From his experience growing up as a Palestinian in Israel to his extensive research and practice in the field, Nadim Rouhana has examined protracted social conflict from various angles. Rouhana’s research highlights the centrality of identity, history, and justice in such conflicts and underscores the need to develop theory to understand these conflicts and tools with which to approach them.

As founding director of Haifa’s Mada al-Carmel-Arab Center for Applied Social Research, which examines conflict in multi-ethnic states, former director of Point of View, an international research and retreat center at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and author of myriad publications, Professor Rouhana comes to The Fletcher School with an illustrious career under his belt. He sees his installation at Fletcher as an opportunity to critically examine conflict studies and develop a new paradigm of conflict resolution that will be inclusive of perspectives beyond those developed in the West.

As a predoctoral student associate and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, Rouhana studied under Professor Herbert C. Kelman, with whom he worked on an approach called the problem-solving workshop (PSW). The PSW was designed as a one-time event focusing primarily on pre-influential participants. Cognizant of the limitations imposed by the one-time event, Rouhana, together with Kelman, worked to pioneer a new approach called the continuing workshop. Informed by a socio-psychological approach, the continuing workshop features regular intensive meetings between high-ranking non-official individuals over a long period of time. The meetings are designed to facilitate constructive interaction between opposing parties in an effort to advance jointly formulated ideas on how to address major issues of dispute in a given conflict.

Rouhana’s recent publications and projects underscore his commitment to highlighting the importance of history in conflict studies. He is currently planning a conference at Fletcher, “Looking Past, Looking Forward: The History and Future of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” with a colleague from UCLA. The conference kicks off a project to discuss future relations between Palestinians and the Israelis by examining the nature of their past encounters. Rouhana defines the goal as “bringing the conflict’s history, and the nature of the original encounter itself, into discussions about the future.”

Research Interests: International dispute resolution; conflict studies; power asymmetry

Select Publications:

Rouhana, N. N. (2008). Reconciling history and equal citizenship in Israel: Democracy and the politics of historical denial. In Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (Eds.). The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

April 2008 Co-Organizer and Co-Chair. “The Future of Dialogue and Problem Solving Workshops”. A one-day workshop held at Point of View, George Mason University.

January 2008 Exile and Return in Israeli and Palestinian Discourse: between Division and Coexistence. A paper presented at conference on “Di/Visions: Culture and Politics of the Middle East.” The House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany.

January 2008 Participant in the Yale Law School Middle East Legal Studies Seminar. The Moral Imperative in the Middle East. Yale Law School. Istanbul, Turkey.

November 2007 Organizer and Co-Chair. “Towards Defining the State of the Field: A Research Agenda for Conflict Resolution.” A one-day workshop organized by Point of View at George Mason University.

Link to Website:

http://fletcher.tufts.edu/faculty/rouhana/default.shtml ^[1]