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…
The former British politician (and leadership contender when the Conservative Party was choosing Boris Johnson), Rory Stewart, is making a mark as an even more independent thinker than he was in the British Parliament. Recently, he hosted a three-part series on BBC Radio 4 entitled A Long History of Argument. It is worth listening to…
In the beginning … Back in the 1976 Pound Conference called “Proceedings of the National Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice”, Harvard…
Back in 2020, just before the world changed, I wrote a blog post on this site suggesting the establishment of the World Mediators’ Alliance on Climate Change. My argument was that mediation offers a much more sustainable way to resolve disputes than many other processes. We could also do a lot to reduce our carbon…
Most people’s experience of artificial intelligence (AI) is limited to interacting with a chat bot on their bank’s website. These bots are unimpressive, dispensing trivial and mostly unhelpful answers. Don’t be misled into thinking that unhelpful chat bots represent the state of the art in AI, though. The cutting edge of AI research has moved…
Online processes in all professions soared during Covid. The legal profession was transformed. A multitude of online mediation platforms miraculously appeared and mediators barely skipped a beat. Benefits emerged – especially in a geographically vast continent like Australia – where advocates and their clients in distant locations saved significant costs in time, travelling expenses and…
One of the important things that struck me about Dr. Anna Howard’s brilliant research into Mediation is the discovery that the General Counsel she interviewed for her project feel disappointed that the promise of mediation has not been realized. I feel the same disappointment – although my disappointment has a somewhat different source. What seems…
