C&K : Adopting Procedures, Educating Parties, and Developing Options (Chapter 6)

This chapter focuses on the first three stages of managing public disputes: adopting procedures, educating parties, and developing options. The main element of the adopting procedures stage is establishing ground rules. The ground rules can be established in written form or orally and they can be agreed upon in many different ways (vote, consensus, etc). Most ground rules are established with input from the parties. Some parties can bring up rules in the pre-interviews that will entice them to help problem solve (i.e. “don’t question motives). Some ground rules are established in the first meeting, but ground rules can change as the sessions progress.

Educating the parties entails having the parties explain their interests and their role in the conflict thus far to the other party(s). This includes telling their assumptions, their source of information, and their concerns. This can lead to a discussion about reliability of data and all parties can share their information sources and a common truth can be agreed upon. This stage also includes having discussions about the history of the conflict, which helps identify the key issues for each party. It is important to keep the parties focused on their interests, and this sometimes requires reframing statements and asking probing questions (i.e. what is your concern about that issue?).

Developing options is the first stage of problem solving. It is important for the parties to work together to develop a possible list of solutions. An outside expert can also provide more solutions that the parties may not have thought of. This stage is discussed more in subsequent chapters and other readings because this can be a tricky stage and there are many different models to come up with solutions and put them on the table.

Conflict: Problem Solving

The chapter focuses how to problem solve with two opposing groups. A goal of a problem solving meeting is to try and change the parties’ view of the conflict from something to be won to a problem that needs to be solved. A roadblock to this realization is the parties have skewed views of themselves and their action versus their adversary’s actions. This is a negative misperception. Often times in conflict the decision makers of one party get so wrapped up in the conflict that it is hard to envision other tactics besides harmful ones. It is difficult to consider other actions because of the potential risk associated with changing tactics. It is easy for that party to think that they have not choice but the other party is purposefully choosing the harmful tactics that they are. This is the principle of unrecognized entrapment and is one of the reasons why problem solving processes avoid the subject of blame (the principle of no-fault). Parties can’t often envision all of their options prior to a problem solving meeting because they are so stuck in their tactics and have the misperceptions of the other party (principle of unrecognized options).


The facilitators of a problem solving process can not choose sides or try to pin down responsibility. They serve as an analytical function in breaking the conflict down and helping to find solutions. An important aspect to the process is setting; the process has to take place in an open environment that does not make people feel angry or inhibited because that hinders the creative flow of ideas. The problem solving process can be insulated from interparty issues, isolated, and stimulating. A potential problem solving tactic is to host a problem solving workshop with people of the different parties. These workshops should be no more than 25 people maximum and the agenda should be simple and flexible. Facilitators should provide role model behavior (non-judgmental, supportive, questioning), a sympathetic audience, a neutral language, analytical insights, and be an agent of reality. If there are solutions proposed it is the facilitator’s responsibility to point out the weaknesses and potential road blocks. Andy did that for us in his role play be always asking us to think how the government would see our options and how we should frame things etc.

Negotiating Justice: The Challenges of Addressing Past Human Rights Violations

The focus of this article is talking about what difficulties arise when peace has been agreed upon after a conflict that saw significant human rights violations. This comes under the field of transitional justice. One common procedure in dealing with reparations is a Truth Commission where a temporary group of people investigates the human rights violations. This is not related to a judicial system. At the end of this process, the committee makes a public report and suggests improvements and reforms to policy and institutions. Truth commissions often include people telling their stories and communicating about things that happened during the conflict. The hope in truth commissions is that lessons will be learned from the future and the victims will find some reparation. One of the largest challenges to think about is the idea of amnesty. Should the people who committed the human rights violations and other crimes be offered amnesty if they come forward and tell their story as part of the truth commission. This is a tricky question because there are so many levels of crime and the judicial system cannot completely be ignored. Another issue is whether or not the people who have amnesty will have that same privilege in international law or when traveling from their country.

The article gives two examples about truth commissions. In Liberia the lack of amnesty for the leader, Charles Taylor, helped in the transitional justice process. He has an indictment, which actually helped the peace talks because they knew that he could not continue to seek power in the future. In Sierra Leone the peace agreements included the clause that 'full and unconditional amnesty' was granted to all the parties. Both sides wanted this to be in the agreement, and this fact helped the peace negotiations. Clearly there is no blanket answer on the effectiveness of amnesty on a peace negotiation, but it is an interesting element to consider. I feel like if I had my human rights violated, I would want to see some more concrete form of justice, but perhaps I would be open to a non-judicial reparation.

