Our first article offers a new framework for cross-cultural conflict resolution education. In “Teaching Peace Top-down, Bottom-up, or Both? Navigating Basic Dilemmas in Cross-Cultural Conflict Resolution Education,” Peter T. Coleman, Lan H. Phan, and Anupriya Kukreja build on John Paul Lederach’s distinction between prescriptive (top-down) and elicitive (bottom-up) approaches to conflict resolution education in diverse cultures. In the prescriptive approach, the instructor is positioned as the knowledge-imparting authority figure in the peacebuilding classroom. In the elicitive approach, instructors honor the value of participants’ locally grounded insights and contributions, viewing them as important resources for knowledge and practice. While the participants are learning from the instructor, the instructor is learning from the participants. And the idea is that this two-way relationship will be mirrored in the field, in practice.
Reframing the elicitive/prescriptive debate, the authors recommend that conflict resolution educators adopt an adaptive or hybrid approach to their work. Through their study of practitioners working across cultures in different conflict zones, the authors found that an instructor’s approach to cross-cultural education should combine aspects of both prescriptive and elicitive methods based on five factors. Two factors are instructional competencies: tolerance for ambiguity and value alignment with the local group. Three factors are situational conditions: local priority objectives, local conflict resolution processes, and local constraints. The authors have developed a free app for Android and Apple devices that is based on their findings and organized around five diagnostic questions. The combined responses to these questions will point the instructor initially toward emphasizing prescriptive or elicitive methods—or a hybrid approach.
After drafting the article, the authors sent it to John Paul Lederach for his review and comment. Lederach’s reflections on Coleman, Phan, and Kukreja’s work and how it connects to his own experiences are included in a postscript to the piece, enhancing the main text.
Illustrating the breadth of our field, our next article takes us from diverse communities seeking peace to corporate executives negotiating megadeals. In “The Force of Negotiation: A Comprehensive Study of the Disney-Lucasfilm Acquisition,” Yicheng Ru gives a detailed analysis of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, using it as a lens through which to explore major negotiation principles and concepts within a commercial context. After outlining the histories and profiles of both companies, Ru provides an extensive overview of this $4.05 billion dollar deal and looks at how the personalities of the major players—Robert Iger (Disney’s CEO) and George Lucas (Lucasfilm’s founder, chairman, and CEO)—influenced the transaction.
The Disney-Lucasfilm deal was a game changer in the entertainment industry, integrating Lucasfilm’s iconic Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises into the cultural behemoth that is The Walt Disney Company. The acquisition presented several challenges for Iger as he negotiated the deal with Lucas, who was selling the major part of his creative legacy. In addition to evaluating the negotiation and implementation of the acquisition, Ru evaluates the post-acquisition impacts and offers three primary lessons and recommendations for negotiators working on complex, high-stakes deals.
In particular, she highlights the importance of how Iger handled prior acquisitions—Pixar and Marvel—in influencing Lucas’s assessment of how Disney would respect the creative core of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. This underscores the value—or cost—of a good/poor prior reputation in future deals. Second, Ru underscores the critical role of nonfinancial factors in this transaction. Finally, she emphasizes the importance for deal implementation of written versus oral commitments.
What can readers learn by analyzing negotiations like the Disney-Lucasfilm acquisition as they unfold in real time? Amanda Weirup and Melissa Manwaring explore this question in “The ‘Negotiation in the News’ Assignment: Building Negotiation Competencies Using Real-World Analysis.” The Negotiation in the News (NITN) assignment is designed to improve student negotiation skills through analysis of ongoing real-world negotiations, supplementing student learning from role plays and case studies by addressing specific pedagogical gaps. The NITN assignment requires student groups to identify, select, and follow a current unresolved negotiation over the course of several weeks as it progresses. While Weirup and Manwaring acknowledge the benefits of role plays and case studies in negotiation teaching, the authors argue that such exercises cannot fully replicate real-world negotiation experience. Through the NITN assignment, students learn to recognize real-world negotiations, gather and interpret data, analyze dynamic negotiation processes, and assess the impact of complex contextual factors. The authors make the case that the NITN assignment strongly complements the more familiar elements of negotiation pedagogy.
Weirup and Manwaring provide readers with guidance in designing and implementing the assignment and illustrate examples from student projects. While they use the assignment in face-to-face, online, and hybrid teaching, the authors differ on the ideal timing for employing this exercise. They offer one set of student instructions for using the assignment as a final/capstone project, and another for using it in the middle of the semester. In either case, students may choose a negotiation from any context, including business, law, politics, community, sports, entertainment, education, and international relations. The article includes a sample list of topics in each category as well as results from a student survey demonstrating the assignment’s value in enhancing students’ learning experience.
Our next article continues the focus on negotiation pedagogy. In “Learning from Practice to Teach for Practice: Reflections from a Novel Training Series for International Climate Negotiators,” Anselm Dannecker and Monica Giannone describe a novel approach to training early career negotiators from developing nations working on climate issues. This essay is a modified version of a presentation that Dannecker and Giannone delivered at the Program on Negotiation’s 40th Anniversary Symposium in December 2023. The authors describe the specific pedagogy they developed, how they infused lessons learned from the field with the best of negotiation theory, and the challenges they faced along the way.
Dannecker and Giannone offer four lessons that are useful for any negotiation teacher, especially one conducting virtual trainings for people who must hit the ground running. First, although fairly obviously, instructors should adapt the training to meet participants’ needs and changing circumstances. Second, they should play on FOMO (the “fear of missing out”) by creating a learning environment in which people feel like they are missing out if they miss a training session. Third, encourage participants to bring the same curiosity and intentionality to real-world challenges as they would if they were playing a role in a simulation. Fourth, adopt peer coaching, which was shown to increase participants’ understanding of the theories and tools they were taught and how to apply them to a range of areas in their life.
We end the issue with Peter R. Reilly’s review of Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures by Sarah Federman. In Transforming Negotiation, Federman bridges the two academic areas of negotiation and peacebuilding. Reilly is effusive in his praise of this effort, observing that that this “book covers a vast amount of ground, effectively connecting theory to practice and harnessing large amounts of research to support its arguments and advice. Perhaps most importantly, this reviewer found reading the book to be— as the title suggests—a transformative experience.”
While Reilly is confident that the book will have strong popular appeal outside academia, he notes that it can make important contributions not only to traditional classroom instruction but also for use in settings such as experiential learning, internships, externships, and clinics. The book seeks to teach people how to grapple with issues of personal responsibility, professional responsibility and identity, and one’s obligation to care for people in the community and the wider world.
Transforming Negotiation underscores the important role played by Constitutional provisions such as the First Amendment and other legal rights and protections that ensure our right to fight for what we believe in, whether through political activism, elections, public protests, or court battles—all of which can be entwined with negotiation. While in the past, Americans might have thought of our personal freedoms and Constitutional rights as inviolable, the current political climate has disabused us of such notions. It is essential that in times such as these, we heed Federman’s appeal to use our pedagogical and negotiation skills to make the world fairer, more just, and more inclusive; and to “[t]each those with power how to use their power to create more equitable futures.”
