“The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts”

with

Dr. Peter T. Coleman

Director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution

and Professor of Psychology and Education

at Columbia University

When: Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Time: 12 – 1 p.m.

Where: Wasserstein Hall, Room B10, Harvard Law School Campus ^[1]

Please bring your lunch. Drinks and desserts provided.

One in every twenty difficult conflicts ends up not in a calm reconciliation or tolerable stand-off but as an acute and lasting antagonism. Such conflicts—the five percent—can be found among the diplomatic and political clashes we read about every day in the newspaper but also, and in a no less damaging and dangerous form, in our private and personal lives, within families, in workplaces, and among neighbors. These self-perpetuating conflicts resist mediation, defy conventional wisdom, and drag on and on, worsening over time. Once we get pulled in, it is nearly impossible to escape. The five percent rule us.

Peter T. Coleman is associate professor of psychology and education at Columbia Univer-sity, director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, and on the faculty of Teachers College and The Earth Institute at Columbia. In 2003, he received the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence.

About the Presenter:

Peter T. Coleman is associate professor of psychology and education at Columbia Univer-sity, director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, and on the faculty of Teachers College and The Earth Institute at Columbia. In 2003, he received the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, Division 48: Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence.