To study and enhance awareness of preferred as well as habitual negotiating and mediation styles and attitudes according to different issues at the stake, and to encourage a whole analytical and psychological reflection on negotiation processes in which negotiators and mediators are involved. To study and encourage experimentation with negotiation methods that can be used to advance high-priority interests and values while protecting working relationships.
To study and increase integrated theoretical as well as experiential knowledge of cognitive and emotional dynamics within negotiation processes and conflict prevention/resolution strategies, and to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings and evidence-based best practices.
To study and research on interpersonal adaptive decision-making processes. Building expertise and making sense of the situations brings to focus the attention on what is going on in that situation and is much more adaptive that just selecting the best option. In time of crisis complexity is increased and we need complex mental tools to adapt our decision-making processes to the real world. We need to relate on our tacit knowledge and experience.
To explore and develop the formulation of strategic training and tailored teaching pedagogy to nurture the mental capital of negotiators and mediators. This means to improve interpersonal negotiating social skills, problem-solving modalities and resilience in the face of stress, increasing actors’ cognitive and emotional resources as major tools to help conflict transformation processes.
EANAM takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of interpersonal negotiations as the main mechanism for managing and transforming conflicts. It seeks to study how to generate a longer term strategic research and negotiating teaching agenda for negotiators and mediators that both respond to changes in our societies and to the unprecedented demand and opportunities for international conflict prevention and resolution and international preventive negotiation processes. Moreover, it tries to understand more of the evolution of the EU negotiators’ diplomatic thinking, to provide a benchmark for future comparison and discussion on the EU as talking with one voice as mediator and international negotiator.
EANAM aims to reinforce the foundation of a new field of research in the intersection between social sciences; specifically between political science, international relations, international negotiation and mediation, social-cognitive psychology, psychology of training. It puts a dual emphasis on the cognitive-emotional processes behind the construction of social knowledge and interpersonal skills, on the one hand; and on the evolution and integration of teaching for negotiators, on the other hand. Interdisciplinary research and study processes we hope will help us to gain new knowledge and awareness of how to deal with conflicts in different contexts over time and space enacting a process for mediating social changes. Negotiators could push their own governments towards a perspective of peace and civil cohabitation between people and nations insofar acting as catalysts for social changes.
If there was stiff competition around the centers of power, there was practically none in the area where I wanted to work: preparing the future.”
Jean Monnet -