In this episode, we have the pleasure of speaking to Ida Manton about her work as a trainer and scholar in the field of negotiations, mediation, and conflict management. In this first part of the interview, we discuss her career and work in this field, and in our second episode with Ida, we will talk about where she sees the biggest gaps in access to justice and ways we can work to address them.

Key Highlights:

• First-Hand Experience: Explore the experiences of Ida Manton and her journey to becoming a negotiation expert.
• Negotiation and Mediation: What is the difference?
• Gaining negotiation skills: how can one learn to negotiate?
• Applying negotiation skills: what are the different fields where negotiation sills can be useful?

Why Listen? This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in how negotiation skills can be used to defend human rights.

Call to Action:

• Stay tuned for our next podcast conversation: with Christopher Robertson and Louise P. King, about their article on “Structural Sex Discrimination: Why Gynecology Patients Suffer Avoidable Injuries and What the Law Can Do About It”.
• Follow and share the Podcast to make sure you never miss an episode!
• Stay informed and take action by advocating for sustainable practices and supporting policies that protect human rights and their defenders.

Keywords: Negotiations, Mediation, Conflict management, Human rights defenders, podcast episode, Just Access.

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Interview with Ida Manton – Part 1

Intro

[00:00:00] Dr Miranda Melcher: Hello and welcome to Just Access. In this podcast series, we talk to some fascinating people, including legal experts, academics, and human rights advocates from all walks of life. Through these conversations, we explore ideas about the future of human rights and improving access to justice for all. Our goal is to educate the wider public and raise awareness about human rights.

[00:00:25] After all, our motto is, “everyone can be a human rights defender”. My name is Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I’m a Senior Legal Fellow at Just Access and the host of this podcast. In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking to Ida Manton about her work as a trainer and scholar in the field of negotiations, mediation, and conflict management.

[00:00:44] In this episode, we discuss her career and work in this field, and in our second episode with Ida, we talk about where she sees the biggest gaps in access to justice and ways we can work to address them.

Interview – Part 1

[00:01:01] Ida, your work, as we’ve spoken about in the introduction, can broadly be described as being a trainer and a scholar in the fields of negotiations, mediation, and conflict management, and we’re going to get into the details about what all of that means. But, to start us off, how did you get started in this kind of work?

[00:01:27] Ida Manton: I think I started completely different academic fields. And for the longest part, I think, of my academic life, I had no idea where it leads, where it goes, what is the end result. But there were things along the way that I found that are close to me, that I cared about, that were interesting.

[00:01:46] And then all of that I was studying usually in the area of culture, literature, theater, all of that was interrupted with the wars in Yugoslavia because I grew up, I was born and [00:02:00] grew up in a country that doesn’t exist anymore. And obviously that affected the republic where I was living, a republic of what is now called North Macedonia.

[00:02:09] And so the conflict became very real, first of all, because my country did not exist anymore, second, because we were building up some new identity. Third, because there were a lot of different people who wanted to see the future of that new country in a different way, there was a lot of diversity and so on. But my main field, I think was interest in texts, in words, how we say things.

[00:02:32] I was struck by the fact that many people were very careless. when they were hurting each other. And obviously what I was seeing on the news at that time was that people were not careless just with words, but with their actions, because we were seeing bloodshed was happening in Bosnia was really, I think it’s a huge scar for my whole generation.

[00:02:52] And I really got very interested in who are these people who are sitting around the negotiation table? Who are those [00:03:00] that we expect to provide us the future? Does the the power lie as we believed in the people, are we responsible generation? And so that was one area.

[00:03:09] The other area was I always loved simulation. I always loved theater, acting. And so I got into this conflict resolution and conflict management field through working in international organizations, because I spoke languages and I was invited as an interpreter or as a facilitator or a teacher, teaching cross culture courses and stuff like that. And then I realized that after working in the field for a long time, I was really lacking the academic stamina that some of the people who became my role models had, like Max van der Stoel, like John Packer, people who had a lot of knowledge in areas that I did not.

[00:03:50] I did not know international law. I did not know about security, policy, decision making, governance, and so on. And I thought it was about time to [00:04:00] go and study at Leiden University. And that is how I got more into the field of negotiation, because my program was between Leiden University and Clingendale and my mentor and professor Paul Mertz, who was teaching negotiation, literally opened up all of the resources and his classes and his experience to me and we started working together.

[00:04:24] So I started teaching negotiations, conflict management and similar courses and trainings with him many years ago and I have continued doing that and writing some articles and chapters for books from this field in these almost 20 years.

