While cooperation and conflict management may often seem to be synonyms, they are in fact parallel concepts with a large but not total overlap. Cooperation refers to a situation where parties agree to work together at some cost to each to produce new gains for each that are unavailable to them by unilateral action. It means combining conflicting interests in order to attain common interests, as developed in Hopmann's chapter, above. Conflict management refers to the reduction of the means of pursuing a conflict from violent to political or, more broadly, to measures to move a conflict toward resolution (elimination of the incompatibilities in the parties' positions on an issue). Conflict management can be accomplished bilaterally or multilaterally, depending on the type of conflict; that is, a party can manage its conflict with its adversary cooperatively, or it can cooperate with other parties to manage someone else's conflict. In a word, it is a matter of negotiation or mediation. So one can say that all cooperation involves some conflict management but not all conflict management involves cooperation.

One may begin with the assumption that states (and most parties in general) prefer to act alone. Cooperation has its costs, as noted, and states in particular prefer unilateral action because they have their own special interests and because they are sovereign. Thus, when faced with a common problem or a conflict, a state (party) has the choice of acting alone, acting with others (cooperatively), or not acting at all.