From an early age, Peter Dixon, director of the M.S. in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (NECR) program at Columbia University School of Professional Studies (SPS), was made by those around him to believe something about his family was “different, even wrong.” But how was that decided? He sensed that the rules of the world were “not natural or given: they’re socially constructed.”
Studying sociology—first at Middlebury College for his B.A., followed by the University of California, Berkeley for his M.A. and Ph.D.—helped him understand both his own upbringing and conflict more broadly. “Sociology teaches you how to question why the world is organized the way it is, how power works, why some people are afforded opportunities that others aren’t, and why conflict proliferates so easily.”
Dixon has worked with major institutions including the United Nations, World Bank, Human Rights Watch, and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. In particular, he credits his time at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague with guiding him on his current path of considering how organizations designed to manage conflict can leverage and support—or ignore and undermine—local knowledge and solutions.
Today, Dixon’s work is split between the United States and internationally. His U.S. work, largely focused on New York City, asks how investment in disenfranchised communities’ local capacities for peacebuilding can help shift punitive approaches to urban violence toward restorative solutions. Abroad, his research has looked into cases like the ICC’s work in east Africa and Colombia’s national efforts to institutionalize and scale up restorative approaches to transitional justice.
“After finishing my doctorate, I was torn between the practitioner and academic worlds. I didn’t know there was something called a ‘scholar-practitioner’ to aspire to!” Dixon said, highlighting the unique scholar-practitioner model for faculty at SPS.
SPS, he says, was the perfect place to continue teaching as a “practice-informed scholar,” and receive support for his own studies as a “research-backed practitioner.” Now, a year into the NECR directorship, Dixon reflects on what makes Columbia’s program unique, his priorities as director, and the future of the field of negotiation and conflict resolution as a whole.
Can you reflect on your first year leading NECR?
During my first year as program director, I felt immense support from the program team and former director (and program founder) Professor Beth Fisher-Yoshida. I remain in awe of the NECR program and its community, which I’ve also had the opportunity to get to know better. There’s something quite special about a community of students, scholars, and practitioners drawn together not by a particular industry, but by a shared devotion to understanding and working constructively with conflict to create value, build bridges across difference, and create more prosperous, peaceful and just communities. Getting to know the NECR students is by far the best part of the job.
I am also grateful for the support and collaboration of the Center for Justice at Columbia, with whom I collaborate on several remarkable projects across New York City, such as Project Restore, a community-based violence intervention. The CFJ is a hub for community-centered innovation that brings together diverse students, faculty, community leaders, formerly incarcerated scholars and researchers, policymakers and more to build cross-sector collaborations rooted in restorative justice. Through the Center, I now teach a college seminar in conflict resolution at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. I recently attended the Sing Sing graduation, in which some of my students were graduating with their bachelor’s or associate’s degrees.
NECR is also quite an innovative hub. We held numerous events throughout the year covering issues ranging from how New York City is dealing with its historical ties to slavery to how communities around the world are using citizens assemblies to confront and manage policy challenges (Dr. Marjan Ehsassi, who directs the Federation for Innovations in Democracy – North America, will return to NECR in spring ’27 to teach a seminar on deliberative democracy). And our students put together the program’s very first negotiation competition and student-run conference, bringing together speakers from around the world to present on issues including venture capital, hostage negotiation, the study of humiliation, and landmine action in Myanmar.
Moving forward, we will continue to build new partnerships and invest in our students’ professional development, while staying true to our core educational foundations in negotiation and conflict resolution theory and skills-building.
As our world seems to be growing increasingly polarized, how is the field of Negotiation and Conflict Resolution responding—or rather, how can negotiation skills be used to respond?
Our students are uniquely positioned to address what can feel like—and in many ways is—an increasingly polarized world. Here, both our systems-thinking and skills-building approaches are invaluable. Systems thinking is key because it helps pull attention away from what is often loudest in conflicts and can seem the most intractable (e.g. political differences, religious differences, national differences) and focus us on both the underlying structures that encourage destructive conflict and the unmet needs that drive and escalate it. This helps identify concrete solutions, which is where our skills-building comes in. Knowing how to mediate, negotiate, and engage across differences is an essential set of skills in today’s world. Our students start with self-awareness, interrogating their own relationship to conflict, and build their competencies from there.