[00:04:43] Dr Miranda Melcher: Wow, what a fascinating trajectory. Thank you for a wonderful start to our conversation and a foundation for, I think, what we’re going to talk about going forward.

[00:04:52] And I suppose to make sure we can do that properly, there’s a lot of terms that we’ve both been mentioning that we [00:05:00] probably should clarify so that everyone can follow along as we discuss them in more detail. So what is the difference to you between terms like negotiation versus terms like mediation.

[00:05:11] Do the skills involved differ? Do the goals change? What’s the difference between the two that we should understand?

[00:05:18] Ida Manton: Absolutely. I think they’re very different and very often people do not see the difference. When it comes to the skills, I think it’s important to understand the process. What is the negotiation process?

[00:05:29] What are the phases of it? What does the preparation phase include? And so on. What kind of skills you need for any particular phase of those? And also ultimately, if you do not have certain skills, where can you borrow them from? Do you have team members? Do you have superiors that you can ask for assistance and so on?

[00:05:49] So I have been trying to learn a lot from experiences, mainly peace building, peace negotiations and so on. Whereas I have colleagues now who come from a [00:06:00] completely different field, like business negotiations. And so I always wondered, what is the overlap? Do we use the same tactics, strategies, planning for different negotiations?

[00:06:12] I’ve been very lucky. To have opportunities to interact with my colleagues who as I said, come from a very different background, so I was even invited for a few times to be a judge at a negotiation competition called the Negotiation Challenge with my colleague Remy Smolinski and Peter Kesting. That happens annually and university students are competing and we’re judges.

[00:06:34] Many of these students are studying economy or law, something that is not from my path of like where I came to this field. And I think that I see throughout all of these years that I have in this field, that there are a lot of overlapping things and that we have to find ways how to learn from each other because sometimes even in peace negotiations, you have to be [00:07:00] entrepreneurial.

[00:07:01] Sometimes in legal cases, you have to have the overview that peace negotiators have.

[00:07:08] Mediation is a different field because simply you have to be a conductor of an orchestra. You have to see rules and ways how to approach different people to offer things that are usually in a package acceptable to various sides. When you’re a negotiator, you don’t have to worry about that very much. You really care more about your interests, the relationship, whether it’s a short term thing, whether it’s a one off negotiation, or you have to build a relationship with the person on the other side of the table.

[00:07:39] But as a mediator, you have to worry about all of the relationships around the table. Also, you have to think about who is not included in the process. Will there be any grievances with the final deal? If some people are not there. As in political and peace negotiations very [00:08:00] often things look very good on paper, but they’re not implementable.

[00:08:04] And as a mediator, you need to have the skills, not only to handle what is happening there at the table, but also what will it mean and how will that translate in reality and what will be the reaction from the people that have to implement. I have been analyzing a lot of the negotiations that are happening currently in one of my homelands North Macedonia, the deal that they had with Greece and there’s another complicated relationship now with Bulgaria because Bulgaria used their right to veto of the EU accession process and so on.

[00:08:38] So there are a lot of people who make these things happen and many of them, as I’m very lucky to have the opportunity to interview and to know some of these people who are involved, they usually say we didn’t have any standard operating procedure, we didn’t know, we were trying to improvise and see what will work.

[00:08:57] Mediation is so precious that [00:09:00] all of those attempts that have not been tested off of the heads of those that have to implement them can be very dangerous for the future of the people and the country. So this is why we often see countries struggling with very fragile peace or countries struggling with frozen conflicts that, the more time passes, the further in the conflict they are, they’re entrenched and it is very difficult to actually snap out of that cycle of either violence or hope that their side will prevail. And this is why I think it is very important to understand that both as negotiator and as a mediator, you have a responsibility to do no harm.

[00:09:45] This is a principle that came out in the 90s, but very often negotiators and mediators do not understand the implications that it has on real people in real life. So yes, there is a difference between negotiation and that’s almost somebody who plays an instrument in an [00:10:00] orchestra, a flute, but a mediator is somebody who is the conductor of the whole process who has to facilitate the dialogue, who has to try to be fair, though not equal always to all the parties involved who has to construct a whole process and design how that will go at what stages and so on. So it’s a little bit more intricate than a negotiator’s role. However, I don’t think that we as humanity have the best practices or we know for sure what are the best mediation outcomes or potential outcomes and there is a lot more that we have to agree. Especially now in this defragmenting world where the great powers are trying to establish themselves on a different footing and small countries are struggling to find their place. And I think we will require a lot of those skills, both to negotiate and we will [00:11:00] need some benevolent and intended great powers to help restore some sort of balance so that we don’t get lost in this huge battle of the titans.

