The publication is devoted to methodological problems and historical discourses of the research of institutional origins, present-days realities, perspectives and the ways of Transnistrian conflict settlement. The authors emphasize the topicality and the significance of the problem, which does not have the vast comparative analysis in the modern Ukrainian and world historiography. While analyzing the conflict resolution models and its institutional history – and, in particular, its political-diplomatic model – the authors focus on the features and national specifics of the stages of institutional history, as well as on the current state of the Transnistrian conflict in the system of international political coordinates. The article also dwells on the methods of the research, which is interdisciplinary in nature and is based on the important cognitive principles: the principles of science, historicism and objectivity. The use of various general and special methods allowed the authors to determine the trajectory of scientific research with the aim of reconstructing real historical and contemporary events.