Varieties of Mediating Activities and Mediators in International Relations

This article focuses on a lot of different elements of mediation. The success of mediation can be hard to define; it comes in many forms like de-escalation, settlement, and enduring resolutions. An important aspect of mediation is the timing of the mediating activity, which is very similar to the concept of a conflict’s ‘ripeness.’ The international context affects the timing of mediation because at some points in time there are more mediating type organizations. Public pressure can also affect the timing of mediation through public opinion surveys, policy makers, and visible support. The relationship between the adversaries, I think, has the most affect on the timing of mediation. Parties can go though stages of their relationship and their parity of power is necessary for mutual accommodation. Parties can have fluxes of power.

Mediation has a variety of stages and the pre-negotiation stage is one of the most important. This is the stage where strategic choices are made and issues are decided on. The initiation stage involves explaining the process to the parties. Negotiation is where a lot of the interparty contact happens, and the implementation stage involves putting the settlement into action. Mediators are not always official professionals; they can be church officials or other informal people.

Understanding Public Disputes: The Spiral of Unmanaged Conflict (C & K Chapter 5)

This chapter focuses on the different dynamics and elements of public disputes. Public disputes can be very different from labor-management disputes/family conflicts because of the more broad range of people involved and affected. Public disputes tend to have more complicated relationships between interests and in fact can have more interests associated with the conflict than other types of disputes. It is hard to pinpoint all of the parties at the start, and the party members can vary widely on their expertise and power. Power can come in different forms; some examples are: financial power, reputation power, network power, skills/knowledge power, and legal authority. Since there are so many parties at varying levels there are many different ways to make decisions and the procedures for public disputes are not standardized.

If conflict goes unmanaged, it can undergo a downward spiral. After a problem emerges, people/citizens get involved and if nothing is done quickly and openly people can tend to get stuck in their issues and stop communicating amongst the parties. The conflict can then even go outside the direct community via people looking for outside support of their interests. Parties can tend to lose their objectivity and see the conflict as more polarized than it may be. This brings about a sense of crisis. The outcomes of public disputes can vary widely. Different options are include litigation, government decisions, and violence. It seems that it is easier to manage a conflict at the beginning of its cycle rather than waiting for the downward spiral.

One thing in this chapter that confused me is why they state (pg. 6-7) that the parties tend to not have a continuing relationship; wouldn't a community need to have a continuing relationship?

Facilitation Skills for Interpersonal Transformation (Kraybill)

This article focuses on the skills necessary for negotiating a conflict for interpersonal transformation. It talks about the moment-by- moment skills, the techniques for sustained dialogue, and the transformative process design. The section on moment-by-moment skills for interpersonal transformation is an extensive reiteration of a lot of the techniques discussed in intro to conflict resolution and mediation. It is important to paraphrase and what one party says to ensure effective listening and to depolarize what they are saying. It is also important to reframe what the parties are saying to try and get at the issues rather than positions and thus hopefully come up with a common ground. The techniques for sustained dialogue are a lot more interesting. The Samoan circle has two central chairs where people from opposing parties talk about the issues. There are also chairs in a semi-circle around them for others to sit in to make a comment or wait their turn for the center chair. Only the people in the chairs are allowed to be talking and everybody learns from what they are saying. The conflict spectrum is another technique. This is a visual technique where everybody places themselves on an “issue spectrum” corresponding to how extreme they feel their viewpoints on the subject are. Another private technique is interviewing key players to the conflict. This helps create an atmosphere of communication and engagement. The idea of transformative process focuses on the idea that the process of communication and negotiation can be more important than the content of the negotiation/conversation. A lot of group conflict can result from bad process. A good process involves a forum that is acceptable to all parties, all parties have representatives in the decision making and design of the process, is clear about its purpose, has a variety of forums, and has a feedback element. All of these elements require preparation and thought on the part of the facilitators.

