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International negotiation has been one of the most pervasive processes in world politics since the dawn of recorded history, yet it has been the subject of far less political science research than other aspects of international relations, such as war and international institutions. This chapter is designed to synthesize key insights and findings from available research on negotiating international agreements and to point to specific paths toward potential research. We hope more political scientists will decide to join the enterprise of illuminating this important process and the conditions under which international negotiations operate. We hope this research will ultimately prove useful in the practical world.

We conceptualize negotiation as a process in which actors take steps to agree on an outcome, and every actor seeks to make that outcome as good as possible from their own perspective. Some actors’ perspectives may include making the outcome as good as possible for their community or a common institution1. Agreements may be explicit or tacit. We assume differing preferences will be present in all cases of international negotiation and thus will always be a possible obstacle to agreement. For instance, any joint gains created will need to be allocated between parties. 2 We do not assume that influence and coercion are absent from negotiation by definition, that parties always negotiate in good faith, or that negotiated agreements are all “winwin” relative to the status quo. This report, however, does concentrate on a subset of situations in