Almost always in times of strife, we perceive a conflict as having two sides: labor vs. management, Arabs vs. Israelis, Jets vs. Sharks. Leave it to anthropologist William Ury '70 to point out the obvious—that every dispute is played out on a wider stage, and folks who are not direct parties to a strife may have a stake in it. These "third side" individuals may be kin of bickering siblings, countries bordering nations at war, or com- muters stranded by a bus strike. They can figuratively—or literally—be caught in the crossfire. In Getting to Yes, the 1981 best- seller he wrote with Roger Fisher, Bill Ury showed how some basic principles from the budding field of negotiations could be applied to kitchen spats or international crises. In 1993, his Getting Past No told how to negotiate with hostile parties—in his words, how to choreograph an agreement "when the other partner doesn't want to dance." Now, in Getting to Peace, the most recent in his septet of books on negotiation, Ury proposes that using the leverage of this "third side" not only can help resolve disputes, but can actually help head violence off at the pass. "The idea of Getting to Peace," Ury said in a recent interview with the Andover Bulletin, "is that conflicts are never just two-sided. There are others around —family members, neighbors, friends—and the secret to preventing destructive escalation lies in mobilizing that surrounding community. Too often we think the job of a friend is either to take sides or to avoid getting involved alto- gether. But there is another choice, which is to take the third side." Citing Columbine High as a tragic example, Ury said, "There were a lot of people who knew what was going on—bystanders who for a variety of reasons didn't put the pieces of the puzzle together to plan an orchestrated response." What might have happened at Columbine? "Kids who saw the initial bullying behavior might have drawn the disputants into a kind of peer mediation process. Other schools have found this very effective in helping avoid those festering resent- ments that lead to sharp outbreaks, particularly among adolescents. Or teachers and parents might have noticed certain behaviors and said, 'Wait a minute, they need some counseling. There are kids filming violent videotapes, kids building bombs in their garage.' The point is, a community can serve as a container to say, 'Whoa, something is going on here! We need to talk! We need to do something!'" Among the Semai people in Malaysia, one of several indigenous groups Ury has studied, the third side swings into action whenever one child strikes another. "They form a kind of parliament of kids. They sit around in a circle with some adults, and they say, 'How can we stop this?' But it's not just an occasion to end the behavior. It's an occasion for everyone to learn something," Ury notes. EARLY LEANINGS Ury's mindfulness of differing viewpoints awoke at age 6, when he began attending school in a small Swiss village. "I realized at once that what was right in the United States— dress, manners, everything— suddenly wasn't right. So I found out very young there was more than one way of looking at things," he said. American-born Ury spent parts of his childhood in Chicago, California and Europe with his parents and three siblings before enrolling as a 10th-grader at Andover in 1968. Despite the rebelliousness, dis- content and visible social segment- ation that characterized the late 1960s on campus, Ury said, Andover stimulated his love of ideas. "I spent a lot of time in the library trying to figure out the meaning of life. I don't think I found better teachers even when I went on to Yale than I had at Andover," Ury recalled. "I have always thought that, while my teachers at Yale were distinguished by their research, my teachers at Andover were distinguished by their love of teaching and of their subjects. My English teacher, Kelly Wise, opened up a new world to me with his passion for film and literature."

Skipping 11th grade, Ury graduated from PA after two years and began studying anthropology, linguistics and classics at Yale. "I was attracted to anthropology," he said, "because it allowed to me ask questions about any aspect of life. As an anthropologist, I could wander from philosophy to medicine to sociology and try to understand a culture in its totality." He was in the first year of a graduate program in anthropology at Harvard when he began seeking a way to apply anthropology to practical problems— among them the problem of war and peace. GETTING TO GETTING TO YES On a hunch, Ury sent a paper he'd written about the role of anthropology in peacemaking to Roger Fisher, a Harvard Law School professor who was the father of Andover classmate Elliott Fisher. The professor, known for his work in negotiation and world affairs, invited Ury to collaborate on a book. Intending to produce a how-to for international mediators, the pair began interviewing the world's top practi- tioners. But they soon came to believe their focus was too narrow as again and again they found themselves turning to examples from family life and the business world. The more they worked, the broader their scope became. By the time Getting to Yes was issued, it was virtually a negotia- tion primer, providing a well-honed set of guide- lines that would serve you equally well whether you were buying a used car or deliberating the fate of nations. No one, least of all publisher Houghton-Mifflin, was prepared for the book's wide appeal. After a small advance and a small first printing, Getting to Yes "took off slowly through word of mouth," Ury said. To date, the book has sold nearly 5 million copies, and annual sales are still climbing. Since its publication and translation into over 20 lang- uages, Ury has had thousands of calls to speak, teach or help calm troubled waters all over the globe. He's also become a popular news