By Tom LoBianco
The “Why It Worked” initiative led by CPL’s Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Collaboratory (NCRC) has spent years working on the seemingly impossible: How do you find peace in decades-old conflicts? How do parties come together for agreeable and lasting settlements to years of bloodshed and woe, and move forward with confidence and stability?
NCRC Director Monica Giannone spoke with CPL on the globe-spanning efforts to identify the central elements of lasting peace, the Collaboratory’s signature “Propeller” framework for replicating successful negotiations and the lessons from Northern Ireland of how even a single small business owner can “propel peace”.
Giannone and Professor Brian Mandell, Faculty Chair and Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy, founded NCRC with the goal of bringing new ideas related to negotiation and conflict resolution to the vlog community and to public leaders and organizations around the world.
Q: Thank you for your time, Monica. There have been so many seemingly intractable global conflicts, how did you and the NCRC team select your case studies in searching for a model of sustainable resolution and peace? What are the shared elements of sustainable resolution?
A: You’re right. There have been nearly 350 global conflicts since 1946. Of those, only about 70 have been resolved by the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement agreed to by both sides and only about 50 haven’t seen violence reemerge.
Why It Worked (“WIW”) started as a collaboration with an organization called Bridging Insights, Inc. in fall 2020. Our team at NCRC and conflict transformation practitioners from Bridging Insights were drawn to the idea of studying the trickiest conflicts that, against all odds, were still able to transform into peace.
Given our mission at NCRC, we took those findings to create a generalizable tool and apply them to other seemingly intractable conflicts.
Of the roughly 50 conflicts to achieve lasting settlement, six were able to propel past these three seemingly impossible obstacles:
- Protracted – Conflicts lasting more than 20 years.
- Asymmetric – Significant power disparities between the involved parties.
- Ethnonational – Rooted in ethnic or nationalistic tensions.
From those six protracted, asymmetric, and ethnonational (“PAE”) cases we collaborated with interdisciplinary teams from five global universities to analyze specific elements: (1) negotiation and process design, (2) informal and track two negotiations, (3) power and leadership, as well as factors related to (4) land and natural resources, and (5) religion and identity.
The Why It Worked collaboration produced five discrete reports totaling 2000 pages that are being published in various long-form formats.
And we are very excited to announce we have put together a Special Issue of those core findings, soon to be published in the Negotiation Journal (published by MIT Press in collaboration with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School).
These findings inform our ongoing work with students, practitioners, and the development of our conflict resolution tool: The Propeller Framework for Conflict Transformation.
Q: The Propeller is a great visualization for an area which can be otherwise laden in verbiage and quite a bit of talk, how did you arrive at this symbol? How can negotiators create that momentum through the “propellers” to keep progress moving even when obstacles arise?
A: Thank you! We love the motion associated with a propeller.
Imagine you’re on a boat. The propeller can push you forward when all things are working well, but a wing could also get stuck. If that happens, maybe the other wings have to work harder to move the boat forward, or maybe the boat stops making forward progress entirely. Maybe the boat even drifts backward – either because of a pesky tide or a wing rotating in the wrong direction.
This is the message of our framework: interconnected wings can work together to propel us toward peace, stall us, or bring us backward.
There are three wings of The Propeller: Institutional Dynamics, Group Dynamics, and Individual Dynamics. They are interconnected and operate both independently and in relationship to one another.
The Propeller’s “wings” were developed on detailed findings related to governance structures, collaborative initiatives, and social dynamics, respectively.
But there is a more practical purpose of the propeller, as well. Through the Propeller Toolkit, questions will guide participants in two dimensions:
- Diagnosing elements in a conflict system – Identifying key stakeholders and relationships, core issue and barriers, as well as underlying and situational dynamics.
- Designing interventions – Outlining actionable strategies to move toward resolution from wherever you are situated within a conflict system.
Q: NCRC hosts a number of conferences and talks bringing together peace negotiators and public leaders. What have attendees found most valuable from these events?
A: This summer, we welcomed Elan Kogutt (a former CPL Rubenstein and George Fellowship Recipient) as a Senior Fellow, to lead this project and efforts integrating our research into practitioner-focused content.
These include a comprehensive conflict resolution framework and action-oriented teaching resources, such as Harvard-style case studies, which are all geared toward bringing research and insights to leaders, practitioners, and students.
