Main Strengths and Weaknesses of Principled Negotiation

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 84%, University of Kent, language: English, abstract: This essay will analyse the advantages and disadvantages of principled negotiation, using the 1978 Egyptian-Israeli negotiations at Camp David as a case study to support the arguments. The essay is divided into five main sections. The first will give a basic explanation of what principled negotiation is and how it works, including a brief summary of the Camp David Accords. The second section will go on to describe the strengths of principled negotiations. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks will be described before the third section, in which the weaknesses of principled negotiations will be explored. Both strengths and weaknesses are backed up by examples from the case studies. Finally, conclusions will be drawn, summarizing the discussion. Principled negotiation is an approach to conflict negotiation. It is a concept that was developed as part of the Harvard Program on Negotiations and was set out in the 1981 book "e;Getting To Yes"e; by Roger Fisher and Bill Ury. Both are co-founders of the Harvard Negotiation Project. They achieved acceptable solutions for negotiations by determining which of the negotiator's needs are fixed and which are flexible; this method of focusing on the psychology of the negotiator allowed agreement to be reached without jeopardizing relations between the parties.