How does battlefield activity affect belligerents’ behavior during wartime negotiations? While scholars have studied when and why warring parties choose to negotiate, few insights explain what negotiators do once seated at the table. I argue that actors engage in obstinate negotiation behavior to signal resolve when undergoing contentious and indeterminate hostilities. I explore this claim by analyzing all negotiation transcripts and associated daily military operations reports from the Korean War. Using text-based, machine learning, and statistical methods, I show that high levels of movement or casualties in isolation produce clear information on future trends, thus yielding more substantive negotiations, while more turbulent activity featuring high movement and casualties in tandem produces cynical negotiations. Moving past contemporary literature, this study explores micro-level dynamics of conflict and diplomacy, builds a theoretical bridge between two perennial views of negotiation, and provides a framework for studying war by applying computational methods to archival documents.

战场活动如何影响战时谈判中交战方的行为？尽管学者们研究了交战各方何时以及为何选择谈判，但很少有见解能解释谈判者坐在谈判桌后会做什么。我认为，在经历有争议和不确定的敌对行动时，行为者会采取顽固的谈判行为来表明决心。我通过分析朝鲜战争的所有谈判记录和相关的每日军事行动报告来探讨这一说法。我使用基于文本的机器学习和统计方法表明，孤立的高水平运动或伤亡会产生关于未来趋势的清晰信息，从而产生更实质性的谈判，而以高运动和伤亡串联为特征的更动荡的活动会产生愤世嫉俗的谈判.