We are looking for new ways to test our materials, gain feedback, and put the findings in the hands of folks engaged in conflict resolution. We’ve had a busy year, but here are three events illustrative of our work:
- In June 2024, we traveled to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ramallah with our Why It Worked academic colleagues. Of the 450+ individuals we engaged with, 95% expressed a desire to stay engaged with our work. One participant shared, “I left with hope, and with the understanding that hope leads to action.”
- In November 2024, we traveled to Stockholm to workshop The Propeller Toolkit and initial case studies with members of a small team focused on conflict transformation in the Middle East.
- And on campus last semester, we launched a Why It Worked seminar based on our research with a diverse cohort of Harvard graduate students and Fellows. Students applied The Propeller Framework to conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Israel-Palestine, Haiti, and India. We are about to launch our next iteration of this seminar.
Q: For attendees, past and future, of NCRC events, how will The Propeller Action Toolkit help to reinforce findings and serve as a useful tool for practitioners in the field?
A: The main purpose of The Propeller Action Toolkit is to bridge the gap between research and practice.
Our team distilled and synthesized the 2,000 pages of innovative academic research into The Propeller Action Toolkit, turning our findings into a usable and adaptable guidebook for everyone engaged in conflict transformation, from the classroom to the negotiating table.
The Toolkit works whether you’re zooming out to themes, patterns, and takeaways showcasing “why it worked’, zooming in on specific examples from the ground in cases as diverse as Angola, Guatemala, the Philippines, or Northern Ireland or using it to diagnose and interventions in conflict systems.
The next step is to continue building a portfolio of curriculum materials – including Harvard-style case studies – to support the Propeller Action Toolkit, then publish our portfolio of work online so everyone can access it, and our colleagues can teach it.
Q: What qualities have you seen as successful elements of ending longstanding conflict?
A: Too many to list! Some of my favorite findings point to the surprising prevalence of leadership change, when inclusion and/or “mitigated exclusion” is productive in the formal process, the role of third parties, mechanisms of transfer from informal negotiations into formal processes, role of intra- and inter-society dynamics, trust-building initiatives, and the importance of cultivating civic in addition to ethnic identities, to name a diverse few.
It’s an incredible amount of interesting data and findings our team worked with.
Coming back to The Propeller, that 2000 pages of academic research supports the idea that peace cannot be achieved through a good formal process or by those with formal authority/power alone.
Lasting peace needs collaborations between groups (e.g. grassroots, business community, religious community, academics, civil society organizations, and nonprofits, etc.) putting pressure on and readying the system.
And it needs individuals to be willing to change how they see themselves and others to envision a different future and work toward it.
Q: How have local leaders and business owners grown into successful peace negotiators? You had mentioned the story of a man who owned a fish and chips shop during The Troubles in Ireland who turned his frustrations into sustained leadership, can you tell us about that?
Absolutely. I want to thank a colleague and fellow WIW team member, Professor Hugh O’Doherty, for this story.
Brendan Duddy, a businessman from Northern Ireland, is one strong example of the critical role of grassroots efforts and intermediaries in conflict settings.
While running a fish and chips shop in the late 1960s, Duddy crossed paths with key leadership and members of MI6. Duddy formed a relationship and became a backchannel between the IRA and the British government, facilitating exchanges that led to the IRA ceasefire of 1975–76.
Building on their relationship, during the 1982 hunger strikes, Duddy was an intermediary for urgent communications between the British government and the IRA, even relaying a proposal personally amended by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In the 1990s, he helped start secret discussions that contributed to the Northern Ireland peace process. And even after the Good Friday Agreement, Duddy remained involved in reconciliation efforts.
Duddy’s story demonstrates how local leaders, even those without formal political authority, can be instrumental in conflict transformation by cultivating dialogue and building trust across the different dimensions of a peace process.
I like this story because it brings an average citizen into the thick of the formal process in a fun way. Our research is full of examples of people who were sick of war, ready for peace, and willing to try something new to change their reality.
That’s the story of the propeller, the stories of people everywhere doing what they can to propel peace forward.
If this is interesting to you, please reach out to us. Our team would love to connect with individuals and organizations that are working on transforming societies marked by conflict.
Learn more about us at our website and reach us via email collaboratory@hks.harvard.edu