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While news of United Nations activities in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and other trouble spots has been in the press almost daily in recent months, information about internal UN developments are more difficult to come by. Fortunately, we have recently obtained documents on some organizational changes that affect the way the UN carries on its business and consequently the paper work documenting its activities. These changes involve several UN bodies, including the General Assembly and the Security Council, as well as other UN units. The number of developments is such that one cannot easily cover all the information in one column, and it has been decided to concentrate here on Security Council documentation.

The subject of this article is how deadlocks in international negotiations may be solved. Despite the fact that deadlock is a common phenomenon in international negotiations, this subject has received little attention from negotiation theorists. This analysis, which is based on five instances of deadlocks that occurred during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, focuses on (a) the negotiating parties' attempts and ability to solve deadlocks by coercion and persuasion, package deals and fractionating, and innovations, (b) how non-controversial elements, uncertainty, vagueness, symbolic formulas and residual disagreement can be used to solve deadlocks, and (c) how the perceptions of the negotiation and the presence of internal negotiations may limit the negotiation parties' possibilities to solve deadlocks. The analysis shows that innovations that are non-controversial, in the sense that they are hard to relate to the positions of the parties in terms of concessions or retractions, may play an important role in solving deadlocks. Furthermore, it indicates that agreements that follow deadlocks are often characterized by uncertainty, vagueness, symbolic formulas and residual disagreement.