That society has become more fragmented is arguably an inevitable consequence of putting people with vast differences in wealth, education opportunities, religious beliefs and values together into a melting pot without adequate integration policies or government support.

1. Why has multiculturalism in a globalized world foundered?
2. What can be done to create a more harmonious society?
3. How can a world free of xenophobia be created?

Special Address by:
H.R.H. Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, Crown Prince of Norway

Speakers:
Cesar Conde, President, Univision Networks, USA
Rosie Dastgir, Author, United Kingdom
Philip J. Jennings, General Secretary, UNI Global Union, Switzerland
Ingrid Srinath Narasimhan, Secretary-General and Chief Executive Officer, Civicus: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, South Africa
Demet Mutlu, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Trendyol.com, Turkey
Lukas Reimann, Member of the National Council and the Swiss People’s Party
Mel Young, President, The Homeless World Cup, United Kingdom

Moderator:
Daniel Shapiro, Founder and Director, Harvard International Negotiation Program, Harvard Law School, USA

The World Economic Forum, along with the Harvard International Negotiation Program, conducted a “soft launch” of the world’s first Global Curriculum on Conflict Management for current and future leaders during the Davos Annual Meeting 2012. This curriculum combines innovative negotiation frameworks with firsthand accounts of senior leadership who have negotiated serious international conflicts. Cases have been contributed by Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern, Morgan Tsvangirai, Benita Diop and other senior global leaders, who discuss a negotiation dilemma they have experienced and reflect on what they learned through the process.

This Global Curriculum responds to a growing consensus among leadership here in Davos and beyond that there is a need for new and better ways to deal with conflict in our world. These leaders are right. Destructive conflict is a huge cost in nearly every aspect of life. It contributes to millions of lost lives, trillions of lost dollars, lost business opportunities, the spread of disease, the collapse of educational systems, hindered development efforts and destabilization of the rule of law.

Dealing with conflict constructively is both a human and business concern. I’ve talked to many leaders here in Davos who have voiced the critical importance – in fact, the urgency – to take measures to prevent destructive conflict. And these voices are not only from the government and NGO world. Chief executives from major companies have talked of conflict prevention as an “insurance policy” against economic instability. After all, destructive conflict, combined with global interdependence, threatens market stability and, ultimately, tends to make for less predictable investments.

So our Global Curriculum on Conflict Management aims to equip current and future leadership with a common set of frameworks, tools and processes to deal with differences more constructively. In a stage-wise process, we are refining the curriculum and planning its global roll-out to senior government and business leadership. We also plan to spread the curriculum to university students, many of whom will be the future leaders of our world.

Our long-term vision is to spread this curriculum to youth around the world. My personal hope is that within the next decade this curriculum – or a culturally and contextually adapted version of it – will be in every school around the world, so that youth have a common set of skills to turn conflict from an obstacle to an opportunity.

Perhaps destructive conflict is a part of our human nature, but so is the desire for connection and collaboration. This curriculum aims to reinforce that latter need, with the hope of bringing our world one step closer to a global peace.

Professor Shapiro’s article presents a new approach for dealing with intergroup conflict. As noted the abstract of his article:

Emotions are a vital dimension in conflicts among nation-states and communities affiliated by common ethnic, economic, or political interests. Yet the individuals most responsible for managing such conflicts–heads of state, CEOs, intellectual or religious leaders–are often blind to the psychological forces affecting their interests. During 20 years of international research, consulting, and teaching, I have developed a program for teaching thought leaders how to apply psychological principles to achieve their aims while also reducing negative outcomes such as violence, social upheaval, and economic displacement. In this article, I present relational identity theory (RIT), a theoretical and intellectual framework I have originated to help people understand and deal with key emotional dimensions of conflict management. I argue that national and communal bonds are essentially tribal in nature, and I describe how a tribe’s unaddressed relational identity concerns make it susceptible to what I term the tribes effect, a rigidification of its relational identity. I provide strategies based on RIT for mitigating the tribes effect and thus enhancing global security.

Professor Shapiro is a faculty affiliate with the Program on Negotiation. He leads a one-day author session based on his book, Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.  For information on attending Professor Shapiro’s course, or the three-day Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives, please visit the Program on Negotiation’s website. In the most recent iteration of the course, Shapiro hosted surprise guest Jamil Mahuad, former President of Ecuador, who discussed how the course ideas were relevant to his experiences in negotiating a peaceful resolution to a long-standing land dispute between Ecuador and Peru.

President Kumaratunga, who led Sri Lanka from 1994 to 2005, described her administration’s attempts to resolve through peaceful negotiations the long-standing conflict between Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil populations.

Sri Lanka’s first female president attributed the challenge in part to a mentality of siege ­that has become entrenched in the psyche of the Sri Lankan people.

Read more about the event here.

To read the full article.

This highly interactive course aims to improve students’ skill in resolving conflicts, and draws on a variety of learning methodologies, including lecture, case simulations, self-reflection exercises, and application of negotiation frameworks to conflicts depicted in movies.