Reinforcing Communication

Maria Volpe

Professor of Dispute Resolution, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003


This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

Q: Another obstacle would be a friends telling them not to engage in this process?

A: Yes. Who do we go to first? People we trust and people who we think like us. We go to people who we think that are going to support us. Not people who say, have you thought about what they think about the situation? And I think that one of the things that I've been able to do here, in my role as an indigenous conflict resolver, is do that. Parties know that if they come to me, I'll try to get them to see from the other persons' shoes, or to help think where the other person might be. And its hard, but most of us don't do that to each other, we just reinforce, and support, and help them to keep entrenching them. I think that gets multiplied from the interpersonal to the international. We go to our allies.