Breaking Deadlocks with Cheap Talks: Weakness of Regimes with Territorial Issues

• In Event: Bargaining and Disputes

Abstract

Existing studies in the conflict management field provide a number of strategies that can be used to break an impasse between disputants including mediation and intervention. This study aims to identify and propose another effective negotiation strategy that can be used to overcome a negotiation deadlock. When two disputants reach an impasse, one party can use a third party as a prop to send a message to its counterpart in order to trigger the receiving state to return to the negotiation table. We expect that the closer to the bull eye the message the former sends, the more likely the latter will get back to the negotiation table.

Using content analysis, we analyze three negotiation cases between the United States and China (The 1989 Tiananmen Square, the 2001 airplane crash, and the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations) to illustrate how Taiwan was instrumentally used by the United States to overcome a negotiation deadlock with China. We find that verbal condemnation as well as a threat to use economic sanctions and implementation of economic sanctions were not effective; however, the messages that threatened the regime’s core national interests (survival) were found to be effective in altering China’s behaviors.

We conclude that while using verbal threats is effective and successful at changing the opponents’ behavior, the contents of the threats need to be deliberately chosen.

Authors

• Su-Mi Lee, University of Hawaii-Hilo

• Shu-An Tsai, Tunghai University