Psychological dynamics of insight: Relevance to international negotiation

Abstract

This chapter explores the implications of a key claim in the Insight approach to conflict resolution that the parties to any negotiation need to be seen as historically situated social actors. As goal-directed, purposive actors, the parties’ negotiation strategies and tactics can be seen as an attempt to shape the future in accordance with the parties’ own goals and interests through the negotiation process. But as historically situated social actors, the parties’ conception of that future is also partly shaped by their consciousness of their own past and themselves as historically situated agents in relation to the other parties. Any attempt to reset the boundaries of that imagined future relationship through negotiation thus involves the parties in psychologically readjusting their own relations with their own pasts, which is one of the least understood and most complex psychological dynamics at work in the international negotiation process.