Raymond Cohen

Cohen adapted anthropologist Edward Hall's framework to international negotiation. 'Low-context' cultures, typical of individualistic societies like the United States, rely on explicit verbal communication: what is said is what is meant. 'High-context' cultures, more common in traditionally interdependent societies like Japan, China, and Egypt, rely on nonverbal cues, implicit meaning, and shared understanding. Cohen demonstrated that these different models create systematic obstacles in U.S. negotiations with Japan, China, Egypt, India, and Mexico—what appears evasive to one side seems polite to the other. His book concludes with ten practical recommendations for intercultural negotiators .

In his 2002 article 'Language and Conflict Resolution: The Limits of English,' Cohen argued that English speakers wrongly assume their language captures objective reality rather than embedding its own cultural assumptions. Comparing conflict-resolution vocabularies in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, he showed the three languages vary significantly in what they assume about the nature of conflict, its objectives, and what terminating it entails. Non-native speakers tend to speak in English but think in their mother tongue, creating conceptual mismatches that impede communication and frustrate negotiation. Israeli-Syrian talks since 1991 exemplified these dissonant expectations .

Cohen co-edited Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations (2000) with Raymond Westbrook, applying modern diplomatic theory to the fourteenth-century BCE correspondence between Egyptian pharaohs and Near Eastern kings. The volume examined diplomatic signalling, reciprocity, status anxiety, international marriages, and the Amarna system's character as a 'full-fledged diplomatic system' or an 'international society in the making.' Cohen's chapter on 'Diplomatic Signaling in the Amarna Letters' brought his signalling theory to bear on ancient evidence, demonstrating that core diplomatic practices—managing status, communicating intent, avoiding offense—are not modern inventions .

In Theatre of Power: The Art of Diplomatic Signalling (1987), Cohen analyzed diplomacy as a system of communication in which states send signals through actions, gestures, and symbolic behaviour rather than explicit statements. A military manoeuvre, a diplomatic reception's seating arrangement, or a delay in responding can all convey messages. Cohen's key insight was that diplomatic signalling operates through a code that must be understood by both sender and receiver—misreading signals, whether through cultural difference or inattention, can escalate conflicts or create false reassurance. The book examined signalling in Soviet-American relations and other Cold War cases .

Cohen was born in Edinburgh in 1947, emigrated to Israel in 1970, and spent his career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Department of International Relations from 1976 until his retirement, serving as department chair and director of the Leonard Davis Institute . A graduate of Oxford University, he was a visiting professor at Georgetown and a research fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1988-89 and 1996 . His research evolved from cross-cultural negotiation and diplomatic signalling to the role of religion in diplomacy, culminating in Saving the Holy Sepulchre: How Rivals Restored the Church of the Resurrection .

Cohen's scholarship focused on the communicative and cultural dimensions of diplomacy rather than material power or institutional structures. Where realist IR emphasizes military capability and balance of power, Cohen examined how language, norms, and cultural assumptions shape what negotiators can understand and achieve. His work on the Holy See's negotiations and Jerusalem's holy places showed that religious identity and symbolic meaning are not epiphenomenal but constitutive of diplomatic problems. This cultural turn in diplomatic studies positioned him as a pioneer in a field that later scholars like Paul Sharp developed further .