Miriam Coronel-Ferrer is a professor of political science at the University of Philippines Diliman and headed the Government of Philippines panel in peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with culminated in the signing of a peace accord in 2014. Miriam is the first female chief negotiator in the world to sign a final peace accord with a rebel group. She was a member of the United Nations Standby Team of Senior Mediators during which she provided mediation support to UN missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Maldives, Kosovo, Georgia, and Southeast Asia, among others.  Miriam is also the recipient of numerous awards including the 2015 Hillary Rodham Clinton Award for Advancing Women in Peace and Security.

In this episode of Conflict, Power, and Persuasion, Miriam takes us behind the scenes of the negotiation process between the Government of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation front.

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Links:

https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/2421

Abid Shamdeen was born and raised in Sinjar, Iraq. For the past six years, he has advocated for victims of the Yazidi genocide and has managed projects that have brought aid and assistance to internally displaced Yazidis in Iraq. During the United States-led invasion of Iraq, he worked for the US Army as a cultural advisor and translator. Abid holds a master’s degree in Political Science from the School of International Service at American University. Together with Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Nadia Murad, Abid co-founded Nadia’s Initiative whose mission is to “create a world where women are able to live peacefully and communities that have experienced trauma and suffering are supported and redeveloped”.

In this episode of Conflict, Power, and Persuasion, Abid describes the genocide of the Yazidi people by ISIS in the Sinjar Region of Iraq which took the lives of over 5000 people, with thousands more missing, many of which are presumed to be still in captivity. He not only speaks specifically of the plight of the Yazidi, including their history, the process which made the Yazidi vulnerable to an attack by ISIS, as well as detailing the aftermath of the Sinjar massacre, but in doing so he also provides invaluable insights into the risks of interventionism in politically disputed regions, as well as important considerations required to successfully rebuild and reintegrate minority groups in the wake of genocide or humanitarian crisis.

Links:

-Nadia’s Initiative: https://www.nadiasinitiative.org/

-The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State by Nadia Murad: https://amzn.to/3Qe21pF

Charles Davidson directs the Political Leadership Academy and is research faculty at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.  He is also a scholar-practitioner of conflict resolution focusing on civil war, insurgency, and vulnerable populations with over a decade of experience in economic peacebuilding in war-torn countries working most recently in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and previously in Iraq, Afghanistan, Uganda, Colombia, and Burundi.  Charles is also founder and president of Innovations in Peacebuilding; its mission is to cultivate peace by accompanying local peacebuilding practice, peace education, connecting peacebuilders, and scholarly praxis.

In this episode of Conflict Power and Persuasion, Charles describes how his background and international experiences shaped his thinking and understanding of the critical motivational forces on members of armed groups, and consequently, the approaches that can successfully achieve disarmament, demobilization and the reintegration of those individuals to create durable peace. He then takes us behind the scenes of what he describes as a hybrid peace process, which led to the signing of a peace agreement by 21 armed groups, civil society leaders, and the Congolese government.

Links:

https://www.innovationsinpeacebuilding.com/

https://carterschool.gmu.edu/

https://kivusecurity.org/

Simon J. A. Mason is a senior researcher and head of the Mediation Support Team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich. He has been involved as a facilitator in workshops on conflict analysis, dialogue, negotiation, and mediation with actors from conflict contexts around the world. Together with Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, he recently co-authored the book: Mediation and Governance in Fragile Contexts: Small Steps to Peace.

Olivia Lazard is an environmental peacemaking and mediation practitioner as well as a researcher.  She is currently a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe where her research focuses on the geopolitics of climate, the transition ushered by climate change, and the risks of conflict and fragility associated to climate change and environmental collapse.

In this episode of Conflict, Power, & Persuasion, we’ll take an in-depth look at environmental disputes with special consideration of the impact of climate change, including discussions about why and how nature could be brought into peace negotiations.

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Victoria Pynchon is an author, keynote speaker, and was a consultant and trainer at She Negotiates, which she co-founded in 2010. She wrote a thrice-weekly negotiation blog at ForbesWoman for more than two years and has written lengthier pieces for CNN International, the American Bar Association Journal and other niche practice magazines.

As a speaker, writer and consultant in the women’s negotiation and leadership niche, Victoria has been interviewed or mentioned by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, the New York Times, CNN Opinion Bloomberg Business week and others.

Victoria is also the author of two books, an illustrated conflict resolution primer, The Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution (published by Reason Press in 2010) and Success as a Mediator for Dummies (published by Wiley in 2012).

In this episode of Conflict, Power, & Persuasion, we’ll discuss negotiating a raise or starting salary. Victoria has helped hundreds of women negotiate their market value and walks us step-by-step through the process. Tapping into decades of experience as a commercial litigator, mediator and negotiation expert, Victoria also provides numerous invaluable tips for mediators, negotiators and coaches.

