What can we learn from studying highly skilled negotiators and diplomats grappling with some of the world’s most challenging problems? This course explores how modern diplomacy and negotiation can effectively address seemingly “intractable” international conflicts and overcome barriers to agreement in civil wars, interstate conflicts, environmental challenges, as well as in trade and finance. Drawing on in-depth cases in national and global contexts, the course will develop diagnostic and prescriptive characteristics of effective negotiation and diplomacy as tools of political, military, economic, environmental and financial statecraft.

The course will pay close attention to the “how” and the skills of effective negotiation and diplomacy. How are negotiation and diplomacy conducted at the highest levels both at and away from the conference table? How can leaders use negotiations and the combination of diplomacy and other sources of leverage (sanctions, coalitions, the threat of force, etc.) to achieve their objectives? How do global and business leaders most effectively overcome daunting barriers to a desired agreements? In service of these objectives, the course will draw on case studies of some of recent history’s greatest negotiators both playing official and unofficial roles, look at in-depth, personal interviews from the instructors’ American Secretaries of State Project, in which we have already spent considerable time with nine former US Secretaries of State focused on their toughest negotiations (and expect to have at least two more such interviews with Mike Pompeo and Tony Blinken before the course is projected to start spring 2026). Throughout, we will study examples where negotiation and diplomacy paid off and where they failed in order to extract best practices and common mistakes.