Currently, Brazil is the second country with the highest number of cases of Burnout Syndrome. This syndrome (which was even included in the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization in 2019) is defined as “emotional exhaustion”, and its main symptoms are related to anxiety and depression, a very common situation in today’s…
Some time ago, in these pages, I proposed the World Mediators’ Alliance on Climate Change. Out of that initiative grew the Mediators’ Green Pledge. Out of that we hope to see a supportive corporate pledge and a conference at the time of COP26 in November. More on that later. This month, I’d like to float…
I started mediating in my early 30s, surely old enough to know the difference between truth and fiction. Yet after a couple of years I began to say, first to myself then to my friends, that the concept of truth was ‘no longer useful’ in my work. What did I mean and how did I…
By the everyday miracle of Zoom, Carrie Menkel-Meadow spoke from her LA office to a Glasgow conference with a worldwide audience. Wrapping up ‘Learning by Doing,’ the UK’s first conference devoted to mediation clinics, her keynote described the inspiration for a whole career: a colleague in her legal aid office in the 1970s. While Carrie…
Anna Howard’s first book, ‘EU Cross-Border Commercial Mediation: Listening to Disputants – Changing the Frame; Framing the Changes’ (published by Kluwer), is an important contribution to the literature about the practice and promotion of mediation. It deserves a wide readership among academics and practitioners alike and I hope that potential readers will not be deflected…
The Harvard Program on Negotiation (PON) has provided a life-changing experience for many of us. It certainly changed the trajectory of my life and triggered a life-long immersion in conflict resolution theory and practice. I am immensely grateful. The program has been an evolutionary one – regularly enhanced and updated to fit the frame of…
The Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama tells the story of a family living in Tokyo over 30 years. Two brothers, one a sumo wrestler and the other a maker of Noh theater masks, are forced to adapt their lives to changes in society in order to succeed in their traditional professions. In an…
I write this in the aftermath of yet another mediation in which the protagonists exhibited symptoms of having been seriously traumatised by the litigation process to which they had been exposed. Depression, suicidal thoughts, anger, loathing, destroyed relationships, large amounts of money spent with no discernible value. And this was a commercial situation, not a…
Homo sapiens, the wise human being, must now learn from its mistakes and live up to its name. We who are alive today have the formidable task of making sure that our species does so.” David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet Looking back at John Sturrock’s post from February which suggested a World Mediators…
Interest is growing in the use of mediation for investor-state disputes. Recent webinars on investor-state mediation (including SIDRA’s recent webinar) have explored ICSID’s new investor-state mediation rules, the role of the Singapore Convention for investor-state mediation and the need for further domestic legislation on mediation. Discussions at these virtual conferences have also emphasised the importance…
