Negotiating Across Worldviews in an Age of Political Polarization

Event Date: Thursday February 25, 2021
Time: 12:00-1:00 pm
Location:

The Herbert C. Kelman Seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution presents:

Negotiating Across Worldviews in an Age of Political Polarization

A virtual discussion with:

Jeffrey R. Seul
Lecturer on Peace Studies, Harvard Divinity School
Co-chair, Peace Appeal Foundation
Partner, Holland & Knight

Thursday, February 25, 2021

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m., ET (U.S. & Canada)

 

About the event:

Now, more than ever, we need leaders who can effectively engage with people whose worldviews are very different from their own, as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Capitol riot, and other recent events have made painfully clear.  Yet conflicts involving deeply-held values and other fundamental differences in perspective often resist approaches to negotiation that may perform well in other situations.  In this session, we will consider some of the reasons moral conflict can be so intense, and how we can negotiate across worldviews more effectively.

About the speaker:

Jeff Seul, JD, MTS ’97, LLM ’01, is Lecturer on the Practice of Peace at Harvard Divinity School. He also serves as co-chair of the Peace Appeal Foundation and is a partner in the international law firm Holland & Knight. The Peace Appeal Foundation, which was founded with a mandate from five Nobel Peace Laureates, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and FW de Klerk, is an international NGO that helps local stakeholders launch and sustain broad-scale peace and national dialogue processes to end or avoid war.

Jeff earned an MTS at Harvard Divinity School and an LLM in international law at Harvard Law School. After graduating from HDS, Jeff taught negotiation and conflict resolution courses for several years at Harvard Law School, where he developed Harvard’s first course on complex, multiparty negotiations. He was also a senior associate of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Jeff’s scholarship is focused on conflict with a religious dimension, large-scale peace and national dialogue processes, and negotiated resolution of disputes involving deeply-held values, both religious and secular. His current writing projects include a book titled Negotiating Across Worldviews: Resolving Moral Conflicts Without Selling Out.

About the Herbert C. Kelman Seminar Series: 

The Herbert C. Kelman Seminar on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution series is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation, The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Boston area members of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. The seminar considers ways to strengthen the capacity to prevent, resolve, and transform ethnonational conflicts.

For more information on the Kelman Seminar, contact Donna Hicks at dhicks@wcfia.harvard.edu.


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