In a speech in March, U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama initiated a national conversation about race. He reminded Americans that “that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper”.

It’s a hard conversation to have. But one web site is pushing people to keep talking.

Exploring Race, a forum hosted by Chicago Tribune editor Dawn Turner Trice, gives Americans a chance to bring race out into the open. Trice writes,

We have a moment in history to have a national discussion about race. We should seize it and try to mine it for what it’s worth. I want this to be a safe place where people of all races can explore their views and biases, openly and honestly.

You can learn about race etiquette, use the prejudice compass to get your bearings on your own biases, or simply join the conversation.

Throughout the world, courthouses tower above the street in busy urban centers or stand with quiet dignity in town squares. Blindfolded Justice waits close by, her sword unsheathed as she lifts her scales.

What do these depictions of Justice say about democracy and law? What messages do the stone or concrete buildings themselves convey about adjudication and human rights? What elements are lost or missing from 21st century representations of justice and the law?

Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has explored these questions in a recent lecture available now in print and visually captivating, “Representing Justice: From Renaissance Iconography to Twenty-First Century Courthouses” (PDF). From the abstract:

This Lecture provides a multi-century, cross-cultural visual narrative of both continuity and change in the use of adjudication by governments seeking to legitimate their authority to impose their law through judges. From the story of the Judgment of Solomon to the Town Halls of Siena and Amsterdam, one can find examples of adjudication, a task of governance that predates democracy. From those walls and the allegories that they represent, one can learn how adjudicatory practices contributed to democratic ideology by generating norms that decisionmakers not be corrupted by payments from one side, that their decisions be predicated on information rather than be arbitrary, and that they hear both sides (audi alterum partem).

Mediators and lawyers both will have much to ponder:

Despite the cutting-edge construction techniques and abstract paintings, many new courthouses, centered on their courtrooms, are both old fashioned and dysfunctional.

Even more troubling, one might read the buildings as gestures seeking to instill a sense of legitimacy to state-based processes by making it seem as if trials were a major modality and thereby rendering the predominance of the alternatives to trial less visible. From a more positive vantage point (if you are, as we are, skeptical of some forms of alternative dispute resolution), one could interpret the ongoing building as evidence of the deep ambivalence that government leaders have about their own promotion of settlement and privatization in lieu of public processes.

This exhaustively researched lecture invites readers to remove the blindfold from their own eyes and judge the courthouse and depictions of Justice anew.

(Hat tip to The Situationist.)

Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim had a wish that undoubtedly many others share: she wished for world peace. She said, “I think that the first step toward world peace is for people to meet each other”. She envisioned the use of film to create a kind of exchange program to help people around the world truly see and understand each other better.

Out of Noujaim’s wish came Pangea Day, a world-wide celebration of the things that people across the globe have in common:

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.

To learn more or to find out how you can take part, visit the Pangea Day web site.

Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

I’ve just added two new blogs to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, my ongoing project to track and catalog ADR and negotiation blogs around the globe. Allow me to introduce them to you:

• Arabulucu Blog, a Turkish language blog, bears the distinction of being Turkey’s first and only blog about mediation and negotiation. It is published by mediator Samil Demir, who is based in Ankara.
• dominique.lopez-eychenie is the eponymous blog of French lawyer and mediator Dominique Lopez-Eychenie who practices in Lille. In addition to her many other professional accomplishments, Dominique is the Vice President and founding member of Nord Mediation. She blogs about mediation, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, and collaborative law.

I’d like to wish both these bloggers the best of success and to offer them a warm welcome to the ADR blogosphere.

I’m always on the look-out for blogs to add to the World Directory. If you publish or know of a blog that you’d like me to add, please let me know. It’s a commercial-free site, and there is no cost to be listed. The Directory has information on submitting your blog and some simple submission guidelines.

(With thanks to Negotiation Guru Jens Thang for kindly introducing me to Dominique and her blog.)

On television, on the glossy pages of magazines, on the billboards we speed past, images fill our visual landscape.

But what effect do the images that appear in the media have on us? How do they influence our judgments, our economic choices, and our assumptions about ourselves and each other? To what extent do they hold up a mirror to cultural values about gender, race, authority, sex, or violence? How do we decode their messages to separate what’s false from what’s not? And how can we immunize ourselves against their effects?

These are questions that media critics, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, teachers, parents, and others have struggled with. But it is up to all of us to confront and examine these images for ourselves. One blog, Sociological Images: Seeing Is Believing, provides images for discussion in sociology and other classes — or for anyone interested in coming face to face with the images that bombard us daily. Visitors can browse the categories of images this blog has collected, which include violence, education, gender, race/ethnicity, and many more. A word of caution — not all images are workplace safe and some may give offense.

Seeing Is Believing offers a fascinating — and at times disturbing — foray into the world of media images. Presented with minimal text, these images at once provoke and invite us to decipher their messages about society and ourselves.

Far be it from me, a mediator, to encourage conflict, but this sounds like good, clean, wacky fun.

On Saturday, March 22, people will be gathering in cities all around the world (including my own, Boston, in Copley Square) to take part in a pillow fight in honor of International Pillow Fight Day. Instructions and rules of engagement are available for starting your own public pillow fight.

What are the benefits? According to the Pillow Fight Day web site,

people will make new friends, re-unite with old ones, meet future lovers, and revel in the blissful one-ness of a free, fun, social gathering.

And who knows? If this a sign of things to come, perhaps in the not-too-distant future there’ll be an International Food Fight Day. In anticipation, you can order yourself one of these spring-loaded catapult spoons.

(Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri.)

(Hat tip to the Atlantic Review.)

