The Negotiation Journal occupies a crucial niche at the intersection of theory, practice, and pedagogy in negotiation and conflict resolution. This intersection was first mapped out by the journal's founding editor, Jeffrey Rubin, who was an accomplished explorer of new territories. In 1985, in the journal's inaugural issue, he observed that “[t]he last several years have been marked by a surge of interest in the process of dispute settlement. Negotiation, in particular — defined most generally as the settlement of differences and the waging of conflict through verbal exchange — has been the focus of an increasing number of books, experimental studies, educational curricula, and applications” (Rubin 1985: 5). There was at the time, however, no journal specifically devoted to these topics, which motivated the launch of Negotiation Journal.
Beginning with volume 12 in January 1996, Deborah Kolb and Michael Wheeler stepped in as coeditors, following Rubin's tragic death in a mountaineering accident (Kolb, Wheeler, and Breslin 1996). Wheeler's steady hand remained on the tiller for two decades, as the journal presented continued advances in negotiation theory, practice, and pedagogy. His many contributions culminated in October's special issue devoted to the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Walton and Robert McKersie's A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations. Beginning with William Breslin — for nearly twenty years — followed by Shannon Quinn and Nancy Waters, managing editors have been essential partners in this journey.
It is my honor to take the helm as the Negotiation Journal enters its fourth decade. In overall editorial direction, I will stay the course. Society faces what have been termed “grand challenges,” including the threats from climate change, terrorism, refugee crises, weapons of mass destruction, ethnic violence, urban violence, and food insecurity, as well as struggles over access to public health, water resources, and sustainable energy, how to build and maintain public infrastructure, and how to manage the impact of new technologies. Each of these challenges involves significant conflict, and effective responses to these challenges depend on negotiation, ensuring the continued relevance of the scholarship published here.
That scholarship will continue to be produced by scholars from a wide range of disciplines and practice areas including social, cognitive, and clinical psychology; mediation; international relations and diplomacy; communications; organizational behavior and management; employment relations; public policy; economics; legal studies; ethnic and gender studies; anthropology; environmental science; and even engineering, artificial intelligence, and systems design. Solutions to humanity's most difficult challenges will require multidisciplinary approaches — nurturing such cross‐disciplinary knowledge will continue to be one of the journal's raisons d'etre, just as it was for Jeff Rubin thirty years ago. And because educating the next generation of negotiators and conflict resolvers is so critical, pedagogy will continue to be a focus of Negotiation Journal.
Even with my commitment to overall continuity, this transition affords us an opportunity to review, reflect, and adjust, which we will do throughout 2016. In consultation with our associate editors and Editor Emeritus Michael Wheeler, we have identified several priorities for this review process.
Content is the first priority. We see opportunities for more frequent special issues, special sections, and special compendia of past articles and have already identified potential special topics for the coming years. This is an open process, and I invite readers to contact us with their ideas about potential special themes and prospective special editors. Of course, we will continue to welcome and solicit regular submissions, with a special interest in submissions from early career scholars, practitioners, and teachers.
We are also taking a close look at our article categories. These have evolved over the years and now comprise Research Reports, In Theory, In Practice, Case Analyses, On Teaching, and State of the Art, as well as columns and review essays. These categories will not change dramatically, but continued evolution is possible, and we welcome readers’ ideas and suggestions.
Process is a close second priority for our reflection and review. We are exploring options to enhance the peer review process, increase our book review capacity, and improve our impact metrics (without being captive to the numbers).
Finally, we will also consider ways of expanding the journal's visibility and impact. This will include continued connections between Negotiation Journal and other events or activities at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, as well as broader developments in the field. I bring a special interest in negotiation data, which presently lack a single repository, limiting replication of analytic results and constraining reuse of data. I believe that the fields of negotiation and conflict resolution have the potential to lead in the social sciences by fostering a culture of sharing and reusing data, enabling insights that would not otherwise have happened. Sharing data can be a complex undertaking, but the challenges that society faces demand that we continually find ways to advance the frontiers of knowledge. Keep your eyes on the Editor's Note in future issues for developments along these lines.
This issue features two articles addressing natural resources issues, one centered on a historic mediation by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) between two member states and one centered on more recent negotiations within a multistakeholder consortium — both with clearly defined outcomes. A third looks at the role of framing in a historic track two negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, in which resolution remains deeply challenged. Interestingly, these three articles are illustrative in various ways of some of the network context considerations in this issue's fourth article.
Zorzeta Bakaki's case analysis of NATO's mediation of the Cod Wars fisheries disputes between Iceland and the United Kingdom illuminates how a third‐party organization utilized mediation styles of facilitation, formulation, and manipulation. This qualitative study, covering a sequence of four major crises that occurred between 1952 and 1976, examines the use of formal and informal mediation techniques, arguing that a combination worked best.
Track two negotiations are a crucial and incompletely understood element of international diplomacy, running separate from negotiations involving senior official representatives, and allowing for increased invention of options. Yuval Benziman has analyzed the video record of negotiations that took place in London as part of the track two Geneva Initiative process involving influential but nonofficial representatives of Israel and the Palestinians. He documents framing techniques that were crucial in enabling these negotiations. Some of these framing techniques depart from traditional recommendations and have key implications for diplomatic theory and practice.
The article by Scott McCreary, Phyllis Grifman, and Meredith Cowart on marine policy negotiations in Southern California is notable for capturing a multistakeholder collaborative initiative that had positive outcomes, but that also featured considerable degrees of dissatisfaction with the process and results. The article combines participant observations with post hoc survey data. These multistakeholder initiatives are increasingly common, with a mixed track record. But reports on mixed cases are hard to find, and this study's insights into the importance of process are most welcome.
Finally, Stefanos Mouzas uses the metaphor of networks to expand on the more traditional dyadic, individualistic approach to negotiation analysis. He highlights three salient features of networked negotiations: vast connectivity, that is, the expanded connections available to bargainers change the structure of negotiations; multiple constitutions, that is, a range of shifting bargaining rules throughout a network can continually change the game; and ongoing consent, that is, the parties’ multiple relationships and agreements require continuous renegotiating. Mouzas's language and framework enrich our understanding of negotiation in context.
The data types employed in this issue range include field interviews, participant observation, attitude surveys, archival materials, and video recordings. And so Negotiation Journal continues on its mission, harnessing myriad forms of data and analysis to enable us all to better understand the dynamics of negotiation and conflict resolution.
