Boston Premiere: Acting Together on the World Stage: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School

cordially invites you to the Boston Premiere of the documentary film:

 

Acting Together on the World Stage:

Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict


October 23, 2011
6:30pm – Reception; 7:00pm – Program Begins

Distler Performance Hall, Granoff Music Center

Tufts University
20 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA

 

Featuring the film screening of “Acting Together on the World Stage” and a post-film discussion on the importance and the risks of cultural diplomacy with leading experts:

  • Arthur Kibbelaar, Consul for Press and Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General for the Netherlands, NY
  • Dijana Milosević, Artistic Director of DAH Teatar, Belgrade, and contributor to the Acting Together anthology
  • Cynthia E. Cohen, co-creator of “Acting Together on the World Stage,” and Director of the Peacebuilding and the Arts Program, International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life, Brandeis University

With the goal of illustrating non-violent ways of addressing human conflict, the documentary “Acting Together on the World Stage” presents the work of theater artists, cultural leaders and peacebuilding practitioners who are drawing on the disciplines of their crafts to support communities to creatively resist abuses of power, re-humanize adversaries, and become more just, inclusive and peaceful. Featuring stories of artists from the United States, Peru, Argentina, Serbia, Uganda, Cambodia and Australia, the 55-minute film strengthens an emerging international movement linking performance and peacebuilding, and highlights the movement’s achievements and its promise.

In addition to the film, highlights of the event include a musical performance by Libana, reception, book signing, displays of work by Medicine Wheel Productions, refreshments and more. Click here for more information.

Buy your tickets now
General admission: $25
Students: $15 with code “studentdiscount”
(Please bring student ID to event)
Cash or check only at the door please.

Co-Sponsored by the Program on Negotiation

Winning at “Win-Win”

Lawrence Susskind (Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

“Win-win” has become a popular term in the field of negotiation, but many people have mis-perceptions about what it actually means. In this blog post, Professor Lawrence Susskind, a member of PON’s Executive Committee, clarifies that a “win-win” negotiated outcome is one in which both sides walk away with more than their “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” or BATNA. This is not the same as an agreement in which everyone walks away with everything they originally wanted, which is extremely rare; most successful negotiations require some concessions from all parties. Susskind suggests that careful preparation and clear thinking about your own BATNA and that of your counterparts can help negotiators obtain true “win-win” outcomes.

Read more.

Political Polarization and Ideas for Restoring Civility to Government in 2012

“Political Polarization and Ideas for Restoring Civility to Government in 2012”

with

Jill Lepore,

Professor of American History at Harvard University

and

Mark McKinnon

Reidy Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government

 

Date: October 25, 2011

Time: 4:00-6:00 PM

Where: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
1737 Cambridge Street, Room K-354, Cambridge MA

Contact Chair: Donna Hicks (dhicks@wcfia.harvard.edu).

Speaker Bios

Mark McKinnon is a Reidy Fellow at the Shorenstein Center. For 30 years, McKinnon has worked as a communications strategist for causes, companies and candidates, including President George W. Bush, Senator John McCain, Governor Ann Richards, Congressman “Good Time” Charlie Wilson, Lance Armstrong and Bono. He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels which is dedicated to more civil discourse in politics. McKinnon is vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton and Public Strategies, and president of Maverick Media. He has helped engineer five winning presidential primary and general elections and has been awarded more than 30 Pollie and Telly awards, honoring the nation’s best political and public affairs advertising. McKinnon’s research topic at the Shorenstein Center, “How the Press Picks Winners and Losers,” will focus on ways in which the fourth estate puts its thumb on the scale of presidential politics by making subjective and arbitrary decisions about who gets covered, who gets included in debates, who gets preferential status, and ultimately who gets exposure to the voting public.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books-in-progress include a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, a study of Charles Dickens in America, and a series of essays about how historians write. Her previous books include The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice;New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Knopf, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize; and Blindspot (Spiegel and Grau, 2008), a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky, also a Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Her next book, The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, will be published in May of 2012.

About the Herbert C. Kelman Seminar Series

The 2011-2012 Herbert C. Kelman Seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution series is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Boston area members of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. The theme for this year’s Kelman Seminar is “Negotiation, Conflict and the News Media”.

Athens, Greece & Nicosia, Cyprus

Location: Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry — Athens
Dates: November 30 – December 2, 2016

Location: Hilton Cyprus — Nicosia
Dates: December 7 – December 9, 2016

The Non Profit Institute for Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution will serve as our partner and host for this program. IADR was formed by the alliance of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), and the Union of Hellenic Chambers of Commerce and Industry (UHC), academics and eminent jurists. IADR is a non-profit organization promoting, studying and developing Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) through educational processes and information campaigns. IADR is a culmination of multiple initiatives in the field of Arbitration, Mediation and Negotiation aiming to provide support and research to the benefit of the legal and business community, the scientific community and ultimately to the benefit of the citizen and society.

Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations: What Is Next?

“From Madrid to New York, from bilateral to unilateral: 20 years of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations – what is next?”

Date: October 13, 2011

Time: 12:15 PM

Where: Pound Hall #200 (Corcoran Classroom), Harvard Law School Campus

Brown Bag Lunch (dessert and drinks will be provided)

Click here for a campus map.

About the Speaker

Academic, writer, practitioner and veteran negotiator, Dr. Ron Pundak is perhaps best known for his decisive role in creating the secret track of the unofficial Oslo negotiations at the beginning of 1993.   Pundak subsequently served as a member of the official Israeli negotiating team in the later stage of the Oslo Process, which culminated in the historic signing of the Declaration of Principles in Washington on September 13, 1993.

Dr. Pundak also participated in numerous Israeli-Palestinian Track II forums related to the “final status” issues, and in 1994 and 1995 was part of the small team which negotiated the so-called “Beilin-Abu Mazen Understanding,” which provided a blueprint for agreement on all final status issues utilized in the Camp David II, Clinton Parameters, and Taba Negotiations. He participated in drafting the Geneva Initiative and serves as a Steering Committee member.  Currently, Ron Pundak is the chair of the Israeli Peace NGOs Forum and the co-chair of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum. The joint Forum consists of some 100 organization, all working on bilateral projects to foster peace.

From 2001 to 2011, Dr. Pundak served as Director General of the Peres Center for Peace, the largest Israeli organization dealing with Israeli-Arab peace.  Prior to joining the Peres Center, he was the Executive Director of the Economic Cooperation Foundation (ECF), an Israeli think-tank dealing with various political and economic issues related to the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Dr. Pundak holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern political history from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). He has published numerous academic articles and a book entitled “The Struggle for Sovereignty”, which details Jordanian history during the years 1946 through 1951. Pundak worked briefly as a journalist and continues to contribute op-ed articles to the Israeli and international press.

Film Screening of “How to Start a Revolution”

How to Start a Revolution

 

film screening &  discussion with

Gene Sharp


 

 

Date: October 11, 2011

Time: 7:15 PM

Where: Langdell North, Harvard Law School Campus

This new documentary film vividly shows how the world’s leading expert on nonviolent revolution, Gene Sharp, has helped millions of people achieve freedom in the face of oppression and tyranny.

Following the film, Susan Hackley, Managing Director of the Program on Negotiation, will moderate a discussion with:

  • Gene Sharp
  • Film director Ruaridh Arrow
  • Jamila Raqib, Executive Director of the Albert Einstein Institution

Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law Documentary Studio.

Pizza, drinks and dessert will be served.

Click here for a campus map.

About the Film

“How to Start a Revolution” is the remarkable untold story of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Gene Sharp, the world’s leading expert on nonviolent struggle. This new feature documentary, from first time director Ruaridh Arrow, reveals how Gene’s work has given a new generation of pro-democracy leaders the nonviolent ‘weapons’ they need to overthrow dictators. It shows how his book ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’ has inspired uprisings from Serbia to Iran and from Egypt to Syria and how his work has spread across the globe in an unstoppable wave of profound democratic change. The film explores how one man’s thinking has contributed to the liberation of millions of oppressed people living under some of the most brutal dictatorships in the world and how his work threatens tyrants and their regimes through civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action.

About Gene Sharp

Gene Sharp is Senior Scholar at the Albert Einstein Institution and founded the Institution in 1983.

He holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Ohio State University and a D.Phil. in political theory from Oxford University. He is also Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. For nearly thirty years he held a research appointment at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs.

He is the author of various books, including The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979), Social Power and Political Freedom (1980), and From Dictatorship to Democracy (1993, 2002, and 2003). His most recent book is Waging Nonviolent Struggle: Twentieth Century Practice and Twenty-First Century Potential. His writings have been published in more than thirty languages.

Sellers: Set the right price

Adapted from “Why Your Selling Price May Be Too High,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, October 2007.

Imagine that you are moving from one city to another and putting your home on the market. How would you determine the true value of the residence? Now imagine that you are in the market for the same residence rather than selling it. How would you determine its value? Do you think you would reach the same estimate regardless of whether you were the buyer or the seller?

According to basic economic principles, we should place the same value on an item whether we’re selling it, buying it, or merely window-shopping. Yet psychological research shows that sellers typically value their own possessions more highly than the possessions of others. In negotiation, that’s a problem if you need to make a sale.

