Roger Fisher (academic) - International Work

International Work

Throughout his career Fisher made significant efforts to seek peace in the Middle East. Among these efforts included his involvement in Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem and the summit that led to an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. In this latter case, he helped devise a process called the one-text, where a facilitator shuttled back and forth between the parties, refining a proposed document until it could not satisfy the parties interests more effectively at which point the parties either approve the document or agree to start from scratch. President Carter and Secretary of State Vance created 23 drafts in 13 days before they had a proposal to which both sides could say yes.

He advised both the Iranian and United States governments in negotiations for the release of the American hostages in 1981 where his work helped lead to the breakthrough that enabled the resolution.

In the 1980s Fisher worked to bring peace to El Salvador. Later in his career, he helped resolve the longest-running war in the western hemisphere between Ecuador and Peru. Jamil Mahuad, the president of Ecuador and a former student of Fisher's asked for Fisher's advice soon after taking power in 1998. Fisher, worried that domestic hardliners could cause either President to use the negotiations to posture advised President Mahuad to avoid the typical photograph of the two presidents shaking hands and instead get a photo of the two leaders sitting side-by-side working off a common document. This photo (copy can be seen here) helped signal to the public in each country that the presidents would not be taking an adversarial approach to the negotiation and helped lower rhetoric on both sides.

In South Africa Fisher worked on the negotiations and constitutional process that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa. From the 1980s through mid 1990s Roger Fisher and his colleagues at the Conflict Management group, at the direction of then Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Joseph Seoka, the African National Congress, the National Party, the Dutch Reformed Church, AZAPO, and the Inkatha Freedom Party taught interest-based negotiation process to the leaders of all the factions as well as advised them and their negotiators. The lead constitutional negotiators, Cyril Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer later stated in an interview that the cooperative interest-based negotiation process taught by Fisher and his team was the approach that they, their principals, and their constituencies used to hammer out the new constitution and democratic elections process.