Why can't we all just get along? In family life, schools, law, the business world, and domestic and international affairs, it is all too common for disputes to fester unresolved even when the parties are committed to a negotiated settlement. In this book members and associates of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation address the complex issues that protract disputes and turn potential win-win negotiations into conflicts that leave everyone worse off. Drawing on such diverse but related disciplines as economics, cognitive psychology, statistics, and game and decision-making theory, the book considers the barriers to successful negotiation in such areas as civil litigation, family law, arms control, labor-management disputes, environmental treaty making, and politics. When does it pay for parties to a dispute to cooperate, and when to compete? How can third-party negotiators further resolutions and avoid the pitfalls that deepen the divisions between antagonists? Offering answers to these and related questions, this book is a comprehensive guide to the latest understanding of ways to resolve human conflict.

Make workplace conflict resolution a game that EVERYBODY wins! Recent studies show that typical managers devote more than a quarter of their time to resolving coworker disputes. The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games offers a wealth of activities and exercises for groups of any size that let you manage your business (instead of managing personalities). Part of the acclaimed, bestselling Big Books series, this guide offers step-by-step directions and customizable tools that empower you to heal rifts arising from ineffective communication, cultural/personality clashes, and other specific problem areas—before they affect your organization's bottom line. Let The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games help you to: Build trust Foster morale Improve processes Overcome diversity issues And more Dozens of physical and verbal activities help create a safe environment for teams to explore several common forms of conflict—and their resolution. Inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and proved effective at Fortune 500 corporations and mom-and-pop businesses alike, the exercises in The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games delivers everything you need to make your workplace more efficient, effective, and engaged.

This book sheds an illuminating light into the psyche of people involved in macro-level destructive intergroup conflicts. It also describes the changes in the socio-psychological repertoire that are necessary to ignite the peace process. Finally, it elaborates on the nature and the processes of peace building, including conflict resolution and reconciliation.

Here is a completely updated edition of the best-selling Resolving Conflicts at Work. This definitive and comprehensive work provides a handy guide for resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work and outlines the authors’ eight strategies that show how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace actually provide an opportunity for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. This new edition includes current case studies that put the focus on leadership, management, and how organizations can design systems to change a culture of avoidance into a culture of creative conflict. The result is a more practical book for today’s companies and the people who work in them.

Civil wars vary greatly in their duration. This book argues that conflicts are longer when they involve more actors who can block agreement (veto players) and identifies specific problems that arise in multi-party bargaining. Quantitative analysis of over 200 civil wars since World War II reveals that conflicts with more of these actors last much longer than those with fewer. Detailed comparison of negotiations in Rwanda and Burundi demonstrates that multi-party negotiations present additional barriers to peace not found in two party conflicts. In addition, conflicts with more veto players produce more casualties, are more likely to involve genocide and are followed by shorter periods of peace. Because they present many barriers to peace, the international community has a poor track record of resolving multi-party conflicts. David Cunningham shows that resolution is possible in these wars if peace processes are designed to address the barriers that emerge in multi-party conflicts.

Unresolved conflict is workplace kryptonite. Learn how to develop the mindset and skills to defuse disagreements, overcome division, and turn conflict into an opportunity for growth. Unresolved workplace conflict wastes time, increases stress, and negatively affects business outcomes. But conflict isn't the problem, mismanagement is. Leaders unintentionally mismanage conflict when they fall into patterns of what Marlene Chism calls “the Three As:” aggression, avoidance, and appeasing. “These coping mechanisms are ways human beings avoid the emotions that come with conflict, but in the end it's all avoidance,” says Chism. In this book she shows how to fearlessly deal with conflict head-on by expanding your conflict capacity. Conflict capacity is a combination of three elements. The foundation is the Inner Game—the leader's self-awareness, values, discernment, and emotional integrity. The Outer Game is the skills, tools, and communication techniques built on that foundation. Finally, there's Culture—the visible and invisible structures around you that can encourage or discourage conflict. Chism offers exercises, examples, and expert guidance on developing all three elements. Leaders will discover techniques to increase leadership clarity, identify obstacles, and reduce resistance. They'll develop powerful skills for dealing with high-conflict people and for initiating, engaging in, and staying with difficult conversations. Readers will learn that when they see conflict as a teacher, courageously face it, and continually work on transforming themselves, they can get the resolution they are seeking. They can change minds.

In real-life conflict resolution situations, one size does not fit all. Just as a mechanic does not fix every car with the same tool, the conflict resolution practitioner cannot hope to resolve every dispute using the same technique. Practitioners need to be comfortable with a wide variety of tools to diagnose different problems, in vastly different circumstances, with different people, and resolve these conflicts effectively. The Conflict Resolution Toolbox gives you all the tools you need: eight different models for dealing with the many conflict situations you encounter in your practice. This book bridges the gap between theory and practice and goes beyond just one single model to present a complete toolbox - a range of models that can be used to analyze, diagnose, and resolve conflict in any situation. It shows mediators, negotiators, managers, and anyone needing to resolve conflict how to simply and effectively understand and assess the situations of conflict they face. And it goes a step further, offering specific, practical guidance on how to intervene to resolve the conflict successfully. Each model provides a different and potentially useful angle on the problem, and includes worksheets and a step-by-step process to guide the reader in applying the tools. Offers eight models to help you understand the root causes of any conflict. Explains each model's focus, what kind of situations it can be useful in and, most importantly, what interventions are likely to help. Provides you with clear direction on what specific actions to choose to resolve a particular type of conflict effectively. Features a detailed case study throughout the book, to which each model is applied. Additional examples and case studies unique to each chapter give the reader a further chance to see the models in action. Includes practical tools and worksheets that you can use in working with these models in your practice. The Conflict Resolution Toolbox equips any practitioner to resolve a wide range of conflicts. Mediators, negotiators, lawyers, managers and supervisors, insurance adjusters, social workers, human resource and labour relations specialists, and others will have all the tools they need for successful conflict resolution.