This article takes a pragmatic approach to understanding critical moments and explores their use in three forms of practice: research, conflict diagnosis, and a form of intervention called a reconstruction clinic. Reviewing what makes critical moments useful in these practices provides insights into their character, and into how they function in the work of adept practitioners, and into the way stakeholders experience, make sense of, and act in a conflict. This review opens insights into the relationship between stories, memory, and action and into the layered and relational quality of experience that the use of critical moments helps to evoke. It also highlights a plasticity that distinguishes critical moments and helps to foster interaction and development in research, in conflict diagnosis, and in efforts to intervene in the contested history of a conflict.

A condition of trust between parties negotiating from positions of separate interest can make the difference between desired and undesirable outcomes, not to mention the processes leading up to them. We posit that trust is multiply determined, relational, and deeply embedded in the psychological processes of individual negotiating parties and the social psychological processes between them. How self and other are experienced, and the personal and cultural processes by which the Other Party becomes perceived as having shared boundaries such that trust is possible, is the topic of this essay. We examine an exchange of email between two members of a Russian and Argentine software joint venture, to illustrate how the sense of Otherness can escalate conflict and decrease trust. Inherent in our exposition are prescriptions for avoiding such escalation and polarizing of self and other parties, through such mechanisms as deliberate contact, respect, and awareness of one's own psychological processes in presenting self and perceiving Other.