Working on some slides for a Mediation Technique presentation in Geneva next week.

Mediation as a professional discipline has some core assumptions. One of the most noted is the idea that there are three levels in the way people look at disputes, namely PIN:

  • Positions
  • Interests
  • Needs

Thus Kosovo. The Serbs and Albanians alike say noisily "Kosovo is ours!" They have incompatible positions.

Yet ‘below’ that level there are (it is argued) some areas of common interest – not fighting over the place, moving towards EU membership, getting richer and so on.

And below even that, maybe some common needs: maintaining credibility, not being humiliated, staying alive and so on.

Thus a mediator trying to help Serbia and Kosovo sort themselves out will want to move the discussion from Positions through Interests towards Needs, exploring ideas for building on those areas where existential agreement can be found rather than focusing on implacable differences.

Another way of looking at negotiation is a ZOPA: Zone of Possible Agreement.

  • Mary wants to pay between £5000 and £8000 for a new car.
  • Nancy is ready to sell her car for as little as £6000 but hopes to get £9000.

Somewhere between £6000 and £8000 is the zone of possible agreement, a price both could accept with more or less satisfaction.

Thus the skilled mediator coaxes the parties to move from their extreme positions and look instead at where interests might overlap.

In the Kosovo case, even the International Crisis Group is now looking at territory swaps as the potential ZOPA:

The international community should facilitate as complete a settlement as is possible, leaving it up to the parties themselves to decide how far and in what direction they can go to achieve the goal of recognition.

The most controversial outcome that might emerge from negotiations would be a Northern Kosovo-Preševo Valley swap in the context of mutual recognition and settlement of all other major issues. Neither Pristina nor Belgrade proposes this openly, but officials in both capitals have begun to speak of it quietly in contacts with Crisis Group.

Many in the international community would be unhappy with this option. Crisis Group believes that ruling out this or any specific mutually-agreed option from the onset, however, would risk freezing the Kosovo-Serbia conflict, with no guarantee of eventual resolution.

So much for theory.

All of this assumes some sort of intrinsic ability of the parties to look ‘rationally’ at what they want now and in the future. To weigh up options in some sort of calm, cooperative spirit, based upon (ultimately) the motherly comforting notion that we are all human beings on Planet Earth together and that there are better things to do here than fight.

Which is usually fine, or at least good enough.

But there are cases where parties each seemingly have internalised different, incompatible levels of rationality.

Such as, in the Balkans, Inat. Someone playing the Inat card is claiming to gain psychic or negotiating strength from the very perverse intensity of his/her irrationality:

See – you are right to say that what I am doing is against my interests! But that’s the point.

The fact that I am prepared to do insane things in response to their antics shows just how strongly I feel about this!

And because I am being driven insane, I can not be reasoned with in your bourgeois/sentimental way. Take it or leave it! 

It may be that it is all a wearying bluff, a highly calculated attempt to extract specific negotiating advantage by feigning wild-eyed lack of calculation.

But what if it is real? Or if the effort of doing all that feigning somehow warps the mind of the feigner and starts to create a genuine level of irrationality if not madness?

Sure, with enough therapy and patient counselling this may be turned round.

Does anyone have a quiet couch big enough for Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians, Bosniacs and Croats to lie on for a couple of decades while they get it all off their chests?