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41 Negot. J. 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/nejo41 and id is 1 raw text is: 





                 Perspective





                      Societal Change


                           John Marks






     The author describes his experiences building bridges between Tutsis
     and Hutus  in Burundi through the organization that he founded,
     Search for Common  Ground. He describes how he implemented the
     practice of societal conflict resolution.



     Keywords:   societal conflict resolution, Search for Common
     Ground,  Burundi, peacemaking



Introduction
Many  years ago, I was  at a meeting with a well-known   professor who
declared that there were only two kinds of conflict resolution: the problem-
solving model, as pioneered by Roger Fisher, and the therapeutic model, as
developed  by Herbert Kelman.  I was taken aback because neither model
fully captured what we were  doing at Search for Common  Ground   (com-
monly  referred to as Search). This was the NGO  I founded  in 1982. I
told the professor that, while our activities included both problem-solving
and therapeutic processes, we operated within a broader framework.  He
asked how  I would describe our approach. On  the spot, I invented a new
term. I said I was a practitioner of societal conflict resolution.


John Marks is the founder of Search for Common Ground and served as its president for
32 years. This article is adapted from his book From Vision to Action: Remaking the World
Through Social Entrepreneurship (Columbia University Press: 2024). His email address is
jmarks@sfcg.org.
10.1162/ngtn_a_00013
© 2024 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC
BY 4.0) license.


Negotiation Journal Volume 41 2025  1

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