[00:11:14] Dr Miranda Melcher: Very interesting explanation of the differences there and I think that analogy of playing the flute in an orchestra versus conducting it is a helpful metaphor and really highlights as you said that these are quite different skills for all that they have many aspects in common.

[00:11:29] Can you tell us a bit more about how you’ve developed your skills in both of these areas? Perhaps some key formative experiences in this process?

[00:11:37] I used to work for when I started working, my first job, I think or one of the first jobs was in Peace Corps. So that was clearly a place where I learned a lot about cultural difference. I had American students and they had to live in a completely different culture, asking all the questions about why is this happening?

[00:11:56] What does this mean? And so on. So I [00:12:00] developed that cultural curiosity. And I think that’s one of the foundations. That you have to have. in being a good negotiator or mediator to actually care about what the others feel, think, what their goals are. Can you progress on their path, on that path together?

[00:12:20] Or you just have to push for your interest and have this narrow look at the goal you want to achieve and so on. So I’ve learned that, we can work together to be better since very young age. However, all of that was shadowed by the realities that I lived in. As I mentioned, I lived in, through the breakup of Yugoslavia, through a lot of wars, genocide through a lot of ghosts from the past coming to the surface and suddenly people that were very close until yesterday were picking up weapons and killing each other.

[00:12:59] I think [00:13:00] that all of that made me a little bit more humble about the strength that we as humans have when you’re facing that kind of destruction and not knowing what the future holds. Will there be place for everybody? When you have questions like, will I lose my identity and the language that my grandparents used to speak? Like many of my great grandparents were, the Balkans was always turbulent area, and you learn and if you come from a small country, I think you learn how to talk without aggravating. And as I said, I studied literature and words, so it became really my focus.

[00:13:40] I started working for the OSCE in the press office and I was always very cautious. About how we can say certain things in order not to hurt one of the sides of the conflict, how we can still have things happen in order justice to be our foundation [00:14:00] rather than prevailing or help parties that were trying to force their way in the process through violence, explain that to my international colleagues. So it required a lot of very sensitive dance around words. We had press conferences on daily basis. And then later on, after my studies in the Netherlands, I got my first international job again with the OSCE in Kosovo. And I was very lucky to be able to actually work on something I was researching in my master thesis.

[00:14:35] And that was the future of Kosovo and the decentralization plan, the Ahtisaari peace plan that was put on table and so on. So I learned a lot about grievances, about how different memories people have and that you cannot talk about future unless you address. And the ghosts of the past and very often, [00:15:00] I think, in our international relations currently, we tend to just look at the current problems without understanding the bigger concept. As I knew that, I don’t have all the skills needed for any job that, is very important at the time, I constantly think that I should, upgrade my portfolio.

[00:15:16] So recently I started some studies in the memory area. What is our collective memory? How do we deal with sins from the past? What has that meant for many nations and many peoples and many minorities and so on. So I think, I have developed my skills through training, through learning in school.

[00:15:39] I was very lucky to have Paul Merz to be my teacher and mentor at Klingendell, but I have attended also many other trainings since because I think that there are other schools, there are other opinions out there. But I think I have also learned quite a lot by being where I was when I was growing up. I grew up in settings that [00:16:00] were, that for many people today would be very strange. Like the first four years of my life, I spent in Libya.

[00:16:08] And my first language was Arabic. And when I tell these two people, they’re like, what, how? Because they think of Libya as it is today. But Libya at that time was part of the non aligned countries that my country, Yugoslavia, was helping build up. And my mother was a doctor. So I was always thrown. in this kind of new situations, new cultures.

[00:16:32] I was always curious about how people solve problems in their own community, in their own society. And I think we all have very different approaches. Therefore, I don’t think that I have learned. Everything that I know from one place, but I’m very grateful for the life I’ve had so far. That I was able to learn from many places and learn different things. Now, am I smart enough to use all of that knowledge [00:17:00] that I have gained from books and experience and travels and living abroad in the current situation that I need?

[00:17:07] I don’t know, but I hope that it helps to give me this open perspective. And that’s at least what I’m trying to teach my students not to be short sighted, not to be very brisk and very fast and look at the shortcuts, but rather to have a comprehensive analysis about the situation and try to deal with both short term gains, but also long term achievements that will bring cooperation and peace to those people that you’re actually helping resolve some conflicts.

[00:17:43] Dr Miranda Melcher: That idea of kind of the comprehensiveness of experience as well as perspective and knowing that needing to learn comprehensively is so important as well really comes through with that combination of things you’ve gone through yourself and put together. So thank you for sharing. I think it’s always so key to emphasize that we never learn everything we need to know just from one place.

