We are delighted to welcome you to the first issue of the new Negotiation Journal. Beginning with this issue, the journal will be fully open access, online only, and published in conjunction with MIT Press. Relative to its traditional closed format primarily distributed to libraries, the new Negotiation Journal will magnify its accessibility and impact, ensuring that articles will more effectively reach practitioners, scholars, students, and others in the fields of negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution. With the elimination of the paywall, it will be easy to read, download, and share the journal’s articles, columns, and reviews, including those published in past issues.
We are particularly pleased to begin this iteration of Negotiation Journal with articles that provide concrete advice for effectively managing the turbulence and discord that define these times. While it is easy to give in to despair, the contributors to this issue give us reason for hope and optimism.
The issue opens with “Navigating Firestorms: The Imperative of Conflict-Intelligent Leadership in a Turbulent World” by Peter T. Coleman, who directs Columbia University’s Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. Drawing on his (and others’) prior work, the author offers a novel framework for conceptualizing “conflict-intelligent leadership” in our contentious world. In what can be understood as almost a provisional summation of his many years studying conflict and leadership, Coleman’s framework builds on evidence-based practices for constructive conflict resolution and enhances them with insights from complexity science. According to Coleman, conflict intelligence is based on four empirically derived assumptions: conflict is a natural and necessary element in life, conflict initially feels bad, conflicts add up emotionally over time, and our first responses to conflict are crucial. The development of conflict intelligence requires us to broaden our orientation to conflict across four levels: a focus on and awareness of the self, a focus on social dynamics, a focus on situational dynamics, and a focus on broader systemic forces. As he concludes his discussion of each of these four levels, Coleman provides tailored readings, exercises, and other pedagogical materials for teachers and trainers. Noting that we live in a “new era of [the] political weaponization of most major events,” Coleman offers the example of the challenges faced by former Harvard president Claudine Gay and other university leaders in managing upheavals arising from perspectives on the Israel–Hamas war and other conflicts.
Indeed, the repercussions of the Israel–Hamas war have been widespread, and the broader Israeli–Palestinian conflict remains intractable. In “Grand Bargain: Negotiating Toward a Better Middle East,” James K. Sebenius of the Harvard Business School and Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project offers a way forward to a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East. Sebenius begins by describing the elements of the grand bargain he proposes—an “Arab–Israeli–Palestinian Peace Initiative (AIPPI)”—initially to be proposed by Saudi Arabia and/or the United Arab Emirates. The AIPPI would include a vision of a permanent solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the form of a non-militarized Palestinian state with Israel benefiting from normalized relations with moderate Sunni Arab regimes. In line with the proposed AIPPI itself, which should be designed as a point of departure for negotiations, the article details the benefits to and obligations of Israelis, Palestinians, and Arab states contemplated by this grand bargain. It also suggests performance-based milestones to evaluate progress toward the realization of the AIPPI vision. After describing the ZOPA that likely exists between the parties that could encompass such an agreement, Sebenius gets to the crux—and bulk—of the article, providing what he believes to be credible answers to two vexing questions: What are the barriers to realizing the AIPPI and, most importantly, what is a plausible path to overcoming them?
Another intractable conflict—that between Greek and Turkish Cypriots—is the focus of the next article, “Widening Participation: How Cypriot Peacebuilding Practitioners are Responding to the ‘Usual Suspects’ Problem” by Mark Barrow, a doctoral candidate at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. The article examines grassroots peacebuilding efforts in Cyprus by interviewing members and employees of four organizations devoted to bridging the divide between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The author explores ways in which these organizations have been resolving the “usual suspects” problem—the domination of grassroots-level peace interventions such as intercommunal trainings and peace education workshops by people who already are persuaded of the benefits of reconciliation. Barrow explores “theories of change” that must be adopted to engage a broader spectrum of the population in such activities. His research shows that activities not explicitly organized around peace work are more likely to draw people who are as yet uncommitted to the idea of building peaceful intercommunal relations. Through encountering each other in language classes, sports competitions, and activities that provide opportunities for economic advancement, Greek and Turkish Cypriots become more favorably inclined to favor reconciliation between the two groups.
The next article is William Ury’s inspiring keynote address at the Program on Negotiation’s 40th Anniversary Symposium, edited for clarity and length. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON), of which Negotiation Journal is a part, celebrated its 40th anniversary last December. Ury is a cofounder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, out of which PON was born. Ury shares his recollections of three of the founders of PON—Roger Fisher, Howard Raiffa, and Frank Sander—remembering a phone call from Fisher that set him on his lifelong work of negotiation and conflict resolution in countless settings. Reflecting on wars around the world and technological revolutions such as AI, Ury asserts that this “polycrisis” compels us to return to the central question with which PON began: “How do we deal with our differences, particularly our deepest and most intractable ones?” Noting that future generations are depending on us, Ury urges optimism, believing that there are few, if any, problems on Earth that we cannot address, if we can learn to negotiate our differences skillfully.
Learning to negotiate our differences is the subject of Louis Kriesberg’s Fighting Better: Constructive Conflicts in America, a review of which concludes the issue. Calling the book “a scholarly masterpiece,” Heidi Burgess, co-director of Beyond Intractability, urges us to take its lessons for constructively addressing class, status, and power inequities seriously. Noting that nothing less than American democracy is on the line, Burgess suggests that reading Kriesberg’s detailed history of what has worked to resolve conflict in the US over the last 75 years is critical for anyone hoping to make progress on “existential” challenges such as global political and economic threats and climate change.
We hope this issue of the new Negotiation Journal strengthens and inspires you in your work ahead on these critical issues, and that you will continue to turn to it for insights and strategies in the years to come. And with respect to your own and your colleagues’ writings in this realm, we hope that you will consider the new Negotiation Journal as a useful path to reach scholars, teachers, and practitioners.