Intractable Conflicts

This article focuses on the five different paradigms for handling intractable conflicts. Intractable conflicts are destructive conflicts that persist for long periods of time and no attempts at resolving them have worked. Intractable conflicts are known for their persistence, destructiveness, and resistance to resolution. All intractable conflicts share a sense of context, core issues, relations, processes, and outcomes. The context of intractable conflicts includes power imbalances and can have roots in racism, colonialism, sexism, and/or human rights abuses. The issues of intractable conflicts usually tend to have a depth of meaning which makes them difficult to be resolved in the traditional sense. The relationship between the parties can often be isolated (little positive interaction between the parties), and sometimes the groups have oppositional group identities. The process has a strong emotional core were rage and righteousness come to the surface. The process usually has to involve over coming stereotypes. The outcome of intractable conflicts often includes a prolonged trauma and loss of trust in the world for the lower power party.

There are five different ways to approach intractable conflict. The realist paradigm focuses on the need for aggression in these conflicts because the conflict is about domination and control; humans are always flawed and strong actions are necessary to be in control of the situation. The Human Relations Paradigm says that people have the capacity for good as well as evil and the external conditions they are exposed to affect their actions. Change can only be brought about by including all aspects of the communities with integrative negotiation and antibias education. The Medical Paradigm views these intractable social conflicts as pathological diseases that need to be contained before they spread. This paradigm focuses on preventative diplomacy. The Postmodern Paradigm focuses on how different people “make sense of the world.” Change is brought about by bringing the assumptions about what is ‘right’ into the negotiations; negotiation would be at the intragroup level and about oppositional identities. The last paradigm, the Systems Paradigm is about is simple cell and its environment. A lot of elements in the environment are interdependent and have complex relationships. Each destructive pattern affects all the elements, and thus conflicts have many different hostile elements and complex layers.

The article ends with 8 guidelines of intervention that are helpful, but I think the most important and helpful part of this article is understanding what intractable conflicts are and the ways to approach understanding them.

The Politics of Environmental Mediation

The main purpose of this article is to discuss the downfalls of mediation with environmental issues. The main roadblocks are the friendly atmosphere of mediation, the power imbalance between environmentalists and development companies, and the fact that the mediation process supports development issues naturally.

The first section of the paper discusses how when mediators set a friendly atmosphere the environmentalists tend to start liking their opponents and in addition want to seem like peaceful people, so they end up conceding more than intended. I felt like this section of the article was negatively stereotyping environmentalists as people with no backbone. Perhaps this has been a phenomena in environmental mediations, but I don't think the answer is to fundamentally change the mediation process by taking away the social aspect; rather the answer seems to be to get the environmental party more training. It just seemed generalized and seemed to imply that environmentalists just fall over in front of corporate people. Overall, I agree with the statement on the 4th page that the responsibility for correcting this lies with the participants, not the mediators.

The second main point deals with the imbalance of power between the two main parties. The development groups have a greater access to economic and political resources. This affects the neutrality of mediation three ways: who is participating, superior technical analysis, and involuntary participation. The environmental groups can view their participation as non-voluntary because they do not have the resources to sustain a long court battle. Environmental groups also can have less political power, and their interest groups are wide spread, so often there is not a representative to the mediation process from all of the interest groups in a conflict. Since the environmental groups have less power, they are bound to agree to solutions that do not fulfill their needs because some concessions from the powerful group are better than none. There is also a section within this part of the paper that argues that some mediators see themselves as just a mirror that reflects the imbalances of society and that they focus on their process and not take responsibility for perpetuating imbalances. Laue would disagree with them because he argues that no mediators can truly be neutral and in order to be a good mediator you need to try and balance the power between the two parties.

The mediation process itself can be bias towards the pro-development party. The mediators consider that both parties have equal and negotiable interests. What can rarely come to the table is the core issue itself: whether or not the land should be developed. One mediation focused on how the mall should be environment friendly, but the fact that mall was being built was never discussed. Mediators rarely see the environmental issues as part of the larger structural and value choices from our society. There is also debate about whether environmentalists should even go to the table about certain issues. Some issues are fundamental beliefs that cannot be negotiated, like being opposed to nuclear power. Those are non-negotiable issues to some people and thus should not be brought to mediation.

In conclusion, it appears as though in order for environmental mediations to be successful, the environmental party needs more training and/or more power.