[00:18:05] It is always a process of continual learning and engagement. And that translates as well it seems to your work, not just your learning. Because you currently work with and have worked with organizations that range quite a lot in terms of what they do and how they operate. Just to name two, the Peace Corps and NATO are pretty different organizations in a lot of senses.

[00:18:28] How does your work differ depending on who you’re working with and the kind of organization they are and the kinds of goals that they’re pursuing?

[00:18:37] First of all, it’s interesting you mentioned Peace Corps and NATO. Both of those were actually a coincidence. Peace Corps, I applied without knowing actually what it was and NATO, I was invited as an urgent need of a friend who was an interpreter and she said they’re getting a new Brigadier General and they don’t have interpreters at the [00:19:00] highest level.

[00:19:01] Mind you, I was studying English language at the department at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. I guess a good student, my English was fine, but was I the best? No. She needed somebody. She thought of me and she called me. She said, I need somebody like you who can just plug in and go tomorrow. So it looks very strange when you put Peace Corps and NATO together, but those happened in different times in my life.

[00:19:28] And I think in NATO, I worked as an interpreter. In those first years, I was a student when the conflict in Macedonia was happening in 2001. So this was during the the few task forces that NATO had and I was working on a task force harvest for collecting the weapons of the UÇK members after the conflict, because that was part of the Ohrid Framework Agreement. And I was there just because I spoke English well. That was it.

[00:19:55] But later on in life with all the experiences I have had, I was [00:20:00] invited to be a lecturer at the NATO Defense College in Rome, which is a very known institution, very high level executive training for NATO staff and actually both military and civilian staff from both NATO countries and partnership for peace countries.

[00:20:20] And I was lucky to work with different groups there, including the senior course for the high level generals, admirals and some other military and civilian staff and this was a group of like 100 people. So there I went as an expert, no longer I was that little young interpreter from the field. And that was very interesting circle of life. I did not expect that. I was always anti war, peace loving young woman who grew up in the wars in Yugoslavia. And it was very interesting the first time when I was invited to teach there, obviously they invited me to teach [00:21:00] negotiation skills, and I was very happy because I think that military staff and people who are in that field have the necessity to have good negotiation skills.

[00:21:12] In the meantime, of course, I worked in Kosovo and I worked closely with a lot of the KFOR colleagues that we had and we had military staff in the OSCE, one of the best bosses I’ve ever had was in the OSCE mission to Skopje, a spokesperson, and he came from PsyOps from NATO. And I really admired the capacity that he had for reading people in the room around the table.

[00:21:37] And that all comes with experience. So a lot of the military staff that I work with in different military academies and so on they need these negotiation skills and I’m a continued education that they’re aware of that need because many of them are in the field in Afghanistan, Iraq, they were in Bosnia and Kosovo where I met many of them in Macedonia and [00:22:00] they interact with a variety of actors from civil society to just normal civilians on the streets, and they need to be able to explain their mission to negotiate, to convince, persuade, and advocate for what they believe is the job that they’re doing.

[00:22:19] Yes, my work is very different than your right. I have been doing a lot of different work not only in different organizations, but also topic wise. I have been dealing with good governance mainly because I believe that our societies need to be healthy and based on good governance where you have a well being of their citizens, who are aware of the different needs of various groups of people, minorities, people with disability, and so on. So I have done a lot of work on minority rights, I have done a lot of work on people with disability because I have a daughter with Down syndrome and I really [00:23:00] believe that as a liberal mind I have to develop skills to be able to be inclusive and find ways for everybody to be part of the processes.

[00:23:15] Just because somebody is discriminated, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the worth or the value. We need to help them grow and we need to find ways how all the people who are discriminated on different levels for different reasons, political, racial, whatever, I really believe, as community, as society to help them get the chances so they can thrive and they can be the best versions of themselves. Then for that reason I have also been very much involved in environmental issues and in the next two days here in Prague we will have the OSCE Economic Environmental Forum.

[00:23:53] I’m very proud of the work I have done in this field because I managed also to combine that in my [00:24:00] environmental work partially with my gender work and recently with a network of civil society organizations from the Balkans and Moldova, I helped develop a guide on lobbying and advocacy for gender responsive budgeting and climate change, as well as online courses for people who want to get involved and do some more work on advocating for these issues to become one of the priorities on their government’s agenda.

