Conducting Negotiation on the Frontlines: Advanced Techniques for Crisis Situations

MLD 234M Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Conducting Negotiation on the Frontlines is an immersive, practice-based course designed to strengthen students’ capacity to negotiate effectively in high-stakes and adversarial environments. Through skill-based exercises, realistic simulations, teamwork, and engagement with experienced practitioners, students develop practical capabilities for preparing and conducting complex negotiations under pressure.

Course objectives:

• Understand the social, behavioral, and cognitive dynamics of polarization and conflict in public policy and public health contexts.
• Develop core competencies in complex negotiation grounded in current practice across political, humanitarian, and public sectors. 
• Strengthen skills and confidence to conduct high-intensity, face-to-face negotiations with difficult counterparts. 
• Build connections with experienced negotiation practitioners across sectors. 

The course is organized around two intensive weekends. The first weekend focuses on bilateral crisis negotiation, including engagement with difficult counterparts, managing relationships under pressure, navigating misinformation and disinformation, and negotiating effectively as a team. The second weekend focuses on complex multilateral negotiation, where students learn to navigate multiple stakeholders, competing interests, shifting circumstances, and the challenges of reaching across the divide to build alliances and coalitions.

Please note that the participation to the January Frontline Negotiation Lab IGA 353M/ GHP 543 is not a formal prerequisite for the Spring course MLD 234/ GHP 243 but is highly recommended.

MLD-234M meets intensively over two weekends (April 3-4, 2027 and April 24-25, 2027). See syllabus for details.

Course Notes

Also offered by the School of Public Health as GHP-243.