Star Wars and Conflict Resolution II: My Negotiations Will Not Fail

Learn to negotiate your way to success and resolve conflict at home and at work from the masters: Obi-Wan, Yoda, Princess Leia Organa… and even Darth Vader.

Star Wars isn’t just about the blasters and lightsabers. It’s about conflict and resolving it. The light side, the dark side—everybody is out to make peace, even if they have very different definitions of the word. Star Wars is also about negotiation and its constant presence in our lives. While the Jedi often wound up clashing lightsabers with their negotiation counterparts, we can still learn a lot from them. After all, as Yoda said: The greatest teacher, failure is.

In this sequel to Star Wars and Conflict Resolution: There are Alternatives to Fighting, two dozen experts—lawyers, managers, psychologists, professional mediators and negotiators, and experts from the fields of communications, political science, and human resources—pass on what they have learned about negotiating and managing conflict with skill and wisdom.

The book explains some of Star Wars’ sharpest conflicts, such as Poe and Admiral Holdo’s flare-up in The Last Jedi. It offers new insights into the movies’ most complex relationships such as Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s rocky student-teacher interactions in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. It offers key lessons from the saga’s most challenging negotiations: Lando Calrissian coping with Darth Vader’s hard tactics in The Empire Strikes Back, Jyn Erso’s attempt to persuade the Rebel Alliance to attack the Empire’s brand-new Death Star in Rogue One, and Luke Skywalker’s valiant efforts to negotiate both Jabba the Hutt’s release of Han Solo and Darth Vader’s return to the light in Return of the Jedi.

Finally, the book explains how the Jedi could have remained keepers of the peace throughout the prequel trilogy, resolving disputes through mediation rather than aggressive negotiation, and thus perhaps prevented the fall of the Galactic Republic and the rise of the Empire.

Star Wars and Conflict Resolution: My Negotiations Will Not Fail explains how these insights from Star Wars apply to our own day-to-day interactions and explains how we can all get better at negotiating and resolving conflict here in our own galaxy.