International negotiations are interactive social processes that can be linked to emerging legitimate forms of global governance. This happens when negotiations allow for dialogues and problem solving as opposed to monologues and threats delivered from privileged heights of power. This book explores the possibilities under which negotiations can be genuinely transformative as opposed to merely reflecting actors' instrumental interests or structural constraints.

It might seem odd to quote a radical thinker like Paulo Freire to begin a text that speaks of negotiations as legitimate forms of governance in a global liberal economy. International negotiations are often stereotyped as manipulative exercises and one among the many coercive instruments available to the mighty. Nevertheless, my intent is to highlight the circumstances under which negotiations can be dialogues and help actors not only to operate in the world as they find it, but also transform it through communicative action and self-understandings. From Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to Amartya Sen's Argumentative Indian, reasoning and deliberation as praxis have been similarly understood.

Hedley Bull notes in The Anarchical Society that the herald or the messenger epitomized communication among political communities before the invention of diplomacy. Now, the nature of diplomacy is being transformed through communication technologies themselves.