“Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears.” Surely some mistake, I thought; shouldn’t it be the other way round? Swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks? It was during Evensong at the magnificent Liverpool Cathedral a few weeks ago that this reading from the Old Testament Book of the prophet Joel caught…

This post was drafted by Leonardo D’Urso, Julia Radanova, and Constantin Adi Gavrila. Introduction In the variegated landscape of European legal systems, mediation has often been overshadowed by traditional litigation. Yet, the winds of change are blowing, particularly with the emergence of soft mandatory mediation models. Among these, Italy’s opt-out model stands as a beacon…

  I’ve just been in London presenting at the terrific UIA Mediation Forum  and my daily train travels constantly exposed me to this image. As the conference themes developed, the image took on an even more significant meaning for me. Let me explain. An early speaker, Kimberlee Kovach (Founding Officer and Past Chair of the…

The Magic in Mediation This is a longer blog post than is normal but I will not be alone in describing Ken Cloke as one of the most influential figures in my life, both professionally and personally. Ken’s wisdom and humanity, expressed so well in his many books and seminars, have been hugely important to…

Mediation has long been used as a method of resolving disputes. Indeed, the practice of combining mediation and arbitration by the same neutral has been traced back to ancient Greece and Ptolemaic Egypt[1]. In his paper “Varieties of Dispute Processing”, presented to the 1976 Pound Conference, Harvard Professor Frank E.A. Sander proposed that, instead of…

Dispute resolution competitions are a rich learning space for students. My 15+ years coaching teams from my university to compete internationally were a rich experience for me and I enjoy continuing opportunities to be part of the competition community nationally and internationally. It has also been my great good fortune to observe and judge hundreds…

This article was prepared by Mahmoud Arif and Constantin-Adi Gavrilă. Picture any school in any community in the world, and you are sure to imagine a group of children learning and playing. Whenever there is interaction, there will always be room for conflict. How do children manage conflict? This question is difficult to answer, as…

The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy (SIDRA) launched its International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2022 Final Report on 31 August 2022. The SIDRA Survey is commissioned by the Singapore Ministry of Law and is into its second iteration, with the first SIDRA Survey Report published in 2020.   The 2022 Final Report continues SIDRA’s global study…

The idea of using insights from behavioural science to achieve desirable policy goals burst into popular consciousness with the publication of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (R Thaler and C Sunstein, Yale University Press, 2008.) It describes the appealing notion that people can be encouraged to make good choices by the way…

In the famous story of Noah’s Ark, Noah questions God about how he will find the animals he has been instructed to put in the ark. God replies, ‘If you build it, they will come’. The consistent repetition of this quotation throughout history (think of Kevin Costner’s movie Field of Dreams ) has created something…