International Crisis Negotiation Exercise

This exercise will use the Korean Six-Party talks to provide participants with the opportunity to learn and apply skills in regional situation analysis, negotiation techniques, strategic thinking, leadership, planning, crisis management, decision-making, team-building and time management. Along with participants from other area educational institutions, participants are divided into delegations representing the six participating nations (China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, the United States, and Russia). Under the mentorship of faculty and guest experts, students organize delegations, plan, strategize, negotiate, and promote national interests in an attempt to resolve the escalating nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

The International Strategic Crisis Negotiation Exercise (ISCNE) is a US Army War College sponsored, Middlebury Institute hosted simulation that allows participants to tackle real-world, contemporary geopolitical problems. 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. This experiential learning event 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.