The essay reviews the content of twenty-five years of the Harvard Program on Negotiation's Negotiation Journal, identifying themes and issues explored on its pages in the past, the current issues challenging the field’s scholars and practitioners, and the issues likely to confront us in the future. It argues that while we in the field hoped for simple, elegant, and universal theories of negotiation and conflict resolution, the last twenty-five years have demonstrated the increasing complexification of negotiation theory and practice, from increased numbers of parties and issues, and dilemmas of intertemporal commitments, ethics, accountability, and relationships of private action to public responsibility

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1500645_code254274.pdf?abstractid=1500645&rulid=34725&mirid=2

Chronicling the Complexification of Negotiation Theory and Practice

The essay reviews the content of twenty-five years of Negotiation Journal, identifying themes and issues explored on its pages in the past, the current issues challenging the field's scholars and practitioners, and the issues likely to confront us in the future. It argues that while we in the field hoped for simple, elegant, and universal theories of negotiation and conflict resolution, the last twenty-five years have demonstrated the increasing complexification of negotiation theory and practice, from increased numbers of parties and issues, and dilemmas of intertemporal commitments, ethics, accountability, and relationships of private action to public responsibility.

/pdf/chronicling-the-complexification-of-negotiation-theory-and-16hfcgoxtr.pdf

The essentialism implicit in Western discourses about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) plays to assumptions that there is limited possibility of indigenous democratic construction in the region. Our study analyzes the importance of local/indigenous knowledge in Tunisia and in Egypt, the specific, local contexts that have shaped the revolutions in both nations, and how social media and communication technologies were used to engage in social change. It also interrogates how change elsewhere in the region may emerge in very different ways than has been the case in Tunisia and Egypt.

Local Knowledge and the Revolutions: A Framework for Social Media Information Flow

This article reviews the historical contingency of theory and practice in conflict engagement. World War II and the Cold War produced adversarial, distributive, competitive, and scarce resources conceptions of negotiation and conflict resolution, as evidenced by game theory and negotiation practice. More recent and more optimistic theory and practice has focused on party needs and interests and hopes for more party-tailored, contingent, flexible, participatory and more integrative and creative solutions for more than two disputants to a conflict. The current challenges of our present history are explored: continued conflict in both domestic and international settings, the challenge of “scaling up” conflict resolution theory and the problematics of developing universal theory in highly contextualized and diverse sets of conflict sites. The limits of “rationality” in conflict resolution is explored where feelings and ethical, religious and other values may be just as important in conflict engagement and handling.

The Historical Contingencies of Conflict Resolution

This paper explores the value and role of critical notions of space in the current impasse in Palestine-Israel through a case study on two films and their creative use of space. The main aim of the paper is to illustrate that it is useful for geographers to use analyses of performance in order to theorise space in more hopeful ways, particularly in areas of conflict, by stressing the importance of space as open-ended and performative. Through a discussion of two films, one by Elia Suleiman and the other by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, the paper argues that space, if imagined as dynamic, in-between and potentially connecting Palestinians and Israelis, can be transformative and have a positive role to play in interrogating us/them relationships, power inequalities and Othering in the region. The paper highlights the value of using third space and performance to help create a spatial politics of affect, which may in turn lead to changing perceptions of the Other in conflict regions. Therefore, the paper makes a contribution, not only to the geographical literature on how space is appropriated and constructed in Palestine-Israel, but also to geographical work on hope, film and performance.

/pdf/creating-geographies-of-hope-through-film-performing-space-18nzus230i.pdf

Creating geographies of hope through film: performing space in Palestine-Israel

This essay describes how Israeli students in a course on mediation and consensus building taught in an Israeli university law department by an American law professor and an Israeli instructor analyzed and studied the conflict in the Middle East. It describes the suggestions they made for process design for the next stages of whatever peace process might emerge for the region. In light of the students’ suggestions, the authors present some ideas as to how different approaches to reconciliation and peace might be used, managed, and coordinated.

The Next Generation: Creating New Peace Processes in the Middle East

This essay describes how Israeli students in a course on mediation and consensus building taught in an Israeli university law department by an American law professor and an Israeli instructor analyzed and studied the conflict in the Middle East. It describes the suggestions they made for process design for the next stages of whatever peace process might emerge for the region. In light of the students' suggestions, the authors present some ideas as to how different approaches to reconciliation and peace might be used, managed, and coordinated.

/pdf/the-next-generation-creating-new-peace-processes-in-the-rqkbqx9ji9.pdf

Irena Nutenko

Papers

The Next Generation: Creating New Peace Processes in the Middle East

The Next Generation: Creating New Peace Processes in the Middle East