The Ethics of Intervention in Community Disputes

This article by Laue and Cormick help define what the different types of intervention roles there are. The main ones are activist, advocate, mediator, researcher, and enforcer. An activist can help the party they are sided with organize, devise a strategy, rally a following, and communicate with the public. An advocate is an advisor or consultant to one of the parties; an advocate can usually envision what it would take to terminate the conflict with a positive outcome for their party. A mediator must be acceptable to both parties, so they cannot have a clear side; they help the parties reach a win-win solution. A researcher is independent of the conflict, but they report their findings to the public, and often they do not stay uninvolved. The enforcer has the power to implement solutions.

There were several interesting points that Laue and Cormick made in this article. The one that I found most interesting was that in order to be an ethical intervener, one should not remain neutral. It is important to try and help minimize the power imbalance between the parties. Important values to consider while intervening are freedom, justice, and empowerment. They all seem to revolve around making sure the disadvantaged party is able to entirely make their own decisions, and to feel the consequences of their decisions. Power should be diffused among many individuals/parties.

The idea of decisions is also important to interveners. Several important decisions include: deciding to intervene, deciding when to intervene, how to intervene, and deciding what a good settlement is. Laue and Cormick argue that ethics and the above values should help an intervener with all of these decisions. The article uses several examples that helped explain the ideas of this article.

Changing Group Norms

This was a very interesting article about group norms. Group norms can actions/gestures/procedures that are followed in a group. An example of a norm here at Juniata is that when we go into Baker, we leave all our books/coats/everything out in the hallway. This reflects our open and trusting culture here at Juniata. It is normal for us to do this action, thus it can be classified as a norm. This article focuses on how to change norms. Often times norms need to be changed because they are outdated, they are not effective, or they are negatively affecting the group. Here are some examples of norms that need to be changed. Technology is rapidly expanding and often times groups settle on norms of past technologies. The material culture changes a lot faster than the non-material culture. If a group is constantly communicating via post-letter, their business will be a lot slower than if they used the telephone or e-mail. This is an example of an outdated and ineffective norm. An example of a negative norm would be if in a company it was the norm to always arrive 10 minutes late; this cuts down on work time, and thus negatively affects the groups productivity.

The article shows several examples of how/when norms need to be changed. It is very difficult to change norms. One way to induce a change is if a very confident, or high status person initiates the new norm. These types of people have more allowance for deviance, and thus makes it easier for them to try out new norms. Crisis can also help induce a change in norms. If a company is failing, it is a crisis, and members will be able to analyze their actions and see where improvements can be made. Unfortunately, often in crisis times, people don't want to change; they want to stick to what makes them comfortable. Sometimes an outsider needs to come in and help a group change their norms to improve their goal completions. Another main point of this article is that it is easier for an individual to change than an organization.

This article applies to conflict intervention because often times you might be walking into a group conflict or negotiation, where the group has norms that are contributing to the conflict. You need to be able to identify them and know how to help them see how their norms affect them. You also need to have the foresight to know what norms might work best for the group.

C&K: Reaching and Carrying Out Agreements (Chapter 7)

This chapter focuses on the many different ways to reach and carry out agreements. The focus is on how to reach consensus with a large group of people. You must make sure that everybody agrees on the process of reaching an agreement, and that everybody okays every part of the solution. If not, there can be committees which decide upon the agreement; when they redraft it to incorporate the concerns, everybody present has to re-approve the agreement.

I found the diagrams of the different ways to reach the agreement to be the most helpful part of the chapter. It really helped me visualize what the different ways of approaching conflict resolution can look like. One general question I have from the reading is how to you decide who is on the resolution 'committee'? Would it be better to just have the negotiators? This part did not seem clear to me. Another thought that I had throughout the chapter had to do with the honesty of the participants. The chapter gives several scenarios about how people would respond to the solutions and how they would voice their opinions. I am not convinced that people are going to be that honest or clear. This is especially apparant on page 143 (3rd paragraph under section "applying criteria to existing options."

I like how the authors focused in the latter half of the chapter on the idea of open communication. You can lose all of the work you put into an agreement by not fully communicating how the solution(s) were reached with the parties. This can make parties feel slighted or cheated. This reminds me of how we often talk in class about how people will settle for less if they view the process of fair, and conversely, people may reject an agreement that has many components that suit them because they felt the process was unfair. It is all about perception, and this puts a lot of responsibility on the interveners to make sure the process is going smoothly.

