After seven rounds of meetings and 133 days, negotiations between the two Koreas over the mothballed Kaesong Industrial Complex culminated in a tentative agreement to reopen the project.
What led to the bargaining breakthrough?
The first six rounds of talks were mainly a fruitless exercise in which each side stated and restated its position without any consensus. Negotiation analysts refer to this as “positional bargaining.”
It’s a familiar tactic with North Korea—the same modus operandi it employs in nuclear nonproliferation negotiations. By elongating the Kaesong negotiation process, North Korea hoped to yield a net benefit eventually.
It’s also a strategy known as the prisoner’s dilemma, a game in which players betray rather than cooperate mostly out of fear and distrust, viewing the outcome as a zero-sum in which player A’s gain must come at the expense of player B.
But if fear can be mitigated and trust furthered, a greater likelihood towards cooperation exists. South Korea used an effective two-front strategy to create trust and cooperation.
First, it provided an option to cooperate by offering to agree to revised language in which both Koreas, rather than North Korea alone, would be responsible for guarantees of the smooth running of Kaesong.
Second, the South’s stance was coupled with a credible walk-away alternative—for Seoul to stop negotiating and pay a designated insurance payment amount to the businesses forced to leave Kaesong.
- Associated Press
- The two sides preparing to talk Wednesday
Timing and signaling were also critical. South Korea used the term “final” in describing the round of talks. This signaled to North Korea it could no longer continue its positional bargaining strategy.
Regarding timing, the talks and bargaining breakthrough both occurred the day before Aug. 15—known as “Liberation Day” in the Korean peninsula, a national holiday that celebrates the entire Korean peninsula’s independence from Japan’s colonial occupation.
What better way to remember the common negotiation interests of the two Koreas than with such timing?
The culmination of such negotiation strategies shifted North and South Korea’s strategic decision-making choice from non-cooperation to cooperation, for now.
With such agreement leading to other talks related to inter-Korean relations, the one open question now is just how long the Kaesong agreement will last. If precedent is any indicator, it won’t take too long before discord strikes again.
—Jasper Kim is director of the Center for Conflict Management at Ewha Womans University and founder of Asia-Pacific Global Research Group
