"The Annual Peacemaker Dance Off", Dance Your Ph.D. Contest 2016

Описание: The video illustrates the main findings of my Ph.D. research on mediator styles in armed conflicts in a fictive dance battle I call "The Annual Peacemaker Dance Off". It is my contribution to the AAAS/Science Magazine's "Dance your Ph.D" contest of 2016, and to getting the world more interested in the study and practice of conflict resolution.

Have you ever wondered why mediating third parties exhibit so many different ways of helping conflict parties negotiate and resolve their contested issues? I have! But few others had looked into the issue of trying to explain different mediator styles of the many individuals mediating armed conflicts for inter-governmental organizations (IGO), such as the UN, or smaller, non-governmental organizations (NGO), such as Crisis Management Initiative. I therefore used my Ph.D. studies to conduct a survey experiment and many interviews with a broad variety of mediating individuals to see what role the characteristics of the mediator and the context in which she/he operates have for two central dimensions of mediator style: orientation and directiveness.

In the dance video you see two teams of mediators with different backgrounds and personalities (characteristics) battle it out in two types of conflict intensities (context). In the first round, we take a closer look at mediator style orientation, i.e. the mediator’s prioritized type of outcome, and see that this differs between low- and high-profile mediators. Accumulated mediation experience, and the mediator’s understanding of conflict, seems to make low-profile mediators more relationship-oriented and high-profile mediators more settlement-oriented. In the second round, high intensity conflict contexts, and particularly the heightened humanitarian concerns that come with these, appear to make both dance teams more directive, meaning that they are using their leverage more to push the parties towards their preferred outcome. Finally, zooming in on the mediators in the high intensity conflict round, we see that there are also some variations in orientation and directiveness. For example, when it comes to personality profiles, low Agreeableness individuals, in contrast to high Agreebleness ones, appear to become more directive toward one/a few and not all parties in the conflict; and high Extraversion mediators, rather than low Extraversion ones, seem to become more directive overall.

All dance offs need a winner. The winner of this dance off, however, will have to be determined by future research, as my study only looks into explanations for variations in mediator style, and not their conflict resolving effects :)

If you are interested in learning more about my research, you can access the full dissertation as a PDF here: https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/...

Finally, a major shout out to all the amazing dancers and Peter for helping me out in realizing my vision!

Dancers: Lotte Lindgren, Yanal Rono, Mathilda Lindgren, Meena Pillai, Miranda González Edner
Producer, Director, iPhone recording, Editor, Composer, Researcher: Mathilda Lindgren
Coach: Peter Sydén