What sets apart Columbia's M.S. program from others in the field?
Three things.
First, we are intentionally holistic, training students in conflict analysis techniques, core theoretical foundations, and fundamental skills in negotiation, mediation, self-awareness and more. This combination of systems-level thinking and practical skills-building is particularly unique. Here, my priority as director is to enhance our foundational systems and skills-based curriculum while expanding our students’ options to dive deeper into their individual interests through enriched elective offerings across the many subfields of negotiation and conflict resolution.
Second, we are set apart by the amazing resources at Columbia and across New York City to which we have access. This includes partnerships with Columbia institutions like the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (MD-ICCCR) and Center for Justice and connections to NYC leaders and changemakers (we’re about to spend a week outside the classroom during my summer course, where we visit such changemakers across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx). Here, my priority is to streamline our students’ access to organizations working on negotiation and conflict resolution around the world, to provide them a step up in their careers and an opportunity to engage with their program learning in diverse professional settings.
Third, we bring together students with diverse professional interests and goals across peacebuilding, social justice, organizational conflict, negotiation, entrepreneurship, and mediation. This gives our classes and cohorts a unique dynamism. Our professional development prepares students for careers in international and domestic peacebuilding; in mediation and dispute resolution; as organizational consultants and change managers; and across business and finance. Here, my priority is to invest in our professional development from start to finish, helping our students develop their goals and providing the support they need to achieve them.
What sorts of issues or topics are your students interested in addressing? And who should consider becoming a student?
Our students study conflict at interpersonal, organizational, community, and international levels across the globe. The throughline is an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation, a systems-level approach to conflict analysis, and an emphasis on practice-based skills and interventions. For example, this could look like: analyzing what went wrong (and what could have gone better) with a merger/acquisition across two distinct organizational cultures; identifying strategies for schools to address the unmet needs of youth drawn to gangs for a sense of belonging; proposing solutions for UN peacekeeping operations to better prepare local communities for conflict management as part of their transition strategies; navigating intraorganizational leadership conflicts rooted in competing interests and conflicting needs; managing conflict across refugee diasporas; and much more. Each student identifies their own capstone topic to deconstruct conflict dynamics and propose resolution strategies in unique contexts that matter to them.
We prepare students for a broad range of professional pathways. Conflict is everywhere, and people who know how to understand and confront it constructively are highly valued. Students should not come here, however, expecting a linear career path. There is no “negotiation” or “conflict resolution” profession per se (unfortunately). For that reason, we invest heavily in professional development to meet our students where they are and do everything we can to help them get where they want to land next. This includes exposing our students to new role models and helping them map the possibilities that a degree in negotiation and conflict resolution can offer. Often, it also includes connecting students directly with opportunities to engage in practice and apply their new knowledge and skills in professional settings.
What misconceptions do people have about Negotiation and Conflict Resolution as a study that you'd like to put to rest?
I don’t mind being accused of idealism. I think you have to have a certain degree of idealism to work in conflict resolution. But idealism does not come at the expense of “realism” or “feasibility.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite: our approaches to negotiation and conflict resolution are rooted firmly in realism, based on decades of research and tested through case studies around the world. We understand how power works. And we understand how people work. This program brings the two together.
Still, there’s often a misconception that the mantra of conflict resolution is something like “can’t we all just get along?” Nothing could be further from the truth. We understand that conflict is everywhere and we don’t run from it. Rather, our students learn from day one how to understand their own relationship with conflict, how to deconstruct conflict dynamics, and how to harness conflict constructively to make the world more prosperous, peaceful, and just.
About the Program
Columbia University’s Master of Science in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution prepares students to analyze the root causes and dynamics of conflict and to transform disputes through reasoned and resourceful interventions. The program focuses on developing self-awareness, tenacity, and interpersonal competency; building common ground; opening lines of communication; ensuring representation and recognition, and building sustainable possibilities for resolution.
The program has on-campus and online (with residency) modality options. Learn more about the program here.
