Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program Releases Report on a New Safety Response System for the City of Boston
The Boston Police Department routinely responds to calls for service involving mental health, homelessness, substance use, traffic incidents, and nonviolent neighborhood or domestic disputes. In the face of nationwide racial disparities in public safety practices, many have advocated for the ability to seek help in addressing these issues without relying entirely on the police. In June…
What Makes a Negotiation Win-Win? Exploring Perspectives, Mutability, and the Limits of Value Creation – Part 1
by Zekariah McNeal ’21 Consider this slightly altered version of a well-known example from Getting to Yes.1 Two children are fighting over an orange, when their mother discovers them and demands that they stop. “Why do you want the orange?” she asks them both. “To make orange juice!” answers the first child. “To make a cake with the orange…
When Norms Collide: Part 1—What is an “inter-bubble” conflict?
By Patrick Maxwell ‘21 This post is the first installment of a multi-part blog series by Patrick Maxwell, “When Norms Collide: The (Growing?) Challenge of Inter-bubble Conflicts.” The series will explore conflicts that cut across structures, groups, and worldviews—and what it may take to effectively navigate them. Sandra, Alex, and QAnon Although Sandra and Alex had been friends for years, their relationship…
Book Review: America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights
Clinical Instructor Deanna Parrish ’16 reviews America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights by Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, calling it both “personal—and tragically relevant.” “. . . . CRS works behind the scenes to provide free, impartial, and confidential conciliation and mediation services to communities, with the intention of “keeping the peace”…
Truth Commissions as an Antidote to Unrest: Where Dialogue and Transparency Promote Reconciliation
by Oladeji Tiamiyu ’20 In recent months, America has experienced significant social upheaval, ranging from the nation-wide protests in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd to the attempted insurrection of the Capitol that led to the deaths of 5 individuals. In July 2020, Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia established truth commissions in…
Identity Commitments at the Negotiating Table
by Zekariah McNeal ’21 Identity often affects the substance of negotiations, not just the process. But this influence might be the most likely to remain unspoken. Consider an employee who enters her employer’s office to ask for a raise. That employee might prepare for such a negotiation by gathering objective criteria such as comparable salaries, market trends,…
Introducing our New Blog Contributors
We are excited to introduce two student writers who will be contributing recurring columns to our blog this spring. Zekariah McNeal ʼ21 and Patrick Maxwell ʼ21 are former students in the Dispute Systems Design Clinic (and Patrick is currently enrolled again for an Advanced Clinical). In their posts, Zekariah will discuss negotiation, restorative justice, and other dispute resolution processes, particularly focusing on the role of identity; and…
What Are We Learning About Convening Peace in a Pandemic?
The field of peace negotiations relies on extensive travel of the parties, mediators, and advisors. From 2018 to early 2020, a major component of my work portfolio was advising parties involved in Sudan’s civilian revolution and democratic transition, and advising delegations to the Sudanese Peace Process. So I spent a lot of time going back…
The Risk—and Relief—in Calls for Unity
President Biden ran on a campaign of unity, “restoring the soul of our nation.” These calls often resembled a pastor’s sermon more than policymaker’s plan, and suggested that division was not a symptom, but instead a harm in and of itself. . . . In President Biden’s view, it seems that division itself is what…
Remote but Robust: having difficult conversations virtually using best practices from crisis counseling
“That is a conversation that probably needs to happen in person.” We can all think of myriad personal and professional conversations that fall into this category: Giving critical feedback to someone you manage; having a conversation with a family member about political views; talking a friend through the loss of a job; announcing big changes in…
HLS Alternative Dispute Resolution Career Panel: Fall 2020
On Thursday, November 5, the Harvard Mediation Program, the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP), and the HLS Negotiators co-sponsored a panel discussion and networking event for HLS students interested in careers in negotiation, mediation, arbitration, restorative justice, and other forms of alternative dispute resolution.
What we’ve learned from the election – no matter who wins
Election Day has come and gone. At this moment, we sit with anxious uncertainty about the outcome in the Presidential race, as key states continue to count the millions of legitimately cast votes that remain. The color-coded maps are ubiquitous but incomplete, the pundits spin out endless speculative scenarios. And we wait.
Reflecting on the Journey of “Thanks for Listening”
When we launched the “Thanks for Listening” podcast in the fall of 2018, our goal was to explore what seemed like deep and growing political polarization in the U.S., and to find out what was being done about it. We wanted to be able to tell a hopeful story about people and organizations who are working to “bridge the partisan divide…
On Dispute Systems Design and Democratic Participation: Reimagining Voting
By Deanna Pantin Parrish American democracy is an almost 250-year-old dispute between “We, The People” and those elected to represent us. Since America was an idea, voting has been a central mechanism for defining our collective identity and determining its representation. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton penned that it was for Americans “to decide ……
Harvard Mediation Program Rises to the Moment
By Ethan Lowens and Cathy Mondell The Harvard Mediation Program (HMP) rose to a new challenge this fall: with Harvard Law School classes meeting virtually and no students on campus, HMP was faced with the question of how to make student mediators available from their homes across the globe to the Boston-area court systems HMP has been working with for decades. And, because access to those courthouses was…
Alumni Spotlight: Corey Linehan
Corey Linehan is a two-time Dispute Systems Design Clinic alumnus who graduated from Harvard Law School in 2018. Nowadays, Corey is a legislative assistant in the office of U.S. Senator Christopher A. Coons, where his work focuses on health and education policy, as well as an adjunct professor in the Master of Leadership & Negotiation…