Improvisation and Mediation: Balancing Acts

Improvisation can be an important element of mediation practice, and there are several ways in which mediation practice correlates to improvisational performance. In this article, two mediation experts and two skilled jazz musicians explore the improvisational aspects of mediation. Two central themes emerge: (1) mediators often use improvisational techniques, and (2) by being improvisational, mediators can create environments that would encourage the parties themselves to be improvisational. We argue that practitioners can enhance their effectiveness as mediators by mastering improvisational skills.     

Practice-Relevant Research in Mediation: Toward a Reflective Research Paradigm

Donald Schön has advanced the notion that a systematic understanding of professional practice can be built on the reflective insights of skilled practitioners. The reflective practitioner paradigm is well suited to mediation research. A study of divorce mediation illustrates how Schön's seminal ideas can be translated into research procedures with broad applicability to a variety of mediation settings.     

A Study of the Emergence of Cooperation in Mediation

All mediators confront the challenge of how to encourage cooperation among parties in a mediation. Based on a phenomenological study of workplace mediation, this article explores the variables that are linked to the emergence of cooperation between parties. In the first part of the study, factors influencing the desire to cooperate are identified and categorized, based upon whether they help or hinder cooperation. The second part of the study compares the characteristics of cooperative and antagonistic mediation climates in order to better understand how cooperation is established during the mediation process. Based on the findings, strategies are proposed to help mediators facilitate the transition of an antagonistic climate into a cooperative one and thereby encourage the emergence of cooperation.     

A New Use for Practitioners in Teaching Negotiation

This article examines the role that practitioners as guest lecturers have traditionally played in the teaching of negotiation. The authors argue that, as seen from the perspective of student learning, this traditional role has not utilized the practitioner's expertise and experience to an optimal degree. Because of this, they have redesigned the role of the practitioner as guest lecturer in their negotiation course. They describe this new role in some detail. Their goal is to encourage students to understand how and why integrative negotiation techniques can work beyond the classroom in what students call the "real world."     

We do negotiate with terrorists: navigating liberal and illiberal norms in peace mediation

The normative framework in mediation processes is growing. Mediators are increasingly expected by their mandate-givers to incorporate liberal norms such as inclusivity into their overall strategy. However, in the wake of the terrorist attacks that took place on 11 September 2001, and the policy shifts that accompanied the “Global War on Terror”, mediators find themselves simultaneously pressured to design mediation processes actively excluding armed groups proscribed as terrorists and consequently incorporating this illiberal norm of “exclusivity”, barring proscribed groups’ access to negotiations. This article asks what consequences this development has on the normative agency of mediators, based on if and how they incorporate proscribed armed groups into their mediation strategies. It argues that the dichotomy between liberal and illiberal norms has important consequences on a mediator’s normative agency. First, the dichotomy constrains mediators to a single normative standard, rendering only liberal and illiberal views possible. Second, the assumption that liberal norms are “good” and illiberal norms are “bad” engenders a double dichotomy that greatly constrains a mediator’s normative agency. Third, these constraints on a mediator engender new mediation practices such as outsourcing and risk-sharing in an attempt to salvage normative agency. The article contributes to scholarship on norms, terrorism and mediation through providing a more nuanced view of normative parameters in mediation practice.     

Accepting Conflict and Experiencing Creativity: Teaching "Concertation" Using La Francilienne CD-ROM

This article discusses the use of the La Francilienne CD-ROM, which I developed with my colleague Alain Lempereur, law professor at ESSEC Business School, near Paris. As a professor in the ESSEC Department of Environment, I use the CD-ROM as the basic tool for my course "Concertation, Decision, and Local Democracy." The CD-ROM's simulation of a public negotiation process for a highway project allows me not only to teach basic concepts and methods of negotiation and mediation but also to enhance two important concepts in public decision processes in planning and environment: conflicts and creativity. The students are given the opportunity first to experience, and then to discuss, conflict and creativity in a quasi-real setting. These experiences and discussions encourage an internal change process for the students and help them to integrate the negotiation and mediation concepts and methods taught. This internal change will be conceptualized in this article according to two educational theories: transitional thinking theory and experiential learning theory.     

