Reaching Constructive Compromise: Steps, Tactics, and Strategies

The history of war and conflicts is as old as human history itself. Along with it always existed attempts to find ways and means to reconcile conflicting parties and reach peace. In today’s world, more than ever, where war and conflicts are everyday occurrence is imperative to find faster and reliable ways how to resolve conflicts. Reaching a constructive compromise is extremely difficult (very often even the implementation phase creates additional hitches) as the parties involved pretend or believe that all of their demands for peace deal are rational and thus should be fulfilled. While one party may have expertise in negotiation process itself, the other may be unwittingly unprepared, and believing that honesty and fairness will result in impartial peace deal. This is, unfortunately, not always so. The aim of this paper, besides targeting these types of naïve perceptions, is to inspire others to be fully prepared prior entering negotiation process. The negotiation strategy, along with steps and tactics is the fundament of this research. History of negotiations teaches us that often the strong and more prepared side tends to win more than the weak and unprepared one in a negotiation process. Yet studying and exploring the approach to reach a constructive compromise is essential and conducive even if you happen to find yourself as the weaker party vis-à-vis a stronger opposing rival. The purpose of this study is to analyse the implications of negotiating strategies in the course of reaching the eventual constructive compromise. Throughout, this paper has endeavoured to answer numerous but distinct issues related to the topic and offer a balanced analysis on the arguments explored. The study also delves into some international conflicts (resolved and unresolved) examining them in light of potential constructive compromise. Finally the study ends up by concluding that constructive compromise strategy that focuses, above all, on creativity, analytical ability and rationality requires often, enormous time and efforts to reach desired result, but ends fully justify means.