Conflict: Institutions

The main purpose of this chapter was to talk about how conflict is dealt with at an institutional level. By institutional level, the author means a court system, a group of elders, etc; it just means whatever the tradition in your society is to handle conflicts. There are many things that can affect the legitimacy and therefore the power of the institution. In accordance with Weber, there are three main types of authority: traditional (i.e. royalty being authority, following norms, clear guidelines of who to go to), charismatic, and rational-legal. Charismatic leaders come into play usually when there is discontent with the current social institution; if somebody is able to unify and motivate groups of people, people can look to them as having more authority than the traditional source of authority. This can only last as long as that charisma leader, so it is necessary to routinize the charisma into law. Most modern systems are rational-legal where there is a clear authority (president/prime minister/etc) and a clear path that conflicts get resolved in (the law/courts/etc). There are many factors that unite legal authorities across societies dealing with the fact that there are positive and negative sanctions, specialized people enact and interpret the laws, and there are alternative routes if the courts do not work. This is where the conflict interveners would come in, through these ADRs.

Legal systems need to be viewed as legitimate in order to be effective in enforcing rules/norms/laws. Legal systems can lose its legitimacy in several different ways. Two examples would be if legal systems are not perceived as providing procedural and substantive justice, or if they escalate conflict because they are not equipped to deal with deep-rooted dissension conflicts. Conflict within a legal system is substantially harder if there is not a normative consensus; this would mean that people were not satisfied with the current legal institution, and part of the negotiation would involve how to create legitimate authority again.

I thought this chapter was pretty interesting because it showed how legal institutions can help escalate and de-escalate conflict. It is important that the social institution that enforces the norms be consistent with the actual norms of the society (i.e. some laws people don’t necessarily follow anymore because they are antiquated).

Conflict: Situations

This chapter presents an interesting argument that the situational context has a much larger affect on negotiations than personality traits. The situational context can include the social/ political system that you are working in, time constraints, external events, how the issues are framed, where the negotiation occurs (public? media?), and the negotiators’ positions within their group. The author goes on to provide a lot of evidence about this idea that the situation is more important than the psychodynamics. A lot of the criticism of the personality theory involves the inadequacy of personality tests/assessments; these tests do not allow for flexibility of location (i.e. perhaps you are more outgoing at a party than at work, or maybe deciding whether or not you want to go to a party depends on a lot of other factors, not just are you outgoing or not). There needs to be a way to assess behavior within and between situations.


Another major point the author makes is about attribution theory; he says that people over attribute behavior to personality traits rather than taking a step back and thinking about situational influences; this may lead to a conflict spiral by misinterpreting an action and reciprocating in a negative way. Behaviors need to be considered in terms of what role the person is playing, what the organization is like, and how they are defining the situation.


I had a few different thoughts about this chapter. The first was, I felt like some of the situational factors they listed could highly be affected by a personality. For example, if there is a strict time constraint, different people will react differently; some people are more productive working under pressure, and others might feel so pressured to make an agreement that they do not come to the best solution possible. I think that the general size of a negotiation can play a big role in the situation vs. personality debate. If the negotiation is big and people are representing large groups, chances are that the negotiators have been trained in how the organization wants the issues framed, what they will settle for, etc. If it is a negotiation on a smaller scale, for example a community conflict or even mediation, I think that personality will come into play a lot more. If people are not specifically representing a large group, I would imagine that it is harder to separate the conflict from your personal self, and thus personalities would affect the path of the negotiations. All in all, I think that there is an overlap between the situational vs. personality factors, and I think that the size of the negotiation and how distanced the negotiators are from the central conflict can draw out personality factors more than the author acknowledged.

Conflict: Dynamics

This chapter mainly talks about how conflicts can evolve and change over time. The authors introduce several conflict models that include stages like escalation. There are also many models that talk about the tactics of a party, such as how if one party perceives the other as aggressive or deceptive, they might defend themselves by being equally deceptive. The conflict spiral notes that it is not just one party that causes the conflict to go downwards into deception/mistrust; both sides can cause this. I found Jervis' piece about how you need to consider psychological limitations when coming up with models of how the parties interact. By this he means that a party only knows there intentions and motives; they can only infer the other parties' intentions. If they have a negative view of the other party, they will most likely interpret their actions as aggressive. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of schema and how your mind will remember certain people, events, and procedures; they can influence your perception of a situation and perhaps distort your memory. The outcome and your feelings about an outcome can distort your memory of the event. It is good for an intervener to have this in mind because it can help them move a party away from worst-case thinking, and challenging schema.

