Beyond Machiavelli: Tools for Coping With Conflict

Conflict is a growth industry, as a glance at the daily paper or the nightly news tells us. Trade wars, global warming, ethnic strife, refugee crises – as the world draws closer together on a thousand fronts, trouble erupts, clashes occur, and new problems arise. What’s wrong, and what can be done about it? This cogent book offers a clear approach for dealing with conflicting interests of any kind. Roger Fisher, the world-renowned master of negotiation, with two of his leading colleagues – Elizabeth Kopelman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider – provides a step-by-step process for dealing with the persistent and complex disputes that mark our changing, often dangerous world. Instead of simply asking why things work – or don’t – the authors ask: how can we affect the way things work? They break conflicts into manageable components and advance a process for problem-solving. Arguing that we need to move beyond one-shot “solutions” toward a constructive way of dealing with differences, they lay out tools for conflict analysis and practical applications for those tools in the international arena. The authors also show that tactics which successfully influence an adversary are equally applicable to the task of persuading an employer, a community official, or a business associate. Originally drafted as a handbook for the diplomats and senior officials advised by Fisher and his colleagues, this succinct, lucid, and effective book is the primer about the new paradigm in conflict