International Crisis Negotiation Exercise

South China Sea territorial dispute:

For this exercise the crisis in question is the current conflict between the countries of China, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia over their conflicting claims within the South China Sea. Other countries with interests in this region and involved in the negotiations are the United States, India and Japan. The date is 3 March 2019, and you are at a United Nations Security Council mandated peace conference in Jakarta, Indonesia. The UN Secretary General has sent his Special Representative to Southeast Asia to monitor developments, facilitate and/or mediate negotiations, and report findings.

This exercise is designed to engage and educate participants in the process and substance of crisis negotiations at the international level over a three-day period. The intent is for the participants to gain experience in negotiations at the strategic level to come away with a greater understanding of the complexity of the problem and the effort that goes into the pursuit of a resolution to a regional crisis that has broad international implications. The educational rigor is drawn from the participant’s own endeavors as members selected to be part of a nation’s negotiation team. Each team engages with their counterparts within the framework of a United Nations’ mandated peace conference in an effort to resolve a long-standing, potentially volatile crisis. The teams are assigned mentors to assist them as they work through the process. This experiential learning experience will help expose students to the complexity of negotiating with nations that have diverse and often irreconcilable positions and objectives. The key learning objective is the realistic search for overlapping interests that could permit progress to be made in resolving conflict.