ICC’s biggest educational event of the year, its International Mediation Competition, took place from 5 to 11 February 2021 and, for the first time of its history, it was conducted online. It was its 16th edition and 48 universities from 39 countries competed online, via a dedicated platform. It has been an opportunity for us,…

Since so much communication at work and home has gone online through the Covid lockdowns we have been witnessing a whole new vocabulary of everyday life. As much of this communication is likely to stay online, it pays to take a critical look at the vocabulary we are using. It is fairly straightforward to find…

Writing this first 2021 post is a task that leads me to make an inevitable retrospective of the past year – 2020. A year to be remembered and whose events have been unrivalled by any others in recent humankind history. The past year was indeed a challenging one, a time when negotiation and mediation skills…

The question recently occurred to me whether we would have reached the kinds of online worlds of work we now have in many fields without the need to do so due to Covid-19. Would it have happened anyway, just more slowly and perhaps with different nuances? Would we be spending so much time in home…

Homo sapiens, the wise human being, must now learn from its mistakes and live up to its name. We who are alive today have the formidable task of making sure that our species does so.” David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet Looking back at John Sturrock’s post from February which suggested a World Mediators…

Hot off the heels of the Singapore Convention, The Singapore International Mediation Centre (SIMC) and the Japan International Mediation Center (JIMC) on 12 September 2020 signed a Memorandum of Understanding to operate a joint protocol that provides cross-border businesses, including companies along the Singapore-Japan corridor, with an economical, expedited and effective route for resolving commercial…

This is the final part of a series of posts on The Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy’s (‘SIDRA’) recently released International Dispute Resolution Survey: 2020 Final Report (‘2020 SIDRA Survey’). The SIDRA Survey delves into the user experiences of Legal Users (lawyers and legal advisers) and Client Users (corporate executives and in-house counsel) in international…

In the alternative dispute resolution arena, mediation plays a prominent role in resolving disputes in all scales globally. Hong Kong is a mediation hub in the region and one would be interested to see what Hong Kong is offering and what it will offer to the development of mediation. To share with us how mediation…

The importance of gaze

‘Because you’re distant, forgive me for being a little bit bossy’ (Paddy O’Connell, BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House) After plying their trade for a while mediators (and broadcasters) develop a persona, not so much bolted on as inhabited. Once in ‘the chair,’ voice, posture and gestures all coalesce to support their purpose and, with minimal…

“The greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others, and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering the genesis of hope. . . Conversation – respectful, engaged, reciprocal, calling forth some of our greatest powers of empathy and understanding – is the moral form of a world governed…