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Introduction:
Herb Kelman reflects on how one "moves up" from the small-group process of problem solving workshops to having a larger societal or political impact.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Scaling Up from Small-Group Processes
Herb Kelman
Professor Emeritus, Program on Negotiation, Harvard University
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But this new group that we started in '94, here the explicit purpose was to
come up with joint documents. Everything was kept confidential and no
attribution up until the final point, they had the right to say no, if they didn't
want to sign the document, they weren't committed to it, but if they did the
work that they had agreed to do, ultimately their names would be known and that
affected the process. Obviously that's a trade-off because by going public we
were able to, hopefully, have some impact. Also it contributes something to the
debate and thinking and so on. We came up with three papers that were published,
and we actually had a fourth paper, which was very close to completion but then
overtaken by events. So that was the look of the '90s. We started in 1990, and
in 1991 the official process began with the Madrid conference and the Washington
meetings, and then the Oslo Agreement, so the '90s were a new experience. The
'70s and '80s were all pre-negotiation. The '90s, to a considerable degree, were
para-negotiations. We were meeting at the unofficial, track II level while
official meetings were already beginning to go on and continuing to go on with
all of their ups and downs. My new challenge now is how to make this approach
useful-I wish it would have been post-negotiations where you focus on
peacebuilding, well, you focus on implementation and peacebuilding, but
unfortunately in my conflict, the Israeli-Palestinian case, we are in the phase
of broken-down negotiations. I'm continuing to work and to see what we can do
and I've had a few activities since 2000, the breakdown, effectively in 2000.
I've had three meetings of one kind or another.
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