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
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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
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Article 9
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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/.
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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)