decentralized negotiation settings. According to this view, informal processes won’t exist or at best play a marginal role in institutionally strong industrial relations systems, where formal rules define the roles, rights and duties of actors in the system. Yet, even in highly regulated contexts, formal and informal mechanisms very often co-exist and complement each other to help reach agreements or solve conflicts among actors. A relational approach and social network analysis applied to the study of the retail sector in Italy, Netherlands and Spain allows to understand the role of informality in countries with different industrial relations regimes. The analysis shows the importance of informal interactions and events in all countries, irrespectively of the industrial relations regime, and confirms the positive contribution of relational approaches to the study of collective bargaining linking with the literature on the embeddedness theory and structural holes.

Leveraging digital methods in the quest for peaceful futures: the interplay of sincere and subjunctive technology affordances in peace mediation

ABSTRACT Efforts to support the resolution of armed conflicts through the facilitation of peace negotiations and dialogues increasingly involve digital technologies. While traditionally perceived as a human-centered activity, peace mediation now commonly entails information- and data-driven methods to enhance talks, support the analysis of conflict stakeholder needs and interests, and ground mediation efforts in better evidence. Digital technologies also promise to make peace efforts more future-oriented by helping to predict or anticipate upcoming developments, build scenarios, and increase readiness for emerging challenges. However, little is known about how such methods can be employed in dialogue and negotiation settings, where participants may have subjective and incompatible views on the conflict context, and more data and evidence don’t necessarily help to determine what a more peaceful future could look like. Through a qualitative study of the use of digitally enhanced dialogue efforts in Yemen and Libya, we demonstrate that future-oriented peacemaking requires the balancing of ‘sincere’ technology affordances that encourage an engagement with the past and present reality of conflict, with ‘subjunctive’ technology affordances that encourage an engagement with possible futures that are more peaceful. In practice, this requires combining data- and evidence-generating methods concerned with the world ‘as is’ with data analysis and visualization methods concerned with how the world ‘should’ or ‘could’ be. Our findings have implications for the study of digital methods in the facilitation of contentious political processes where the provision of data and evidence may create hurting deadlocks.

Developing a Product-Level Prioritization Method for Bilateral Trade Negotiations

ABSTRACT The SACU and US trade relationship continues to be dominated by AGOA. Given the lingering uncertainty surrounding its renewal post-2025, this article recommends the SACU to be proactive and reengage the US in the negotiation of a reciprocal trade agreement that builds on AGOA and deepens the parties’ trade relationships. However, trade negotiation processes can be challenging. The literature on product-level prioritization specifically designed to inform trade negotiations is also sparse. Hence, this article proposes a product-level prioritization method, suggested for implementation in the preparation phase of the bilateral trade negotiation process. The method can be applied in any bilateral trade negotiation setting.

Ophelian Negotiations: Remediating the Girl on YouTube

It is no longer possible to think of Ophelia simply as the restricted tragic girl of Hamlet. Rather, she is a recurrent text, image, and even a brand that can be endlessly repurposed and appropriated. Building on recent work on Ophelia as a discourse that names and constitutes the contemporary girl, this essay examines a variety of Ophelia productions on the video-sharing platform YouTube. It identifies particular genres of response and situates them in terms of current debates within girls' studies, as well as media studies. The objective here is to think more precisely about the modes and politics of girls' media uses. What is at stake in the turn — or return — to Ophelia within online culture? To what extent is Ophelia a progressive text? More broadly, does the democratic media-making associated with Web 2.0 signal new, meaningful forms of feminism, or might we dealing with the latest phase of "girl power"? This essay interprets Ophelia videos in terms of a triptych, "YouTube-Shakespeare-Ophelia." Each of these terms should be understood as a frame, both enabling and delimiting, through which girls produce and/or perform postfeminist identities online. Ophelia becomes a meta-language for a set of negotiations about girl culture and the (im)possibility of authentic expression in the contemporary mediascape.

How to Get a Job Offer from a Smaller Joint Teaching‐Research Mission University and What to Do Once You Have It

How to Get a Job Offer from a Smaller Joint Teaching‐Research Mission University and What to Do Once You Have It

Migration is everywhere: The overlooked landscapes of Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) by Yamina Benguigui

This article examines Yamina Benguigui’s 2001 film Inch’Allah Dimanche as a reflection of the transformative impact of past and ongoing migrations to France. While the narrative centres on an Algerian family reunification in the north of France during the 1970s, the film incorporates numerous landscapes as active aesthetic and narrative devices that, I argue, could be studied through a postmigratory lens. In an ecological reading that attends to the multiple discursive, historical and thematic threads embedded in the film’s physical environment, I analyse three landscapes featured as metaphors for the sets of struggles, conflicts and negotiations taking place in societies shaped by migration and colonialism. By taking such an approach, I aim to foreground the ecological dimensions of postmigration and their potential to further decentre the study of audio-visual narratives about migration.