Researchers have dubbed the tendency to overvalue our possessions—including items we have only owned briefly and haven’t had a chance to become attached to—the “endowment effect.” Contrary to rational economic theory, we seem to view almost anything as more valuable once it belongs to us. Why? Ownership, like any stroke of good fortune, is accompanied by the threat of loss relative to the status quo. This “loss aversion” can lead us to overvalue our assets and ask too much for them.

To put together a more rational and competitive package prior to your next sale, answer these questions as honestly and thoroughly as possible:

•    “Would I want it if it weren’t mine?” Once you’ve made the difficult decision to part with a possession, imagine how you’d react if someone were pitching it to you. When you put yourself in a prospective buyer’s shoes, the item might not look as appealing.
•    “How much is it really worth?” Improve your estimate of an item’s value by consulting an expert in the field, such as a financial adviser or an art, jewelry, antique, or real-estate appraiser.
•    “What if it doesn’t sell?” Imagine what will happen if you are unable to make a sale after a month or a year passes. If that wouldn’t be a problem, go ahead and aim high. But if it would cause financial or other difficulties, rethink your goal.
•    “What other value can I offer?” In most negotiations, price should not be the only issue on the table. If you can provide delivery options, payment plans, or an ongoing relationship to a potential buyer, you may be able to justify a higher-than-average price.

The late-night-TV disputes

Adapted from “Comedy of Errors: The Late-Night-TV Wars,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, April 2010.

In 2004, NBC asked Jay Leno, the longtime host of The Tonight Show, to yield the show in five years to Conan O’Brien, his younger rival and host of NBC’s Late Night.

As the date of O’Brien’s promotion approached, Leno’s Tonight Show ratings remained strong. Taking a gamble, NBC offered Leno an hour-long prime-time show that would run before the local news. Both Leno’s and O’Brien’s shows performed poorly in the ratings. Seven months into O’Brien’s Tonight Show tenure, NBC reversed course. It offered to create a half-hour show for Leno that would air after the local news – and bump O’Brien’s Tonight Show from 11:35 to 12:05. According to The New York Times, NBC executives were confident the plan did not breach O’Brien’s three-year contract, which didn’t stipulate a time slot for The Tonight Show.

In a public letter, an angry O’Brien rejected the plan. Leno was given his old job back. Just one issue remained: O’Brien’s three-year contract with NBC.

The final deal terms, widely viewed as generous to O’Brien, included a $32.5 million buyout of O’Brien’s contract, a guarantee of $12 million for his staff members, the right for O’Brien to host a show on another network, and a “nondisparagement clause” forbidding O’Brien from bad-mouthing NBC for seven months.

The negotiations in this story offer several important lessons:

•    Don’t gloss over key terms. O’Brien’s contract with NBC didn’t specify a nightly time slot for The Tonight Show. If O’Brien’s lawyers had included this detail, NBC might not have tried to move his show back to 12:05.
•    Prepare for the worst-case scenario. When inking deals with the two hosts, NBC appeared not to have anticipated the possibility that both Leno and O’Brien would suffer in the ratings. Facing the ire of affiliates, NBC scrambled for a plan B, which O’Brien quickly rejected.
•    Show some respect. NBC’s perceived shabby treatment of O’Brien caused a public backlash against the network and Leno. In negotiation, fairness concerns can affect perceptions more than the bottom line.

Gender and competition: what companies need to know

Recent research by Harvard professors Iris Bohnet and Kathleen McGinn, and Harvard Business school doctoral student Pinar Fletcher, explores the relationship between gender, competitiveness and cooperation.

In this HBS Working Knowledge article, Bohnet and McGinn discuss the results of their work.

Read the article here.

PON Launches Middle East Negotiation Initiative (MENI)

Under PON’s Harvard Negotiation Project and its current director, Professor James Sebenius, an initiative was launched in 2009 to focus on Middle Eastern affairs, in line with HNP’s mission “to improve the theory, teaching, and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution.” The Middle East Negotiation Initiative (MENI) recently assumed a role as its own Research Project directly under PON, and PON’s Executive Committee asked Senior Fellow Shula Gilad to coordinate the transition and to consolidate the existing projects.

Today, MENI seeks to advance cutting-edge research and scholarship on key topics relating to Middle East peace and negotiations. In an effort to disseminate methodology and dispute settlement techniques and to train future negotiators, MENI faculty organize various programs, seminars, and projects related to negotiation in the Middle East, which are conducted all over the world.

Lastly, the program seeks to inform members within and outside of the PON and Harvard communities of new methods and techniques which can help solve the difficult challenges in the Middle East.