analyst whose learned commentary on world conflicts fills the pages of major newspapers and permeates the broadcast media. The principles outlined in Getting to Yes may seem like common sense to the careful reader, but Ury prefers to call it uncommon sense—or, better, common sense that's uncommonly applied. "We spent a lot of time," he explained, "trying to simplify, simplify, simplify, to the point where I some- times thought, 'Gosh, this is so simple, the reader's going to say, Why do I need a book?' But, paradox- ically, people need a simple frame- work to keep in mind as they try to work through a difficult conflict, whether it's with a spouse, whether it's with a neighbor, or whether it's a world conflict." TALK OUT OR WALK OUT With Getting to Yes wrapped up, Ury set out looking for real-life, practical subjects to focus his graduate studies on. After meeting a Lawrence, Mass., judge who needed help unjamming a bottleneck, he and another student put their fledgling mediation skills to work in small claims court. The Small Claims Mediation project, which they began, is still engaging Harvard law students 20 years later. It was through a visiting professor at Harvard Law School that Ury found his thesis subject—a coal strike in Kentucky. "It was a bitter situation. They were packing guns, and there were bomb threats. Appalachia is such a different world. When you come in from Boston, they think you are from Mars. During the six months we were there, I spent a lot of time inside the coal mine. We taught the parties methods to talk out their differences rather than just walking out when there was a problem. That was the name of my thesis, 'Talk Out or Walk Out.' By and large, they learned to handle their conflicts through negotiation," he said. After receiving a Ph.D. degree, Ury taught organizational behavior and negotiation at the Harvard Business School, then moved to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to work on the Project on Avoiding Nuclear War.   Copyright, Phillips Academy, 2000

A PROGRAM IS BORN As part of a group of academics interested in law, business, anthropology, social psychology, urban planning, environmental policy and government, Ury was also instrumental in founding the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. The group originally formed in the late 1970s thinking they would "work together for a year or two to cross-fertilize ideas" then go their separate ways, Ury said. Instead, the program grew into an internationally respected, multi- university consortium that trains mediators, business people and government officials in negotiation skills. It also creates teaching materials, case studies and videos, publishes books and a scholarly journal, and hosts projects on which doctoral students serve as graduate research fel- lows. Mixing theory with practice, program members act as facili- tators or third party advisers in a range of negotia- tions involving political, environ- mental or ethnic crises, among others. Though Ury left his Harvard teaching post some years ago to move to the Southwest, he retains his affiliation with the Program on Negotiation, serving on its steering committee and directing one of its core projects, the Project on Preventing War. ON THE GLOBAL FRONT Ury has also been putting theory into practice in the global arena since the late 1970s, when he helped set up talks at Harvard between Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and an Arab leader whose identity he is not free to divulge. They were conversations about the West Bank that for political reasons could not have taken place in the Middle East, said Ury. As part of the same series of discussions, Ury went to Israel to interview Palestinian and Israeli leaders and collaborate with Benvenisti on a guide to Jerusalem for negotiators on all sides. Other peace talks have taken Ury to the highlands of New Guinea, to Sudan and Ethiopia, and to the former Yugoslavia to meet with rebel Serb leaders. He facilitated allegedly secret meetings with the top leaders of Chechnya and Russia that in reality were covertly videotaped by the KGB. According to a biographical sheet used to publicize Getting to Peace, he's also worked with "Colombian generals, Palestinians and Israelis, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and blacks and whites in South Africa." A CAUSE FOR OPTIMISM With so many battlegrounds in his memory, how is it that Ury's newest book projects a sense of optimism about the future? "I'm optimistic not in the predictive sense; I'm optimistic in the potential sense. I think we have a lot more potential for peacemaking than we give ourselves credit for. I see learning taking place. It hasn't manifested itself yet in peace breaking out, but I see evidence human beings are discovering better ways to deal with their differences, both in their families and in the world arena. I was in South Africa recently, and I observed remarkable transform- ation. For so many years, we were sure what was happening in that country was going to end civil war. Instead, it ended in a positive agreement." Does agreement mean an end to conflict? Not in Ury's mind. "Conflict," he says, "is not going to end. It's not going to end in the Middle East, it's not going to end in Northern Ireland, and it's not going to end in our families or in our schools. Conflict is inevitable. It's part of life. But violence can end— that's the key. Violence is one option, talking is another, and people are gradually learning that they can probably realize their objectives more easily by talking than through violence. That's my reason for optimism."   Richard A. Johnson serves as the curator of the Sports Museum of New England in Boston and is the author of A Century of Boston Sports, Photographs and Memories and co-author with Glenn Stout of Red Sox Century. Both books are slated for publication in fall 2000.