The Paradox of Accepting One's Share of Responsibility in Mediation

Mediators generally avoid the issue of whether parties accept their individual share of responsibility for a conflict. But the results of this study demonstrate the important role that taking responsibility for the conflict can play to encourage the emergence of cooperation within the mediation process. In this article, the author first explores the role of responsibility within the context of various mediation approaches and styles. Next, he reports the results of a quantitative study that examined the attitudes of disputants involved in workplace conflict mediations. His results indicate that acceptance of responsibility can play a parodixical role in the mediation process: it seems to be effective only when both parties jointly acknowledge responsibility. When responsibility is acknowledged unilaterally, it seems to have a negative effect on the emergence of cooperation. Finally, the author proposes an intervention strategy for mediators that is designed to encourage the joint acceptance of responsibility and thus facilitate the emergence of cooperation in mediation.     

A matter of balance: the European Union as a mediator in Yemen

The mediation efforts of the European Union (EU) Delegation in Yemen started with the uprising in 2011 which led to the conclusion of the National Dialogue Conference in 2014. This article examines the EU's understanding of mediation vis-à-vis its practice. The case of Yemen lends itself to trace EU mediation capabilities from the implementation of the “Concept on Strengthening Mediation and Dialogue Capacities” to a more systematic approach because the Mediation Support Team (MST) of the European External Action Service took office in 2011. Building on an analytical framework of mediation as a tool of EU foreign policy, this article demonstrates how EU mediation presents itself along a political and a technical dimension. The collaboration of the MST and the EU Delegation personnel in Yemen fostered an increase in mediation awareness. However, it could not develop its full potential as the UN Special Advisor sidelined the EU and other members of the Group of Ten Ambassadors through his proactive approach. Despite those difficulties of standing up to established actors in the field, this study argues that EU mediation is about balancing its political and technical dimension. For now, the political seems to outweigh the craft of mediation in the case of Yemen.     

The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness: Using the Reputation Index with Law Students

Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiation? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be? I force my students to grapple with these questions by incorporating the issues of reputation and reputation development into my negotiation/mediation course. I introduced this innovation at the same time that I decided to increase my focus on developing students' skills in distributive (or value‐claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut. As a result, I now base a portion of my students' final grade on the objective results they achieve in two negotiation simulations. Two dangers of this assessment choice are that it can encourage students to focus only on the numbers and, even worse, engage in “sharp practice”— an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries — in order to achieve the best short‐term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, objective results, I also base part of students' final grades on their scores on a “Reputation Index.” These scores are based on students' nominations of their peers, accompanied by explanatory comments. This article describes the Reputation Index and how I use it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers' reputations in the “real world.” To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers' perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation “approach” and negotiation “style,” and the relationships among perceptions of negotiation style, procedural justice, trustworthiness, and reputation.     

Learning from complexity: The International Development Research Centre's experience with Outcome Mapping

This paper introduces the major concepts of Outcome Mapping and discusses the International Development Research Centre's experience in developing and implementing Outcome Mapping with Northern and Southern research organisations. It explores how the fundamental principles of Outcome Mapping relate to organisational learning principles and the challenges associated with applying theory to practice. It presents cases where planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes have been used to encourage learning and improvement, and discusses the potential of Outcome Mapping as a tool for evaluative thinking to build learning into development programmes.     

New Technology Meets an Old Teaching Challenge: Using Digital Video Recordings, Annotation Software, and Deliberate Practice Techniques to Improve Student Negotiation Skills

There is a world of difference between teaching negotiation theory, which pertains to conceptual understanding, and teaching negotiation skills, which pertain to actual behavior in real‐world situations. The principle of reflective practice is widely used for theoretical instruction. Deliberate practice, however, is a more powerful model for skills training. Cognitive scientists have discovered that subjects will learn skills best when they perform well‐defined tasks at appropriate levels of difficulty, and when they are given immediate feedback, an opportunity to correct their errors, and an opportunity to practice until the tasks become routine. To satisfy the deliberate practice conditions for large graduate‐level negotiation courses (some as large as seventy students), students were assigned to use webcams with their laptop computers to video record their negotiation exercises. Before each exercise, students were assigned to prepare for and to concentrate on performing two or three well‐defined tasks. Students reviewed these recordings and commented on their performances in a journal before uploading the videos and journals to an assigned network folder. The instructor and teaching assistants then reviewed the journals and specified portions of the videos and provided individual written feedback to the students. The instructors found that student negotiating skills have improved significantly using this new system. In comparison with earlier semesters, students also felt they were involved in a more intense and personal learning experience. A majority of students reported they intend to apply the principles of deliberate practice in their professional lives after graduation. The authors have found this method continues to challenge their ability to identify and describe the skills used by expert negotiators. As an addition to this new methodology, two of the authors have spearheaded the development of video annotation software, known as “MediaNotes,” to help students and instructors review, comment upon, and learn from video recordings of negotiations. Based on their experiences using the software to support deliberate practice, the authors expect this tool to initiate a significant advance in our ability to recognize and describe expert negotiation behavior and in students’ ability to improve their negotiating skills.     