Conflict: Sources

This chapter focuses on how conflict can come about. Conflict can be caused by personal or situational aspects. Three major situation aspects are socioeconomic transformation, political transformations, and cultural transformation. The socioeconomic transformation would involve something like the switch from horticulture to agricultural societies; the means of production are changed, so peoples' roles are changed and class conflict can emerge. The modernization of production, like factories emerging caused a population transfer to cities and a class difference between the haves and have nots. Political transformation has more to do with reorganization of power and new opportunities for minorities. This can create conflict between minorities because they are competing for these new identities. A large source of cultural transformations have to do with modernization and technology. The material culture is changing before the non-material culture and there can be inner turmoil about these changes.

Once you realize why the conflict is happening, you can more from analysis to resolution. There are two main theories on how to approach this: relative deprivation and basic human needs. The relative deprivation deals with the frustration that occurs when people are not getting what they perceive they should be getting or achieving. This can have to do with where you are living/what you are doing in life. For example, an American might get in a conflict about a promotion they they did not get, but thought they deserved; the would feel relatively deprived in their reality with what they imagined for themselves. A person from a third world country would not feel deprived if they had a job but just did not get a promotion. The basic human needs theorists would counter that most conflicts can be analyzed based on the needs for identity, recognition, and security. They would analyze the job scenario by saying that the worker was having trouble being recognized for his hard work or maybe not getting the promotion hurt his job security and thus the security for getting food/clothes/housing/etc. Human need theorists focus on the fact that these needs are universal and non-negotiable, while relative deprivation theorists focus on the frustration on not getting what one 'deserves.'

C&K Chapter 5: designing strategy

The overwhelming thing I learned from this chapter is that a negotiator or intervener must be highly skilled in multitasking and keeping organized. There were so many little details about how to make the process reach its highest potential. I would feel so pressured if I had to make a lot of the decisions by myself, such as who would participate and when they would find out. The authors talk about a lot of the different roles that interveners can take on; it just seems stressful to manage that many negotiators and that many disputants. Reading this chapter really made me realize that I would not be happy in working in any type of large-scale negotiations; I like the mediation type set-up where there are usually only two disputants and two mediators, which is a nice ratio. I just felt that there were so many little details involved in these larger scale negotiations, like creating packets of information to give related interest groups who might not be at the table, or figuring out the news or funding. It is just very complex.

One thing that I was curious about while reading this chapter was the idea of problem-solving workshops. The authors described these by saying that it is a public meeting that people can come to to try and work out a solution to a problem. I’m confused because it is not clear if these workshops are to solve the current problem that needs intervention, or if this is just a general workshop where the public is giving related problems or scenarios just to practice team-work/brainstorming/negotiating your side. If it is the real problem that needs intervention and it is open to the public, doesn’t that discount all the work doing interviews and deciding who should come to the table? I guess I am just a little confused about how this relates to the formal negotiation settings.

All in all I thought this chapter clearly showed how complex a negotiation can be.

Defining Issues/Setting Agenda: The Mediation Process

This chapter from the Mediation book is all about defining the issues that will be covered in a mediation and setting the agenda (i.e. procedural process to coming up with solutions and the order/way in which the issues will be looked at). The author breaks the issues down into interest and value based conflicts. Most times values cannot be negotiated, so the mediator needs to be skilled in reframing value statements into issue statements. The mediator(s) must be careful about neutrality while doing this. The first level of reframing, detoxification, involves making a statement the party said sound more neutral; I believe this would work best in a caucus or shuttle intervention. If both parties are at the table and one party is saying (as per the example in the chapter) “That fat slob hasn’t paid his rent money for the past two months,” since both parties are at the table, and the ‘fat slob’ can hear the comment, I believe that in addition to reframing what party one has said, the mediator needs to remind the parties of the rules of conduct/politeness. If they don’t, they won’t appear as neutral to the second party.

