Ready for Prime Time: The When,Who, and Why of International Mediation

Most of the literature on international dispute resolution emphasizes timing and ripeness when considering whether or not a dispute is suitable for mediation. In addition to this focus, the authors believe analysts should consider whether a particular mediator is ready for prime time. Their framework posits that one may gauge the appropriateness of a mediator for a particular dispute along three different types of considerations: operational and political; strategic and diplomatic; and relationship and cultural fit. They provide numerous case examples illustrating how the choice of a mediator might apply in each dimension.     

The Cairo Stories: Some Reflections on Conflict Resolution in Egypt

The author relates three cases of conflict which he has observed in Cairo and recognizes patterns that cut across each of these stories. The stories shed light on how people in Egypt approach and deal with conflict; in addition, they may help readers understand conflict in their home culture as well as be instructive on how to listen to conflict in different cultures. Six general themes in the way Egyptians approach or handle conflict are identified, and each of these themes is analyzed.     

Negotiation: The Chinese Concept

It is no understatement to say that negotiation activity has skyrocketed in China in recent years; however, these negotiations are frequently unsatisfactory. Part of the reason for this lack of success is that Chinese people have a conception of negotiation that is fundamentally different from that of people in the West. Based on extensive interviews with Chinese and non-Chinese negotiators over a period of five years, the author explains the Chinese approach by using two metaphors: mobile warfare and the joint quest. Understanding this approach has significant implications for negotiation practice.     

Crafting the language of consensus

Conclusion In summary, the consensus process provides a necessary set of procedures and standards that provide the essential foundation for reaching mutually supported settlement of disputes. Adjudicatory or voting processes are antithetical to the very nature of the consensus process. When voting takes place, winners and losers are explicitly defined. This can lead to lessened support for implementation of solutions—and even to the losers preferring that implementation fail.As with any other processes, consensus-based processes can—and, at times, should—fail. Where consensus fails, participants will have recourse to other alternatives for making decisions, including administrative, legal, and political forums, the alternative forums which provided the impetus for disputing parties to seek mutually agreeable solutions through a consensus process. Gerald W. Cormick is a mediator specializing in public policy dispute settlement and a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate school of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. His mailing address is 15629 Cascadian Way, Mill Creek, Wash. 98102.This column is based on materials developed by the author for the British Columbia Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, 8 April 1991.     

Fighting the wimp image: Why calls for negotiation often fall on deaf ears

Conclusion Must calls for war always dominate pleas for more serious negotiation? Not necessarily. But, if negotiation is to prevail, its advocates have to recognize which elements of their rhetoric sound weak and timid to others.Right after the routing of the Iraqis from Kuwait, the conventional wisdom was that American voters would repudiate those members of Congress who had argued for more negotiation — the surrender lobby, one belligerent called them. Iraq would teach elected officials not to talk of negotiation in the future. Now, barely a year from the start of hostilities, the verdict is not quite so clear. With Saddam still in power and the establishment of President Bush's new world order yet to be proven, opinion polls suggest that a growing number of Americans now regard the war as only a partial success. Public awareness of the costs of war, as well as its seeming benefits, can only be to the good, but apostles of negotiation should be careful not to read such numbers as vindication of their views. Skepticism about war still must be matched by some well-founded confidence in its alternative. Michael Wheeler is Director of the Undergraduate Program, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. 02139. He is also Deputy Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.     

Caveats for Cross-Border Negotiators

Scholars and practitioners have detailed a number of ways that differences in national culture can affect bargaining behavior: from surface etiquette and protocol to deeper cultural characteristics and to systematic variations in decision making and governance. Such cross-national analysis can be quite useful but is prone to at least four hazardous fallacies described in this article and illustrated, in some cases, by probabilistic reasoning. Along with suggestions for avoiding them, these fallacies include: (1) The John Wayne v. Charlie Chan Fallacy (stereotyping); (2) The Rosetta Stone Fallacy (overattribution); (3) The Visual Flight Rules Fallacy (skewed perceptions and information processing); and (4) St. Augustine's Fallacy (When in Rome...).     