Some Minor Reflections on Conflict Resolution: The State of the Field as a Moving Target

Based on several recent meetings between the scholarly and practice communities of the conflict resolution field, the author observes that our understanding of what we consider to be conflict resolution is changing rapidly, and that the context of a particular dispute is often determining. To continue to build knowledge in the field, scholars and reflective practitioners should examine such topic areas as the nature of practice; differences between in-house and external mediation; expectations of all parties about change and outcomes; and the ethics of intervention.     

Common Language, Different Meaning: What Meidators Mean When They Talk About Their Work

Mediators, for the most part, descrive their work as "facilitation" but what they actually mean varies considerably. Based on an exploratory study with nealy 90 mediators in Canada (all of whom are also mediation trainers), the author describes the great diversity among mediators'understanding of commonly-used terms like facilitation, transformative, settlement, and humansitic. She also reports on how such factors as context, gender, and number of years mediating affect mediator perceptions of what they do. In addition, the author shows how perceptions affect the overall philosophy and goal of hte meidation practitioner: One implication of this research is that we can no longer presume to know what people men by "mediation," nor can we assume mediators are like-minded in how they understand their work. Thus, practitionsner, scholars and policymakers are encouraged to be purposefully clear when describing and writting about the practice of mediation.     

Toward a Global Theory of Mind: The Potential Benefits of Presenting a Range of IR Theories through Active Learning

Active learning is particularly well-suited to teaching across the range of perspectives inherent in the practice and study of international politics for two key reasons: (1) because of its capacity to highlight how subjective, intersubjective, and contested understandings play an important role in determining outcomes in the ivory tower as well as in the real world and (2) because of the compatibility between underlying theories of knowledge that inform active learning and the newer generation of IR theories including subaltern realism, social constructivism, constitutive theory, and postmodernism. This article explores the potential benefits of presenting these and other norm-oriented theories through active learning. It also discusses ways to overcome barriers to the integration of active learning techniques.     

Stage Development Theory: A Natural Framework for Understanding the Mediation Process

Scholars and practitioners of mediation have generally paid little attention to the development of theoretical frameworks for understanding what is taking place in the mediation process. By borrowing from stages of adult psychological development theory (in this scheme, physical; hedonistic/impulsive; conformist/authority-seeking; rational/individualistic; and integrative), we can better understand some of the behaviors that people exhibit in mediation and perhaps find ways to help parties expand their behavioral repertoires so that new avenues for resolution appear to them. Using frequent examples from mediation practice, the author describes each stage, then assesses the limits and possibilities of relating this theoretical framework to mediation. She sees this juxtaposition of theory to practice not so much as a how to for mediation practice, but rather as a new window through which mediators can view mediation clients, the mediation process, and their own behavior in the mediation room.     

The Secrets of Successful Mediators

A survey of thirty experienced mediators showed that three-quarters of them regarded achieving rapport with the parties as central to their success in bringing about settlements. This article discusses how mediators achieve and make use of that rapport. The article also considers the implications for mediator training of the finding that achieving rapport with the parties is a key factor in successful mediation.     

Framing New Directions for Theory from the Experience of Practitioners

Parallel, powerful tensions exist both in mediation and in the general worlds of the scholar and the practitioner. One response to balancing these tensions, which could be called "practice romanticism," has evolved from the reflective practitioner model. But more could be done to improve our analysis and build practice-oriented theory. A key ingredient in this investigation is a healthy critical approach.     

The significance of the Cracow summit

This article assesses whether the EU contributes to long-term positive change in societies emerging from violent conflict, helping them ‘mend’ or whether it simply encourages societies to ‘make do’ with the status quo. To do so, the article focuses on two of the principles found in the Treaty, peace and justice for human rights violations. It examines how the EU translates the principles of peace and justice into policy and puts them into practice by analyzing EU engagement in peace mediation, transitional justice, and security sector reform in general and through in-depth examination of EU engagement in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It questions the prevailing discourse that greater inter-institutional coherence would improve EU security provision and considers whether and how the EU prioritizes between peace and justice. The article finds that principles may be translated into policy and put into practice, and practice is often ahead of policy. But this is uneven within as well as across the institutions. Greater coherence between principle, policy, and practice, rather than between institutions, would improve EU security provision and enable prioritization. If the EU settles for making do, it undermines its considerable potential to contribute to long-term solutions to complex conflicts.