An interesting depiction of global conflict, with data from the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research and graphic from Good Magazine.

What is it about December and a lack of interest in mediation and conflict resolution?

(via Google Trends)

For your holiday entertainment, here’s a physical example of the potential lose-lose outcome in adversarial games.

From the latest British Journal of Sociology, “Ignorance as an under-identified social problem.”

I’ll be continuing my discussion of credentialing shortly, but in the meantime, here’s an interesting insertion of mediation into public-sector dispute resolution: North Carolina’s Senate is considering a bill that would include mediation as a step in disputing public records and open meeting law issues. Story here.
Also, Cricket Australia is lobbying the International Cricket Council [...]

I recently had the pleasure of presenting at New Jersey’s ADR XI. And how great is at that not only is there sufficient ADR interest and practice to warrant a yearly state conference, but that it’s been running for 11 years now!
Anyhow, at the conference, I raised this ever-popular proposition:

But the thing is, I [...]

There’s a common expression that “two heads are better than one,” and that may often be the case. However, since we often bring groups together to work on resolving conflict, it’s also important to recognize when and why groups may fail at producing high-quality deliberations.
Two U Chicago scholars have released an interesting working paper [...]

Unfortunately, a glitch in my WordPress (blogging software) installation has been preventing me from posting new material, and it’s taken me a while to track down and fix the problem. All is well now. On the plus side, the time off-line means that I’ve accumulated a nice backlog of postings, so check back often.
For [...]

The International Association for Conflict Management recently released its Spring/Summer 2008 Newsletter. It’s available in pdf form here.

In reading a blog entry about research into the personal happiness benefits of prosocial spending, I came across a nice quote by the New York Times science writer, John Tierney. His guiding principles:
1. Just because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
2. But that’s a good working theory.