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.