The other main topic of the chapter, besides the issues, was how to set the agenda. The author gives several examples of types of agenda. You can look at the issues linearly, do the easier items first, alternate issues, do building blocks, and a principled agenda. To me, as a mediator, it does not make sense to separate all of the issues and solve them one at a time because I think that most issues around a conflict will be interlocked, and it is hard to negotiate one without the other. Also, I agree with the ‘trade-offs’ agenda; I think that if I were a party I would not want to be resolving the issues separately in fear that I might lose my leverage and negotiating power when it came to an issue that I really felt strongly about; I would not want to resolve anything before whatever the most important issue to me was. I suppose as a mediator, I would have to learn to adapt if the parties really wanted to solve things linearly or separately. The author touches on this in his psychology department example; you may think you know the best way to attack the issues, but you have to feel out the culture and norms of the group you are working with.

Cultivating Peace: A Practitioner's View of Deadly Conflict and Negotiation

This article was a response to the Zartman article about ripeness. Lederarch's main point is that ripeness is not necessarily the best indicator of the prime time to intervene. He points out that you can really only pick the ripe moment out in retrospect. Another main point of Lederarch's was that ripeness can mainly be picked out by on objective third party. In fact if you see that the situation is 'ripe' as a third party and try and intervene and negotiate, if the parties are not ready, it can escalate the conflict. I think that what Lederarch failed to recognize in the Zartman article was the idea of the way out (WO). Zartman meant that the parties need to perceive the idea that they need the other party to get themselves out of the conflict (i.e. the stalemate is draining the economy and the cost of human lives is too high). The idea of the WO is basically one of the things that Lederarch said was missing from the ripeness idea. I also found the Zartman article a little easier to understand because of the lack of excessive metaphors; I found them hard to wade through in the Lederarch article. Other than that, I think they both had good points. Lederarch especially was perceptive in pointing out that it is hard to see the ripe moment in the present and that sometimes the right moment or thing to say can be purely coincidental.

Managing Public Disputes: Chapter 5

This was a thorough introduction to all aspects of gathering information and interviews. These all occur prior to any negotiation process. There are a lot of variables to consider such as how many people from each side will you interview, what will there positions/status within the party be? Where will the interview take place and how long? A lot of research needs to be done ahead of time, but the initial interviews will be the most helpful in identifying key players and issues. One topic that I found interesting was when they discussed how you should dress for the interviews. They made the point that you might offend somebody by trying to imitate them. I think the best bet is to aim to wear neutral clothes (i.e. not a ‘cowboy’ outfit if the dispute is versus small town cowboys and a corporation). I think that neutral clothes can help portray your neutral stance.
Other things that jumped out at me in this chapter is how much these interviews are like the second stage of mediation when each party tells their side. It is still important to ask neutral questions and practice reflective listening; in fact the only difference seems to be the absence of the other party. Overall, I thought this was a good introduction to the first phase of professionally handling a conflict.

The Timing of Peace Initiatives: Hurting Stalemates and Ripe Moments

I found this article fascinating because I have never heard of a ‘ripe moment’ before. The purpose of this article was to talk about the timing of conflict intervention. The author talks about how the parties need to both see negotiation as a viable option because they have been unsuccessful using military strength or they are in a stalemate. Parties also need to feel there is a WO (way out), meaning that they see the possibility of negotiation and resolution. I am a little confused about what this means. It was upsetting to read about how many conflicts do not come to negotiation until there are hurting stalemates; I would hope that some form of conflict resolution might come in to play before violence, but I suppose that is a bit idealistic of me. I did like how the author stressed that if there is not a ‘ripeness’ it does not mean to not try and work towards peace or non-violence; it just means that the parties might not want to come to the table for a full blown negotiation.
One last thing that I found important in this article was the idea that the parties themselves recognized the need for negotiation (via a spokesperson). It might escalate the conflict to try to go to a negotiation before the parties are ready. I think that sometimes the U.S. is imposing with there peace proceedings, so perhaps this is a necessary article for politicians to read.