If you’re interested in learning more about the resolution of international disputes or other topics that concern the practice of dispute resolution and negotiation abroad, there is no better resource than the International Dispute Negotiation (IDN) podcast series.

IDN is hosted by Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure - Oil & Gas. The two latest issues of this excellent series are #16, “How to Borrow a Mediator’s Powers” with ADR scholar Professor Dwight Golann from my alma mater Suffolk University Law School in Boston; and #17, “Offshore Litigation Work in India“, in which Mike pays a visit to Mumbai to explore this controversial method of reducing litigation costs in common law systems and talks to the founder of successful outsourcing firm Pangea3, and to one of its top managers.

According to the Boston Globe, brain scans reveal cultural differences in perception between Asians and Westerners:

Western culture, they have found, conditions people to think of themselves as highly independent entities. And when looking at scenes, Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings.

In contrast, East Asian cultures stress interdependence. When Easterners take in a scene, they tend to focus more on the context as well as the object: the whole block, say, rather than the BMW parked in the foreground.

To use a camera analogy, “the Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic,” said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. “The Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail.”

You can test your own perceptions using the gallery of images that accompany this article.

In an increasingly global business world, for many English serves as a lingua franca. To help those who need to conduct their business in English with colleagues or customers overseas, theEnglishWeb.com provides advice for using English in the workplace, together with cultural tips, with articles on effective communication in business English situations.

A recent post lists 10 idioms that relate to negotiation. There’s also advice for successful negotiations.

The National Iranian American Council reports that Ambassador John Limbert, one of the 52 US diplomats who was held hostage at the United States Embassy in Iran in 1980, has published “Negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran: Raising the Chances for Success – 15 Points to Remember” (PDF), a guide for negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

Limbert’s 15 points are:

1. Negotiating with Iran—hard as it may be—is worth doing.
2. Establish objective criteria free of legalisms.
3. The past matters: Be aware of Iran’s historical greatness, its recent weakness, and its grievances from decades or centuries earlier.
4. Choose intermediaries with great care.
5. Talk to the right people.
6. Understand that the Islamic Republic’s priority is survival.
7. Let the Iranians define what is in their national interest.
8. Understand the Iranian BATNA: Expect actions that may appear (to you) self-destructive.
9. Give your Iranian counterparts credit for intelligence.
10. Expect a case based on vague and uncertain claims.
11. Expect grandstanding, political theater, and flamboyant gestures.
12. Remember that power is respected, weakness despised.
13. Understand that justice, often in a harsh version, in the abstract is extremely important.
14. Remember that conspiracy theories have great currency—and are sometimes true.
15. Expect hands to be overplayed.

Limbert says,

What works in any negotiation—being prepared, building relationships, exercising patience, knowing both one’s own and the other side’s BATNA, understanding the other side’s real interests, among other things—can work in negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

“An Aboriginal Woman’s Experience with Mediation” is a six-minute-long film that allows a woman to describe what mediation meant for her and the changes in her life it helped her produce:

…When you go to appear in front of a judge with a lawyer, your lawyer does all the talking and you don’t get to be heard. Whereas with mediation you have a voice and there’s options…and things get worked out on both sides…

Despite its length, this little film speaks volumes, serving as an eloquent reminder to lawyers and judges of mediation’s power to give a voice to those whom the legal system all too often silences.

“An Aboriginal Woman’s Experience with Mediation” was produced by the Vancouver Coastal Region, Ministry of Children and Family Development, for the Mediation Cafe, a mediation forum held in April 2006 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Thanks to the Peacemakers Trust for the link, which reports on news and events on dispute resolution.

According to today’s Boston Globe, the University of Leicester has published a Global Projection of Subjective Well Being, or, in layperson’s terms, a world map of happiness.

Which countries are among the 20 happiest? They include Denmark in the #1 slot; Canada, #10; and New Zealand, #18. The U.S. ranks 23rd, while the U.K. is #41 and India #125.

Click here for the list or here for the map (scroll down to see the map image).

Maybe you consider yourself knowledgeable about foreign affairs. Or count yourself a seasoned traveler with the passport stamps to prove it. Or perhaps you pride yourself on your cultural awareness.

Put your internationally attuned wits to the test with the interactive Traveler IQ Challenge to see how well you know your world geography. (Watch where you’re clicking — I inadvertently slipped and missed accurately locating Fenway Park by 735 kilometers.)

(Hat tip to Kottke.org.)

No sooner had the virtual ink dried on my post about a new ADR health care blog than I received a delightful message about a new dispute resolution podcast — this one with a distinctly international flavor.

International Dispute Negotiation, presented by the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR), explores ways professionals from different countries and backgrounds approach dispute resolution. The podcast is intended to help listeners understand the risks of disputes and shed insight on optimal ways of accepting, mitigating, and managing those risks in the real world, whether through mediation, arbitration, or litigation that arises far from home.

International Dispute Negotiation is hosted by Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure - Oil & Gas. Michael is based at his company’s headquarters in Florence, Italy, and is a long-time member of the CPR Institute and its European Advisory Committee.

Michael tells me that the podcasts are mainly recorded when he’s on the road in different countries, the editing is done in Florence, and the feed is through CPR’s website in New York.

This podcast is the latest addition to the World Directory of ADR Blogs, which tracks and catalogues blogs covering dispute resolution and negotiation. If you publish or know of a blog that should be added to the World Directory, please let me know. It’s a commercial-free site, and there is no cost to be listed. The Directory has information on submitting your blog and some simple submission guidelines.

Congratulations, Michael, and best wishes on the launch of this superb audioblog.