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Alanis Obomsawin was born in 1932 and is a member of the Abenaki Nation. She spent her early years on the Odanak reserve, then at the age of six relocated to Trois Rivieres, Quebec, where her family was the only Indigenous peoples in the community. Driven by the need for truthful and respectful education about Indigenous peoples, while in her early 20s, Alanis began performing as a singer and storyteller and toured in Canada, the US and Europe including managing her own stage at the Mariposa Folk Festival in the 1960s.

In the late 1960s Alanis was hired as a consultant by the National Film Board of Canada where she went on to become one of the most acclaimed Indigenous directors in the world, completing dozens of documentaries, exploring the lives and concerns of Indigenous peoples including violent conflicts such as the raids on the Mi’kmaq over fishing rights in the early 1980s and the historic Mohawk standoff at Oka.

Alanis has an incredible list of well-deserved awards and honors including honorary doctorates from the universities of York, Carleton, UBC, Western, McGill, Concordia, and Dalhousie. In 1983 she was made a Member of the Order of Canada, she’s received the Governor General’s Performing Arts award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, the Glenn Gould Prize, the prix Albert-Tessier for contribution to Quebecois cinema, and many others.

In this episode of Conflict, Power, & Persuasion we take a walk through time, discussing the struggles to realize Indigenous rights and the path to reconciliation.

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Links:

CBC’s Telescope Episode: https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/alanis-obomsawin-the-activist

Bush Lady Album: https://alanisobomsawin.bandcamp.com/

NFA Documentary Films: https://www.nfb.ca/directors/alanis-obomsawin/

Jim Tamm is a former judge and an expert in building collaborative workplace environments, with 40 years of experience in the field of alliance building and conflict resolution. As a Senior Administrative Law Judge for the State of California for 25 years, Jim mediated more than 1,000 employment disputes.

His legal decisions have impacted national labor policy in the US, and he has authored training materials that have been published in fourteen languages. The California Senate, the California Assembly and the California Public Employment Relations Board have all honored Jim for his work building more collaborative employment environments.

His most recent book, Radical Collaboration (co-authored with Ron Luyet) was on Amazon’s top seller lists for workplace, organizational psychology, collaboration and negotiations books for most of the past nine years. He is a former law professor and is currently on the faculty of the International Management Program of the Stockholm School of Economics, the Management Education Program at NASA, and the Leadership Academy of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Wallenberg Institute in Sweden.

Jim has a diverse client base of international organizations ranging from the United Nations, NASA, Toyota and Boeing, the US Army and Navy, to universities, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals and toy companies.

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Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She is a social psychologist with research interests in conflict, negotiations and judgment, and decision making. Her primary line of research addresses the “psychology of disagreement” – how do people engage with opinions, judgments, and decisions that are different from their own? She explores this theme in the context of group decision making to uncover the psychological biases that prevent managers, consumers, and policy-makers from maximizing the benefits of collaboration. She also studies the conditions that make people willing to listen and be receptive to views and opinions they strongly oppose on political and social topics.

Prior to the Harvard Kennedy School, Julia served as a Lecturer at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she taught Negotiations at both the MBA and the undergraduate levels.   She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University and her BA in Psychology from Harvard University.

Topics discussed include:

· What receptiveness is and why it’s so important.

· Whether liberals are more receptive than conservatives.

· Whether men or women are more receptive.

· How age influences our openness to the opinions of others.

· The link between receptiveness and good decision making.

· The linguistic markers that convey receptiveness.

· The power of acknowledgment.

· How mediators can frame discussions to promote receptiveness.

· Why being formal and polite in an argument can be counterproductive.

· The key to creating receptiveness at Braver Angels workshops.

· How you can test your own level of receptiveness.

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Jamie Arbuckle served for 36 years in the Canadian Army. As a peacekeeper, he has served three tours with the United Nations Forces in Cyprus (UNFICYP), and with the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. He also served four tours with Canada’s NATO forces in Germany.

Jamie was a faculty member of the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Nova Scotia, a member of the Capacity Building and Training Section of the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), and has delivered seminars on Conflict Management for the OSCE Secretariat in Vienna and for missions in Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania, as well as at the Austrian Peace Support Command, the German Foreign Ministry Training Centre in Bonn and at York University in the UK.

Jamie was the English copy editor for the Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations and has written several articles on military issues for professional publications. Jamie’s the author of two books: The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia: An Observer Returns, and Military Forces in Twenty-first Century Peace Operations: No Job for a Soldier?, which details the military role in humanitarian operations.

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On Amir received his Ph.D in management science and marketing from MIT’s Sloan School of management and is a professor of marketing at UC San Diego. On’s research focuses on using psychological and economic principles to identify successful strategies in different market settings. He investigates different customer decision-making mechanisms and their influences on pricing and promotion strategies, on decision making under risk and uncertainty, and on preference dynamics. He also writes about how insights from research on decision making and behavioral economics may be used to improve business practices and policy making.

On has been retained as an expert witness and testified at deposition in numerous cases. He has also consulted to and conducted market research for companies in the life sciences, biotechnology, media, gaming, and defense industries. On has received several research awards from the Marketing Science Institute and from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation.

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