This book explains how facilitative mediators, those without material leverage, contribute to progress in peace negotiations. While existing theories of mediation have offered suggestions about what a mediator should get parties to do to reach an agreement, the puzzle that has remained is: how does a mediator get parties to do what is prescribed? The book argues that a communication perspective is key to understanding facilitative mediation and that framing is the main mechanism by which facilitative mediation functions. Based on an empirical analysis of the United Nations mediation in El Salvador between 1990 and 1992, the work breaks new ground by uncovering three underlying mechanisms that explain how a mediator can get their framing adopted by the negotiating parties, thereby advancing the negotiations. The book offers a novel theory of facilitative mediation as framing and an innovative methodological approach that focuses on negotiation impasses to study the process of how negotiations progress. Practitioners will also appreciate the framework for thinking about when and how framing and reframing can be used to increase mediation’s effectiveness as a tool for ending armed conflict. This book will be of much interest to students of peace and conflict studies, negotiation, Latin American politics, and International Relations, as well as practitioners.

Contemporary Peacemaking draws on recent experience to identify and explore the essential components of peace processes. The book is organized around five key themes in peacemaking: planning for peace; negotiations; violence on peace processes; peace accords; and peace accord implementation and post-war reconstruction.

This empowering guide goes beyond observable techniques to offer a close look at the creative internal processes--both cognitive and psychological--that successful mediators and other conflict resolvers draw upon.

With insightful chapters from key social psychologists and peace scholars, this handbook offers an integrative and extensive overview of critical questions, issues, processes, and strategies relevant to understanding and addressing intergroup conflict.

Provides mediators and other professionals who use mediationsuch as lawyers, therapists, and personnel managerswith comprehensive, step-by-step instruction in effective dispute resolution strategies.

A guide to the practice of mediation as a means of resolving conflict, this short how-to manual includes all the resources needed to teach and train mediators in the skills of conflict resolution. It explains the conceptual framework of conflict and peacemaking, the stages and steps of the mediation process, and the resources necessary to conduct mediation sessions, including practice through role-playing. The book is divided into three parts: Theory, Process, and Practice. Part I provides a conceptual framework for understanding conflict and mediation. It discusses the sources of conflict, the dynamics of power imbalances, how mediation counteracts them, and familiar styles for managing conflicts. Part II describes the stages of the mediation process. It begins with orientation and preparation for the mediation session before outlining each of the five stages of the mediation process along with a range of communication skills crucial to the success of each stage. Part III focuses on several familiar areas of human experience in which the practice of mediation is common, such as family and domestic mediation, business and organizational mediation, international mediation, and education. These chapters include customary forms and techniques used in resolving conflicts. The final chapter includes materials to manage and conduct mediation role-playing exercises.

Make workplace conflict resolution a game that EVERYBODY wins! Recent studies show that typical managers devote more than a quarter of their time to resolving coworker disputes. The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games offers a wealth of activities and exercises for groups of any size that let you manage your business (instead of managing personalities). Part of the acclaimed, bestselling Big Books series, this guide offers step-by-step directions and customizable tools that empower you to heal rifts arising from ineffective communication, cultural/personality clashes, and other specific problem areas—before they affect your organization's bottom line. Let The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games help you to: Build trust Foster morale Improve processes Overcome diversity issues And more Dozens of physical and verbal activities help create a safe environment for teams to explore several common forms of conflict—and their resolution. Inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and proved effective at Fortune 500 corporations and mom-and-pop businesses alike, the exercises in The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games delivers everything you need to make your workplace more efficient, effective, and engaged.

After years of relative neglect, culture is finally receiving due recognition as a key factor in the evolution and resolution of conflicts. Unfortunately, however, when theorists and practitioners of conflict resolution speak of culture, they often understand and use it in a bewildering and unhelpful variety of ways. With sophistication and lucidity, "Culture and Conflict Resolution" exposes these shortcomings and proposes an alternative conception in which culture is seen as dynamic and derivative of individual experience. The book explores divergent theories of social conflict and differing strategies that shape the conduct of diplomacy, and examines the role that culture has (and has not) played in conflict resolution. The author is as forceful in critiquing those who would dismiss or diminish culture s relevance as he is trenchant in advocating conflict resolution approaches that make the most productive use of a coherent concept of culture. In a lively style, Avruch challenges both scholars and practitioners not only to develop a clearer understanding of what culture is, but also to take that understanding and incorporate it into more effective conflict resolution processes."