What am I?

In some ways, it's very hard for me to find "my literature." What I'm interested in is how countries get each other to cooperate to do things they want each other to do. I often refer to this as international negotiation, but actually, if you search on "negotiation" or "international negotiation" in the literature, you tend to get a lot of very details-oriented process-based stuff. Sometime that can be interesting, but it's a little peripheral to my interests; I tend to think that most of the outcomes of actual negotiations are predetermined by the time negotiators get to the table - by prior maneuvering, domestic-level interest aggregation, and background conditions.

On the other hand, if you try to take a step back and look at a higher level, much of the literature becomes too distant, too abstract. There's a lot of international relations literature that wants to abstract international behavior to very basic drivers, like the distribution of power. In a lot of these strands of literature, treaties just don't matter much at all; they're epiphenomenal.

What I want is a strand of literature that presumes treaties matter - ie, that countries do care about deal-making and will put efforts into obtaining deals they want, and that subsequent behavior will differ depending on whether a deal is or is not obtained - but doesn't focus on the often rather quotidian details of actual negotiation conferences and so on. What I care about is stuff like the prior maneuvering, domestic-level interest aggregation, and background conditions, and how countries manipulate those (or fail to) such that when they come to the table they get the deal they want (or fail to).

(There's a branch of literature on pre-treaty preparation, but from what I've seen it's small and not very good - not really what I'm looking for, more focusing on bureaucracy and agenda-setting - in other words, the pre-treaty version of the existing negotiations literature - though I'm not fully up on it.)