[00:24:28] Yeah, as you mentioned, I have done a lot of different things, but all of it somehow goes under the umbrella of international relations, diplomacy, good governance and I think that keeps me very interested and very passionate about the topics that I’m doing, that I have the luxury of choosing different different topics and deal with them differently, unlike some of my colleagues who are pure academics, I get to also do some policy papers to write, to do some trainings, as well as write chapters for [00:25:00] books, articles, academic articles, and so on.

[00:25:03] This is what I really enjoy, having the variety and reaching out to different audiences than they were when I started in this field, because we’re facing huge tectonic changes in our areas of work and I think this whole defragmentation and the shaky international system that we have that everybody recently after the invasion of Ukraine feels that it was not enough to prevent the war. I think this is the time when we need to reassess and try to establish or upgrade our our structures in order to be more resilient and to be more certain that what we’re doing is the right thing to do as well as to recognize when malign influence is attacking the structures that have been built for more than 70 years.

[00:25:59] Dr Miranda Melcher: That is a massive amount of variety and quite a fascinating range. I can see how you stay so passionate about all of this work, given the range that you’re able to work at. And it does make my next question kind of something I’m particularly interested to hear your answer in. It is something I ask a lot of our guests, but given what you’ve just laid out for us, I think in your case might be especially intriguing.

[00:26:21] What does a normal day look like for you? How do you balance all of these things on any given Tuesday?

[00:26:28] Ida Manton: Oh, but yeah, it has been Tuesday since COVID, I’m joking with my kids, because I work usually as a consultant, right? So I don’t have a nine to five job. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Monday or it’s a Saturday.

[00:26:42] So it has been Tuesday for a long time. But I chose to do the job that I’m doing because I’m also a mother and I’m a mother of two girls one of them having special needs you know, and I think it is also, [00:27:00] it’s a choice that you have to make. And I made this choice knowing that I can handle the work that I’m doing well. I’m also Gemini, maybe that adds something to it, but my husband was the one who had a stable contract, but he was always in a place, right?

[00:27:16] So if we move, that would have meant that I have to resign from my job, wherever that was, and look for another job. And I don’t like that insecurity. I’m fine with longer term insecurity, like I have now as a consultant, you never know where a request will come from, but I’m fine with that. I’m not fine with having to quit my mission just because my husband’s contract ended and we have to move to another place.

[00:27:44] So I managed somehow to have a continuity. So my day to day, Tuesday, you know, depends on which month you catch me in. Usually April and October are full of lectures and I’m traveling [00:28:00] to, now I live in Prague, but usually I have a course at one of the universities here and I teach an intensive course there.

[00:28:09] That’s a stable thing that I know will happen in April and October. Then for many years, for 10 years or something, I was doing also in April and October training with the NATO defense college in Rome. I’m doing a lot of trainings with think tanks and different diplomatic academies and military academies. For more than 10 years in September, I was always in Moldova doing my model OSCE, which I’m very proud of actually.

[00:28:36] I started it 11 years model OSCs, and now I see that the OSCE has not only developed the model OSCE that I have been doing with them, but they’re branching out and the secretariat had the first model OSCE, so you know, these are small little seeds that you plant somewhere and you see them grow and that makes me very happy.

[00:28:58] I don’t know what each [00:29:00] day brings, but that is what I really treasure about the way of life and work that I have currently. It gives me also a lot of opportunities for work life balance. There are many sleepless nights because there are deadlines and things need to happen and nobody’s asking you whether you were in the office until five o’clock.

[00:29:24] They don’t care. It might as well be two o’clock in the morning, but things need to happen. And I love the thrill of it. I love the adrenaline and very often I get involved in training people who then go and do some mediation or negotiation processes. Recently, one of my colleagues who invited me to do training for the Qatari Diplomatic Academy through UNITAR he told me that three of the students that we were training were involved in the peace process between israel and Palestine that were happening in [00:30:00] Qatar, and that is fascinating. So I was not there at the table, but some of the people that I trained and talked about, different aspects of the negotiation or mediation process were there, and they’re trying to change the world. So that gives me a huge gratefulness and I really feel very lucky to be able to help other people who actually need the skills to make the world a better place.

[00:30:22] Outro

[00:30:22] Dr Miranda Melcher: Thank you so much for speaking with us, Ida. I absolutely appreciate the insights and experiences you’ve shared with us. To listeners, thank you for listening. In our next episode, we’ll continue our conversation with Ida talking about where she sees gaps in access to justice today and what we can do to address them.

[00:30:43] You’re definitely going to want to tune in to the second part of our conversation, so make sure you hit the follow button and don’t miss a single episode. If you’re enjoying the Just Access podcast, please tell your friends, like us and share us on social media. Please do also rate us and leave us a review on your favourite podcast [00:31:00] app.

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