UCLA

Two broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused particularly on public coercive diplomacy and alliances, also belongs to this approach. The other tradition is the rhetorical-argumentative, which focuses on rhetorical style, justificatory argument, and the effects of modes of discourse. These traditions have offered very different insights and, in some areas, complement and reinforce each other.