Overview of the Models

This is an interesting introduction to eight different models of analyzing conflict. There were just brief explanations, so I am assuming that the in-depth chapters give more details about what all of the lines/etc in each model mean. Here are some of my thoughts on the models:
Model #1 (circle of conflict) : I find it interesting that they choose a circle to represent the five categories of causes/drivers of conflict in equal proportion to the interests of the resolution. Why are they all equally spaced, and should the interests piece of the pie even be in this model; it seems a bit out of place.
Model #2: I think it is interesting how they are looking at different strategies, but there is not much to this model in this introduction.
Model #3: Do you think more conflicts happen from disrupting norms than disrupting boundaries? How are they defining boundaries—are norms included?
Model #4: I think it is interesting and very applicable that they put Power as the costliest way to approach conflict: I think it is harder to negotiate power than interests.
Model #5: This seems the most complex, and I think a more in-depth description would be helpful.
Model #7: I’m not sure what those arrows symbolize, but this looks like something we discussed in intro to conflict resolution
Model #8: I think that this is visually the easiest to understand, but I am a math major and am very accustomed to reading graphs.

Peacemaking and the Consultant's Role

This reading was informative, but a bit long. It seemed like an ‘owner’s manual’ to conflict intervention with how detailed it was. I thought it was great how they talked about many details and situations though. They said that the optimal group size was about twelve, which I found interesting since I am so used to mediation where there are only about four people. It seems like that would be a lot harder to manage. The main purpose of this article for me was to illustrate how many variables go into an intervention process. For example, there are sixteen different questions to consider when talking about the parties and the participants. It seems like to be an effective intervener one would need to be able to think about a lot of different factors at once and be adept at trouble shooting (if the trouble that is being shot is not a necessary part to the conflict—i.e. you would not want to trouble-shoot a debate about one of the key issues to a conflict). Conflict interveners need to be extremely analytical. It is a tough job, and perhaps an under appreciated one.

“Assessing the State-of-the-Art in Conflict Transformation: Chpt 1 &2”

I thought this article was very informative about the different intervention strategies. I was able to recognize the concept of the subjectivist and objectivist from mediation, but it was interesting how the author seemed to argue that one can never see something as a total objectivist because we all have a background and values; we cannot be value-free. I think the goal is to try and learn how to be as objective as possible though. I think that the only really viable Track that they were talking about for long term solutions is Track III. This relates to what I was talking about above with needing to bring a wider range of people to the negotiating table. This, clearly, is the hardest approach to take, or else we would have tried to implement it already. It also talks about major structural changes, which can be quite unnerving to those in power.

What Peace? What Process?

I found this article to be very interesting, mostly because it talked about the problems with our current peace-making processes. The piece that I found the most interesting was the third criticism that the author brought up; he said that “those who held the guns or the dominant position on the battlefield…became negotiating partners” (pg. 6). He goes on to say that the peace procedures are predominantly male. I found this interesting because I think there would be more of a balance to have an equal representation of both genders at the table, because after all, each culture has males and females. I wonder if this has any connection to the fact that he says the solutions do not usually look towards challenging the dominant social/political organizations; after all these men automatically have a better social and political position if they are the ones at the tables. Maybe more importantly than including a larger number of women at the table, perhaps a larger variety of socioeconomic status needs to be represented. On another side note, I liked how the author mentioned that the peace solution is not long term unless it is continuously upheld and it addresses a lot of underlying conflicts. For example, my sister and I do not get along, but if we merely sat down and said a list of things that we both agreed to do, nothing about our conflict would change if we did not discuss why we were having issues in the first place.

Process: The Dynamics and Progression of Conflict

The main focus of this article is to talk about the progression of conflict. Lederach illustrates this progression with a Curle’s “matrix” approach. This says that the progression can go from education to confrontation to negotiation to sustainable peace. The adaptation of this chart has different roles that a third party can play at the different stages. I don’t necessarily think that this chart encompasses every stage that a conflict goes through; what about escalation and stalemates. I definitely don’t think that conflict is a linear progression. This chart also makes sustainable peace look so attainable and almost easy (after all, it is just the opposite end of education without too many visual bumps in the path). I think short-term peace agreements, and the possibility of not reaching sustainable peace need to be included in any model of conflict. Other than my issue with the visual representation of conflict, I think that the article made a lot of good points. One of which being the idea that you cannot rely on an individual or single team to transform conflict; this goes back to the Track III way of dealing with conflict and the need to incorporate many levels of society in the peace process.