Just a few short months ago, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School hosted an international conference on the conflict within Israel over the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. The event, which was cosponsored by the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the United States Institute of Peace, attracted scholars, practitioners, and officials from a remarkably wide range of disciplines with diverse scholarly and political viewpoints. Most participants agreed that forging greater internal consensus in Israel over the settlements is necessary — although by itself insufficient — to advance the larger peacemaking process in the Middle East.
Much has already happened in the region since the conference concluded, notably the death of Yasser Arafat and the January election of Mahmoud Abbas as the new president of the Palestinian Authority. Undoubtedly, more will unfold between the time this issue of the Negotiation Journal goes into production in January and when it reaches your hands in April. Nevertheless, the settlement controversy will still be an important part of the negotiation landscape and thus of interest to informed citizens everywhere.
That fact alone would warrant our publishing the conference report. However, it is the presenters’ wide‐ranging discussions of a host of negotiation issues, theories, and practices that will make this package of articles most interesting to many of our readers. To offer just one example, in one panel Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw the compensation process for families of victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, and Francis McGovern, who has mediated high‐profile class action suits, brought some of their own experiences to bear on the discussion of the schemes currently in development for compensating settlers who may be evacuated from Gaza and the West Bank. The resulting discussion of what constitutes fair compensation and how to allocate inadequate resources should be stimulating for negotiation practitioners and teachers of all stripes.
Special thanks are due to Robert Mnookin, first for orchestrating such an ambitious event, and second for organizing the articles coming out of this conference to get them to our readers in such short order. He has also written an introduction to the overall report, just as the chairs of the various panels have provided overviews and theoretical analyses of the sessions that they facilitated.
This issue is rounded out by three very different pieces. (Readers will note that the choice of verbs is not inadvertent: this issue and last are both bulkier than our normal 120 pages; we will even this out in later issues this year.) In “Transcending Dualistic Thinking in Conflict Resolution,” Marla Del Collins examines how our common inclination to construct opposites — good/bad, right/wrong, male/female — can exacerbate conflict. She surveys alternative ways of framing the world arising from a variety of disciplines, including the under‐appreciated virtues of “fuzzy thinking.”
Jean Poitras’ article, “A Study of the Emergence of Cooperation in Mediation,” offers a complementary view from the practice side, explicating the preconditions and dynamic steps through which mediation relationships may — or may not — constructively evolve. Peter Reilly, in turn, addresses another widely accepted (although erroneous) distinction, the supposed distinction between reason and emotion. His article, “Teaching Law Students How to Feel: Using Negotiations Training to Increase Emotional Intelligence,” is a welcome challenge to the assumption that the head should always rule the heart.
