Hard bargainers are known to dictate terms. Humanitarian frontliners confront them daily. Some state and nonstate counterparts, guided by military necessity, are deemed so overpowering that it seems impossible to negotiate humanitarian necessity with them. And yet, humanitarians leverage negotiations with quite an edge. They construct working relationships and creative solutions to get access and deliver humanitarian aid to those affected by conflict. Humanitarians shape a responsible approach that can enrich the understanding of negotiation power. Guided by humanitarian principles, they do not exercise a power over anyone but leverage a power of getting things done with counterparts, through relational, transactional, and process moves. The purpose of this article is both descriptive and prescriptive. On the one hand, it provides examples to document humanitarian negotiation practices of empowerment and to contribute to a general theory of negotiation power. On the other hand, the article provides some recommendations from negotiation theory to empower humanitarians. Indirectly, by analyzing and supporting the power of humanitarian frontliners, this article also aims at refining the reflection and action of every negotiator when confronted with tough bargainers.

There are three general philosophical conceptions of how worldviews might impact negotiations—we can call them “meta” worldviews. At one extreme, actors negotiate, and are fully in charge; they can bypass any specific or “micro” worldviews they originally hold; they remain free agents in the final analysis. At the other extreme, “micro” worldviews shape protagonists' words and acts to such an extent that, even unbeknownst to them, they are themselves, in effect, being negotiated upon by the worldviews. In between these two poles, both agency and worldviews impact negotiations and influence protagonists on a continuum with various degrees of freedom. If we acknowledge the impact of “micro” worldviews on negotiators, we can study them as a set of interactive components—sociological, psychological, and biological—that mold the identity of an actor or group. This recognition of the impact of “micro” worldviews does not prevent us from offering proactive platforms to reinforce agency. When two people negotiate with each other they can acknowledge, unilaterally and hopefully jointly, how worldviews inhabit and influence each of them, and still dynamically deploy a series of moves to get things done responsibly across their respective worldviews.

In this article the authors investigate the relationship between culture and joint gains by examining the role of information sharing and power strategies in intracultural negotiations. Previously, the authors found that the relationship between cultural values or norms and joint gains was uncertain in six cultures: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the United States. Of the five values and norms measured, only norms for information sharing in negotiation were directly related to joint gains. This article explores and extends prior findings by investigating the strategies used by negotiators in the same six cultures. Cultures that maximized joint gains used direct information-sharing strategies or a combination of indirect and direct strategies. Power strategies may help or hurt joint gains, depending on a culture's values and norms for power and whether or not power-based influence is used in conjunction with sufficient information exchange. The findings suggest that understanding the other party's cultural characteristics and strategies can help negotiators plan how to focus on information exchange and deal with unusual power strategies that they may encounter.

What effect does culture have on the achievement of joint gains in negotiation? Prior research has identified a number of strategies, for example sharing information about preferrences and priorities, eschewing power, that lead to the development of joint gains when both negotiators are from the U.S. Are these same strategies used in other cultures? Are other strategies used? How effective are negotiators from different cultures in realizing joint gains? These are among the questions considered by the authors, whose research is based on data collected from negotiators from six different cultural backgrounds: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the U.S.