Inside the History Lab

For more than two hundred years the Elgin Marbles, pictured on the cover of the March 2023 issue of the American Historical Review, have been the subject of one of the longest transnational cultural disputes in the world. Named after the British aristocrat who oversaw their removal from the Parthenon in what was then Ottoman-controlled Athens, they have been in the collection of the British Museum in London since the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1830s, the Greek government asked the British to return the marbles. Those Greek demands have continued to the present day, but the British have been steadfast in their insistence that the marbles were legally acquired and have refused to return them. Very recently, however, a new set of high-profile negotiations between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin Marbles may finally bring this impasse to an end.1 If the parties do reach a settlement, it would come in the wake of a transformative set of campaigns beginning in the 1970s for the cultural restitution of objects brought to Europe and the United States in and after the era of high imperialism. In Germany, Belgium, France, and the United States, several museums have returned more than a thousand looted artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. French and American museums are beginning to return stolen Khmer antiquities under pressure from the Cambodian government. Protocols have emerged in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and at the United Nations for the return of Indigenous cultural property and remains to tribes and First Nations.2

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

Africa and climate justice at COP27 and beyond: impacts and solutions through an interdisciplinary lens.

Climate justice is not just a financial transaction to protect the environment. It needs to be seen as the protection of the most vulnerable in society after centuries of resource exploitation. African countries disproportionately face impacts of climate change on their environments, their economies, their resources and their infrastructure. This leads to greater vulnerability and increased exposure to the negative effects of a changing climate. In this article, we highlight the importance of climate justice and its role within the United Nations negotiations, and ultimately in concrete action. We discuss current climate impacts across key sectors in the African region, with a focus on health, infrastructure, food and water scarcity, energy and finance. All sectors are affected by climate change. They are interconnected and under threat. This triggers a ripple effect, where threats in one sector have a knock-on effect on other sectors. We find that the current set of intergovernmental institutions have failed to adequately address climate justice. We also contend that a siloed approach to climate action has proven to be ineffective. As we head towards the next set of negotiations (COP27), this paper argues that the economic and social conditions in Africa can be addressed through financial and collaborative support for adaptation and localised solutions, but that this will only be achieved if climate justice is prioritised by the decision makers. This needs to include a global-scale transition in how climate finance is assessed and accessed. Climate justice underpins real, effective and sustainable solutions for climate action in Africa.

Does Bilateral Trust Matter During Mergers and Acquisitions Negotiations?

AbstractWe examine the effect of bilateral trust on cross‐border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using a large European M&A sample, we find that bilateral trust facilitates deal announcement and completion. Bidder and target bilateral trusts towards each other are both important for deal announcement, but only bidder trust towards the target firm matters for deal completion. The effect of bilateral trust on deal completion is amplified in more complex transactions and when bidders face severe liability of foreignness. Moreover, bilateral trust between the parties is also associated positively with merger performance. These results support the importance of bilateral trust as a deal facilitator in negotiation settings characterized by contract incompleteness and liability of foreignness.

Abandon the Slum? Toward an Alternative Recognition of Urban Informal Dwelling

The focus on urban poverty in the Global South has centered on slum-centric discussions of urban marginality to explain the supposed crisis of Third World cities. Evidently, ideological and material eradication of slums is symptomatic of the erasure of urban poverty and is regarded as a developmental panacea to address all urban problems. Notwithstanding the political significance of this term to understand and respond to subaltern urbanism, the Eurocentric gaze of urban scholars and practitioners in using slum, as an analytical and developmental category, has impeded the recognition of varied forms of dwelling practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with footpath-dwelling communities in Mumbai, I argue that to understand the diversity of dwelling in the city, attention needs to be extended to what could be called non-slums, spaces that embody a set of practices and negotiations that are spatially distinct from those characterizing places officially labeled as slums and expand beyond density politics. Unlike residents of so-called slums, these groups are often dispersed and numerically weak. It is this spatial organization (or the lack of it) that shapes their everyday politics in making their place within the city. The exposed nature of their habitation makes their everyday living transient and sets forth a form of spatiality that is distinct from dense neighborhoods labeled slums. While slums are being peripheralized through various policy and state interventions, these groups continue to hold on to the urban core and in doing so produce new spatializations of poverty and varied subaltern subjectivities of dispossession and belonging.