Realizing the Potential of International Conflict Work: Connections Between Practice and Theory

The author reviews the insights of four expert practitioners of international conflict resolution, pointing out a common theme that signals a major shift in the way we conduct and conceive of international conflict intervention. In addition to traditional top-down interventions, leading conflict resolution practitioners are advocating a bottom-up approach, a complementary effort that includes development of conflict resolution potential among the parties themselves, without external imposition. This increased emphasis on the kinds of structures, understanding, and relationships that help to transform international conflict situations reflects the impact the developing field of conflict studies has had on practice.     

Groundhog Day: Teach it Again...and Again.

The problem of teaching the same negotiation class again and again, yet remaining fresh and spontaneous, is a dilemma familiar to academics. The situation is akin to that of characters in the movie, Groundhog Day, living the same 24 hours over and over, trying to get things just right. This article reflects on this problem, and offers some advice.     

Scrolling Around the New Organization: The Potential for Conflict in the On-Line Environment

The technological revolution has created as many challenges as opportunities for managers in today's organizations. Besides wandering around to manage, scrolling around on a computer screen has become common-place. This article reviews four key technology-caused challenges facing managers in the workplace, chiefly as the result of communication via e-mail. Specifically, the author focuses on what research to date informs us about negotiation and conflict resolution in an electronic environment.     

The Illusion of Transparency in Negotiations

The authors examined whether negotiators are prone to an illusion of transparency, or the belief that their private thoughts and feelings are more discernible to their negotiation partners than they actually are. In Study One, negotiators who were trying to conceal their preferences thought that their preferences had leaked out more than they actually did. In Study Two, experienced negotiators who were trying to convey information about some of their preferences overestimated their partners' ability to discern them. The results of Study Three rule out the possibility that the findings are simply the result of the curse of knowledge, or the projection of one's own knowledge onto others. Discussion explores how the illusion of transparency might impede negotiators' success.     

Trajectories Toward Peace: Mediator Sequencing Strategies in Intractable Communal Conflicts

The author identifies three distinct mediation sequencing strategies used in intractable communal conflicts: the gradualism model; a boulder-in-the-road approach; and the committee strategy. Using case examples of contemporary mediation efforts, he describes the three approaches and their advantages and disadvantages. A wider-angle approach to the differences in how mediators and conflicting parties achieve peace in these destructive conflicts is useful for both scholarly inquiry and practice.     

Sustained Dialogue in Managing Intractable Conflict

In the warn-torn new nation of Tajikistan, the author has been part of a five-stage dialogue for peace since 1993. The focus of the dialogue has been on transforming relationships and changing relationship dynamics so that this intractable conflict can be addressed positively. The author briefly describes this multilevel peace process both historically and substantively. He also discusses the continual process of evaluation of the Inter-Tajik dialogue effort as well as focuses on a series of questions that apply to intractable conflicts in general.     

Negotiating with Your Nemesis

The assumption that negotiators can and should eradicate emotions from negotiating is unrealistic. Instead, effective negotiators know how to handle emotional outbursts including how to respond when the other negotiator evokes their nemesis. A nemesis is the hidden part of ourselves that we project onto others who push our hot buttons. When emotions are intense, understanding the possibility that you may be giving or receiving a projection can help you sidestep escalatory behavior. This article explores the concept of the nemesis and offers practical steps for confronting it as well as responding to others' emotions at the negotiating table.     

Parallel informal negotiation: A new kind of international dialogue

Bargaining in the international arena is intrinsically positional. Negotiators are often instructed by their governments not to improvise or explore new options when they meet with their counterparts — even though the invention of additional tradeoffs or packages might well produce better results for all sides. This article describes an approach that we call parallel informal negotiation which encourages a collaborative effort between contending groups that were officially not even allowed to interact: international trade and environment policy makers.     

