In this keynote address I take the audience on a journey through 27 years of publishing articles in GDN. My first article appeared in a 1997 special issue on “The Logic of Comparative Negotiation Analysis.” This was an analysis in search of key dimensions of international negotiation. It was followed in 1999 by an article that honed in on Fred Ikle’s taxonomy of negotiation, producing strong empirical support for his theory and a gracious thank you letter from Fred. The first of many articles on automated mediation began with a 2002 article that described the Negotiator Assistant system. This was followed in 2004 and then in 2014 by ambitious experimental evaluations of screen vs. human mediation. This stream culminated in our 2021awared winning article on robot meditation. The upshot is that robots produced more and better agreements than any of the other formats.
A slight detour from technical articles to the role of emotions resulted in a highly cited special issue that showed the many ways that emotions influence negotiation. Nine years later we produced another special issue on justice and fairness with a mix of quantitative and qualitative articles in a variety of settings. About that time I was working on positive affirmation as a technique for improving the chances of getting better agreements (2019) and on how negotiators react to turning points with matching or mismatching strategies. Most recently, in 2022, we answered the question: Does trust matter in negotiation? The answer is an emphatic yes.
This GDN journey spanned topics at the center of our field, from types of international negotiations to the importance of trust in any negotiation. The key insights that emerged reinforce our claims about the value of doing systematic research with practical implications. In summing up, I will try to push the field further in directions that broaden our understanding of these processes and contexts as well as strengthen GDN’s contribution to the social and informational sciences.
Daniel Druckman is Professor Emeritus of Public and International Affairs at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government and an Honorary Professor at Macquarie University in Sydney and at the University of Queensland in Brisbane Australia. Two of his books, Doing Research: Methods of Inquiry for Conflict Analysis (Sage, 2005) and, with Paul F. Diehl, Evaluating Peace Operations (Lynne Reinner, 2010) received the outstanding book award from the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM). His co-authored article on robot mediation (2021) received a best article of the year award from GDN. He also received lifetime achievement and Rubin Theory to Practice awards from the IACM in 2003 and 2018 respectively. He also received lifetime achievement awards from the Novancia Business School in Paris in 2016 and from the Schar School of Policy and Government in 2023.