Shero worship: Female stardom in Tamil cinema

ABSTRACT Post-millennial Tamil cinema has seen a marked increase in casting women as protagonists or in pivotal roles. In a historically patriarchal industry that rests on an almost sycophantic male star system, this proliferation of women characters has proven significant in expanding the possibilities of female stardom. In turn, the potential of women stars and women’s narratives participates in and showcases the broader globalising impulses of Tamil cinema in the twenty-first century. This paper focusses on two actors – Jyothika and Nayanthara – who have been instrumental in bringing to the fore a new figure in Tamil cinema, i.e. the ‘lady (super)star’. This paper theorises their rise to stardom as a set of complex negotiations between their personal and professional lives while navigating and resetting the boundaries of the ‘good Tamil woman’.

Urban solidarity typology: A comparison of European cities since the crisis of refuge in 2015

This article scrutinizes how local responses to irregular migrants vary across European cities. Existing literature shows that cities develop inclusive policies and practices for irregular migrants as a response to the restrictive asylum and migration policies of welfare states. This article goes beyond this monolithic understanding of cities by unpacking city actors into local governments and local civil society organizations, as well as exploring various dynamics between them. This benchmarking study builds an overarching urban solidarity typology based on an empirical analysis of policies and practices in 13 European cities between 2015 and 2019, inclusive. Binary coding of collected data leads to an inductively built descriptive typology that consists of analytical categories of urban solidarity (top-down; bottom-up; hybrid; limited). These four different categories reveal that urban solidarity is not one-size-fits-all. It emerges as a spectrum of transformative practices of various actors, as well as a constellation of displays of diverse sets of contentions, solidarity repertoires, compromises, negotiations, and consensus as well as their various combinations over a long period.

The Effect of Appearance of Virtual Agents in Human-Agent Negotiation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) changed our world in various ways. People start to interact with a variety of intelligent systems frequently. As the interaction between human and AI systems increases day by day, the factors influencing their communication have become more and more important, especially in the field of human-agent negotiation. In this study, our aim is to investigate the effect of knowing your negotiation partner (i.e., opponent) with limited knowledge, particularly the effect of familiarity with the opponent during human-agent negotiation so that we can design more effective negotiation systems. As far as we are aware, this is the first study investigating this research question in human-agent negotiation settings. Accordingly, we present a human-agent negotiation framework and conduct a user experiment in which participants negotiate with an avatar whose appearance and voice are a replica of a celebrity of their choice and with an avatar whose appearance and voice are not familiar. The results of the within-subject design experiment show that human participants tend to be more collaborative when their opponent is a celebrity avatar towards whom they have a positive feeling rather than a non-celebrity avatar.

The Palestinian Refugee Problem: Theory and Practice in Light of Back-Channel Negotiations

Abstract The Palestinian refugee problem is considered one of the most intractable and complex issues surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article examines the gaps between Israel and the Palestinians concerning the Palestinian refugee problem and considers whether back-channel diplomacy can help promote possible lasting solutions. To answer this question, several sets of peace negotiations are presented that involved back-channel communications and offered possible solutions to the problem. These include the Camp David ii summit in 2000 (including the Taba talks of 2001), the intensive back-channel negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu-Mazen (2006–2008) ongoing when the 2007 Annapolis Conference was held, and the Kerry Proposals of 2016. The main argument is that back-channel negotiations may contribute to a solution to conflicts involving issues of human dignity and responsibility, like the issue of the Palestinian refugees.

On the Efficacy of Average Weightings Predicting Joint Choices in Bilateral Negotiations with Attribute Tradeoffs

Previous research suggests negotiators demonstrate a predisposition toward weight averaging or the averaging of attribute values. One outcome is that weight averaging generates a maximizing joint choice using a Multi-Attribute Utility of joint preference or ‘utility’ over known attribute values. Thus, attribute weightings are a fixed variable in the MAU model and determine maximum joint preference over a joint negotiation set with uncorrelated attribute values. We test an alternative form in a simulated experiment predicting joint choice when there are strict trade-offs in the negotiation set and negotiators average their intrinsic weightings paramorphic to a multi -attribute model. We show that joint weights by averaging, or negotiation must be equal (a 50/50 weighing of the two attributes) to reflect maximum joint preference or utility. Consistent with prior research, results find that a relative 50/50 weighing of the two attributes is dependent both on the symmetry or asymmetry of negotiators’ preference functions for the two attributes and possible cognitive conflict inherent to negotiators intrinsic individual weightings. For instance, negotiators’ individual weightings ( .2,.8) vs (.8,.2) that result in average weights of (.5,.5) involve less cognitive conflict than negotiating weightings of ( .7,.3) vs (.1,.9) to achieve joint weights of (.5,.5). The paper concludes by summarizing the primary results of the simulation related to extant research and presents possible modeling for negotiations over three attributes of which at least two attributes are strictly tradeoffs.