Bruce Allyn

By — on / Affiliated Faculty, PON Faculty

Senior Fellow, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School

Bruce Allyn is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project. For three decades, Allyn has taught negotiation and mediation and served as a strategic advisor and negotiation trainer to national and state governments, corporate leadership teams, and nongovernmental organizations.

His current focus is integrating core principles of negotiation with the latest cognitive neuroscience, using biofeedback and role play simulations to increase performance in high-stress political and business negotiations with the use of AI as an agent and as a counterpart.

A highly-respected mediator, Allyn has worked on the ground in major conflict and war zones in Russia, Cuba, Chechnya, Libya, Syria and South Africa. The attempt by the KGB to recruit him to spy for the Kremlin is the subject of a popular case study at Harvard Business School. Together with his political work, he has served as a senior partner in strategy consulting with Fortune 50 firms in a wide range of industries.

In his current research, Allyn uses case studies from his personal experience with CEOs, presidents and pariahs, including his work in the 1980s with President Mikhail Gorbachev’s government on negotiations to reduce nuclear risk and reform foreign and domestic policy; with Fidel Castro in the 1990s when Allyn played a key role in bringing together top decision makers from the 1962 Cuban missile crisis (what historians call “the most dangerous moment in human history”); his mediation work with Chechen President Maskhadov and with Putin’s Russia.

Allyn is Director of the Russia Negotiation Initiative at the Harvard Negotiation Project, publishing articles and appearing in major media with his analysis and possible pathways to a negotiated settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War.

He is Senior Creative Producer for the multimedia “Quest for Stability in US-Russia Relations,” supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (https://usrussiarelations.org/) and former Director of the Harvard-Soviet Joint Study on Nuclear Crisis Prevention.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University

M.A., Harvard University

M.A., Oxford University

B.A., Dartmouth College

Research interests

Integration of core principles of negotiation with cognitive neuroscience to enhance performance in decision-making under stress through use of biofeedback training and focused role plays; Negotiation with AI as an agent and counterpart; Negotiation in U.S.-Russian relations; facilitating dialogue for environmental sustainability across for-profit, nonprofit, and government boundaries.

Selected publications

  • “What Biden and Putin Can Agree On,” Foreign Policy, February 21, 2021.
  • “The Cuban Missile Crisis” in The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics, 8th Edition, 2015.
  • “Bruce Allyn: Negotiating with the KGB” HBS Case Study by James K. Sebenius, 2013.
  • Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. Pantheon, 1993, With James G. Blight and David A. Welch.
  • The Edge of Armageddon: Lessons from the Brink. Rosetta Books, 2013.
  • With Graham Allison and William Ury. Windows of Opportunity: From Cold War to Peaceful Competition in US-Soviet Relations. Harper and Row/Ballinger, 1989.

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