It has taken a lot of time and effort for the Ukrainian mediation community to enact the law on mediation (the “Law”). On 16 November 2021, the Ukrainian Parliament finally passed it. This development opens up a new chapter and further prospects for the growth of mediation practice in Ukraine. Congratulations to all my Ukrainian…

This series of blogs posts explores investment mediation from a variety of angles. In this second installment, we focus on what mediation is—and how it works—in the context of investment disputes.  In part one, we explore how to determine whether mediation is an appropriate option for resolving an investment dispute, while part three outlines the…

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard (PON) sends to subscribers a daily blogpost of interesting negotiation thoughts and analyses. It regularly visits the negotiation styles of world leaders with the idea that ‘by studying the negotiation styles of famous leaders, we can identify what to emulate and what to abandon’. Unsurprisingly it has shone a…

Professor A.C. Grayling, an Oxford don, has recently published The Frontiers of Knowledge.[1] According to Professor Grayling, the more humankind knows, the more we realise the limits of our knowledge. Grayling identifies twelve problems confronting scientific enquiry which he says stand in the way of increased knowledge. These problems can equally apply, in their own…

“Humanity has outsmarted itself. With its ingenuity, this tribal ape has created a world its tribalism can’t manage. We know this…But the knowledge is not enough.” So began Martin Wolf in a recent article in the Financial Times following a meeting of the finance ministers of the G20 – one of the institutions created to improve…

Mr. Jawad has been a mediator since 2007 and a passionate promoter of mediation in India from its earliest days. Jawad works as a mediator and trainer with the Mediation and Conciliation Project Committee of the Supreme Court of India and is a global faculty with ADR ODR International UK. He is a SIMI accredited…

For me, one of the benefits of our new online world has been an increase in opportunities to get to work with people over distance, without having to travel that distance. While I have not physically left an area within a radius of some 60 kilometres since early 2020, I feel connected around the world,…

Slowly but surely the dispute resolution landscape is shifting for investment related disputes. More than half the respondents to the International Dispute Resolution Survey published by the Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) last year indicated that they have been involved in an investor-state dispute between 2016 and 2018. And, it is of course no…

In recent years we have learned a lot more about what have become known as cognitive biases and how they may play a part in negotiation and mediation. These are mental shortcuts that save energy and get us out of tight spots that have evolved over thousands of years. Well over a hundred have been…

A quarter century ago, Professor Leonard Riskin published an article describing a grid of mediator orientiations including a facilitative-evaluative dimension.  Despite critiques of this framework, including by Riskin himself, many mediators, trainers, and teachers still use these concepts as mediation models, expressing strong feelings that one model is good and the other is bad. These…