Should They Listen to Us? Seeking a Negotiation / Conflict Resolution Contribution to Practice in Intractable Conflicts

Journal of Dispute Resolution, Aug 2017

Conflict resolution (CR) has had its successes, particularly in what has become common negotiation and mediation practice in divorce, civil litigation, and small to medium scale public policy disputes. Yet despite these practical inroads and increasingly successful dissemination of the ideas of our field, CR practitioners in politics and policy (and other fields) are still conspicuous by their absence in the largest, most consequential conflicts. Negotiation remains the vehicle for addressing international conflicts nonviolently. However, as of 2007 when we first questioned the relative lack of practical impact (at the highest levels) of negotiation scholarship, the international relations practitioners did not seem to acknowledge any debt to, draw inspiration from, or request assistance from negotiation theory. We propose here that in this respect, there has been change. Indeed, as we write in late 2016, the U.S. presidency has just been contested under some quite remarkable conditions. Among them, not the least interesting for our field is that the prevailing candidate centered his claim to fitness for the world’s highest office on competence in negotiation – even while dismissing many key notions and ethical precepts found in the field’s literature. These changes together raise the question, how should we go about contributing positively to conflict management practice in public and international conflicts?

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1772&context=jdr

Should They Listen to Us? Seeking a Negotiation / Conflict Resolution Contribution to Practice in Intractable Conflicts

Journal of Dispute Resolution Should They Listen to Us? Seeking a Negotiation / Conflict Resolution Contribution to Practice in Intractable Conflicts Chris Honeyman 0 1 Sanda Kaufman 0 1 Andrea Kupfer Schneider 0 1 0 Chris Honeyman, Sanda Kaufman, and Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Should They Listen to Us? Seeking a 1 This Conference is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Dispute Resolution by an authorized editor of University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. For more information , please contact , USA Part of the Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Commons Recommended Citation Negotiation / Conflict Resolution Contribution to Practice in Intractable Conflicts, 2017 J. Disp. Resol. Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/jdr/vol2017/iss1/9 - Article 9 Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/jdr Should they Listen to Us? Seeking a Negotiation /Conflict Resolution Contribution to Practice in Intractable Conflicts Sanda Kaufman*, Chris Honeyman** & Andrea Kupfer Schneider*** I. INTRODUCTION Conflict resolution (CR) has had its successes, particularly in what has become common negotiation and mediation practice in divorce, civil litigation, and small to medium scale public policy disputes. Yet despite these practical inroads and increasingly successful dissemination of the ideas of our field, CR practitioners in politics and policy (and other fields) are still conspicuous by their absence in the largest, most consequential conflicts. Negotiation remains the vehicle for addressing international conflicts nonviolently. However, as of 2007 when we first questioned the relative lack of practical impact (at the highest levels) of negotiation scholarship, the international relations practitioners did not seem to acknowledge any debt to, draw inspiration from, or request assistance from negotiation theory.1 We propose here that in this respect, there has been change. Indeed, as we write in late 2016, the U.S. presidency has just been contested under some quite remarkable conditions. Among them, not the least interesting for our field is that the prevailing candidate centered his claim to fitness for the world’s highest office on competence in negotiation2–even while dismissing many key notions and ethical precepts found in the field’s literature. These changes together raise the question, how should we go about contributing positively to conflict management practice in public and international conflicts? * Sanda Kaufman is a professor of Planning, Public Policy and Administration at the Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University. She directs the Master of Arts in Environmental Studies. Her research, often interdisciplinary, focuses on public decision making processes and the conflicts that ensue. ** Chris Honeyman is a consultant who has directed research-and-development programs in dispute resolution for more than 25 years. He has published widely in the field and has served as a neutral in more than 2,000 cases. *** Andrea Kupfer Schneider is a professor of law and director of the Dispute Resolution Program at Marquette University Law School. In addition to several textbooks in the dispute resolution field, she has published numerous law review articles and book chapters on negotiation, gender, international conflict, and dispute system design. 1. Sanda Kaufman et al., Why Don’t They Listen to Us? The Marginalization of Negotiation Wisdom, in NÉGOCIATION ET TRANSFORMATIONS DU MONDE (Christophe Dupont ed., 2007). 2. A Google search requiring both of the exact phrases “Trump speech” and “Art of the Deal” produced 26,900 references. GOOGLE, http://www.google.com (last visited Mar. 24, 2017). E.g., Rena Flores, Donald Trump: Living by “Art of the Deal” as campaign playbook, CBS (Apr. 1, 2016 4:52 PM), http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-donald-trump-is-using-the-art-of-the-deal-as-a-campaign-playbook/. 74 JOURNAL OF DISPUTE RESOLUTION This Article revisits our 2007 initial effort3 to examine what seemed at the time to be the negotiation field’s failure to influence the handling of large-scale international and public conflicts. With the benefit of ten years’ mulling, and with the impetus of two related symposia in the fall of 2016,4 we will identify some possibly new symptoms of this failure. We call for new attention to a modified list of underlying causes for the lack of marked progress in many of the conflicts around the world that have yet to be resolved. Our field’s adherents don’t readily see our imprint on the world, perhaps because many world conflicts continue despite our insights. We had expected our insights to lead to their resolution—or at the very least, to set in motion steps toward their nonviolent management. But perhaps this observation is overly pessimistic. Running the risk of exag (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1772&context=jdr

Chris Honeyman, Sanda Kaufman, Andrea Kupfer Schneider. Should They Listen to Us? Seeking a Negotiation / Conflict Resolution Contribution to Practice in Intractable Conflicts, Journal of Dispute Resolution, 2017, pp. 9, Volume 2017, Issue 1,