Mediation Strategies and Techniques

Nancy Ferrell talks about re-establishing channels of communication during family mediation.
Nancy Ferrell talks about cost-benefit analysis and visioning as mediation techniques.
Suzanne Ghais talks about ways to help parties to discuss the past without getting caught up cycles of blame.
Suzanne Ghais recommends that mediators explore the past in order to better understand parties' perspectives.
Silke Hansen talks about a benign form of manipulation mediators can use to help parties move toward compromise.
Wallace Warfield describes how one identifies the real leaders in a group.
Peter Woodrow describes a Sri Lankan approach to mediation.
Suzanne Ghais suggests that explaining the mediation strategies she is using can help parties to communicate more effectively.
Nancy Ferrell discusses mediators' role in empowering minority or low-power parties.
Jane Docherty notes the importance of differentiating between impasses based on worldview differences, and others based on bad faith or misunderstandings.
Helen Chauncey explains how fear can interfere with coexistence efforts.
Angela Khaminwa and Sarah Peterson explain the interrelationship between peacebuilding and coexistence work.
Angela Khaminwa and Sarah Peterson discuss ways to "scale up" coexistence work to the national level to address issues of structural violence.
Former Community Relations Service Mediator Edward Howden describes how mediators sometimes need to be assertive to hold the process together.

Case Examples

Sarah Peterson describes a negotiation process in South Africa involving land reform that has, with effort, led to longer-term coexistence.
Coexistence is a situation in which people embrace diverse identities constructively. Helen Chauncey explains this notion in the context of Cyprus.
Mediator Edward Howden brought in outside experts to help resolve factual disagreements in a water dispute.
Former Community Relations Service Mediator Edward Howden describes how he got control of a very uncontrolled mediation process.