Negotiating Across Worldviews

Event Date: Tuesday November 19, 2019
Time: 4:30-6:00 pm
Location: CGIS K-354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA

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

Negotiating Across Worldviews

A discussion with:

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

Tuesday, November 19, 2019
4:30-6:00 p.m.
CGIS Knafel North, Room K-354
1737 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA

Free and open to the public.

 

About the event:

Leaders and change agents of all kinds must learn to engage effectively with people whose ways of seeing the world and moral codes—their worldviews—are very different from their own. Conflicts involving deeply held values and other fundamental differences in perspective often are resistant to approaches to negotiation and dialogue that serve us well in other situations, particularly when individuals and groups have a history of animosity, and even violent confrontation. This talk will introduce an approach to negotiation focused on ways in which our own and others’ worldviews influence our experiences as negotiators and dialogue partners—an approach designed to help us 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 dialogues 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 theme of the Kelman Seminar is “Negotiation, Conflict and the News Media”.

For more information, contact Donna Hicks at dhicks@wcfia.harvard.edu.

Comments

Comments are closed.