Parasitic Integration: Win-Win Agreements Containing Losers

Parasitic integration involves agreements that are Pareto-superior for two or more of the negotiating parties, while being inferior for one or more of the remaining negotiating parties. The contrast between parasitic integration and integrative bargaining is highlighted. A taxonomy and examples of parasitic integration are provided, as well as linkages to specific areas in the negotiation literature.     

Book Review: Facing the Decisions One Should Make and the Decisions One Wants to Make

Authors of two recent books, Smart Choices and The Win-Win-Solution, offer negotiation practitioners some new twists on how they can improve their decision-making processes. In the first book, Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa present a five-part PrOACT system, which features: an assessment of the problem; determination of objectives; exploration of alternatives; comprehension of the consequences; and dealing with tradeoffs. The second book, by Brams and Taylor, outlines four settlement options that are available to decision makers, but advocates an adjusted winner approach. The authors have devised a system in which individuals' subjective assessments of particular items in dispute receive point totals, which can then be divided in an equitable manner. In effect, the authors show readers how to deal with the decisions they should make, and those they want to make.     

Mediation and Psychotherapy: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Some mediators believe that mediation and psychotherapy are quite similar, and that when doing mediation, the mediator also is practicing an art form similar to psychotherapy. On face value, some forms of mediation (e.g., evaluative) and some forms of psychotherapy (e.g., psychoanalysis) are so far apart in theoretical conception and in actual practice that they cannot be compared meaningfully. However, the forms of mediation known as facilitative and transformative and the forms of brief or focused psychotherapy that often involve families or couples do have considerable similarity. Overall, numerous resonances exist between these two approaches to mediation and to couples or family-oriented psychotherapies, especially when differences in terminology, licensure, and training requirements are not allowed to obscure commonalities.     

Regional integration and conflict management. The case of Vietnam

This paper is examines the process of regional integration of Vietnam into the framework for regional co-operation under the umbrella of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The main focus is on the process leading to Vietnams admission into ASEAN in 1995. The relative importance of key factors – economic, political and security – in the process leading to Vietnams admission into ASEAN is assessed. Particular attention is devoted to the conflict management dimension of the regional integration of Vietnam both in process leading to membership in ASEAN and in the management of border disputes between Vietnam and other ASEAN members.This study is based the authors on-going research on Vietnams foreign policy and on regional collaboration is Southeast Asia including ASEANs expansion with a focus on conflict management.This article is an edited version of a paper with the same title presented at Paper prepared for Session 1: Lessons to be learnt, success stories of peaceful reconciliation, At the 3rd Asia-Europe Roundtable: Peace and Reconciliation Success Stories and Lessons. Organised by Asia-Europe Foundation, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, The Institute for International Relations, and Singapore Institute of International Affairs, Hanoi, 20-21 October 2003.     

The Ombudsman: What's in a Name?

The role of the ombudsman is perhaps the least well understood inthe field of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). This essay introducesreaders to the differing conceptions of the role; the sometimes fractiousdivide that has existed in the past between classical andorganizational ombudsmen; and a collection of essays by four well-known practitioners that shed lighton what it is ombudsmen do; the kinds of disputes they deal with and howthey operate; how they view their role (and how others view it); and boththe possibilities and limitations of the ombuds function.     

Negotiatory Alchemy: The Court Special Master as Scientist and Mediator

An environmental health scientist and mediator was appointed for the first time as a special master to oversee cleanup of a hazardous waste site in California. The case analysis examines the creative assimilation of Integra-live/mutual gains bargaining (mediation) into a distributive/zero-sum bargaining construct (litigation). The special master played multiple, overlapping, and conflicting roles as the case unfolded. The interfaces and tensions of these roles produced a hybrid style of dispute resolution, termed mediation-negotiation by the author.