QUESTION:
“How did you ensure the talks didn’t fail because of internal strife?”
—Alexandra Baranowski (MBA 2025)


“I had to handle that with a lot of cold blood and not engage the opposition in every argument. I had to maintain the course, explain why we were doing what we were doing, and convince them that it was the right thing. Making war takes vertical leadership: You have a strategy, you give orders, and as long as you win you’re in good shape. Making peace is always more difficult and requires horizontal leadership. You’re making concessions to people who have committed atrocities. You have to persuade people to forgive. It’s not easy. That’s when you have to persevere.”
—Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, 2010–2018; Nobel Peace Prize winner, 2016

QUESTION:
"How did you ensure the talks didn’t fail because of internal strife?"
—Alexandra Baranowski (MBA 2025):

ANSWER:
"I had to handle that with a lot of cold blood and not engage the opposition in every argument. I had to maintain the course, explain why we were doing what we were doing, and convince them that it was the right thing. Making war takes vertical leadership: You have a strategy, you give orders, and as long as you win you’re in good shape. Making peace is always more difficult and requires horizontal leadership. You’re making concessions to people who have committed atrocities. You have to persuade people to forgive. It’s not easy. That’s when you have to persevere."
—Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia, 2010–2018; Nobel Peace Prize winner, 2016

Midway through class, on an October afternoon in Aldrich, Professor Deepak Malhotra announces that Juan Manuel Santos has entered the Zoom. A moment later, the former president of Colombia appears on the big screen. The blackboards on either side of the screen plot the discussion of the last hour, which has covered the historic agreement that Santos negotiated to end the country’s 52-year conflict with the FARC in 2016. The Nobel Prize winner is here to share his experiences and take questions from students.

Malhotra steps back and allows the conversation to unfold. He launched the course War & Peace in 2020 with the aim of challenging students’ approach to leadership, negotiation, and strategy by studying conflicts of the past 2,500 years. The syllabus begins with the Peloponnesian War, progresses through both WWI and WWII, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Colombia, Rwanda, the Middle East, and on to Russia and Ukraine. The cases ask students to put themselves in the shoes of the leaders, strategists, negotiators, and policymakers who confronted decisions of war-making and peacemaking.

In the case of Colombia, the class focused on three key questions: First, what are the barriers—psychological, structural, or tactical—that stand in the way of dealmaking? Second, why have previous efforts failed? And third, why will things turn out differently this time? “You have to think not only about the tactics you will employ once you get to the negotiation table but also, and more important, the conditions, the scope of what is being addressed, how to structure the right process, and how to control the frame of the negotiation. These are things that can change naturally over time, but they also can be made to change to suit your needs as a negotiator,” Malhotra says. Success will not be determined by one person’s “awesome negotiating skills at the table,” he notes.

In his retelling of his experiences, Santos underscores the importance of having a North Star. As a young man in the Navy, he learned the significance of knowing where you want to go, “as a sailor but also in life,” he says. Later, he had the good fortune to meet Nelson Mandela, who generously explained how he achieved peace in South Africa. Santos was inspired. “I said to myself, this is going to be my objective in life: to study what is necessary to make peace in Colombia.”

▶ Eight of the 80 students in the course are cross-registrants from schools across the Boston area. Malhotra received over 100 applicants for those spots: “I look for people for whom this might be relevant to their trajectory. Over the years I’ve had scores of such students, from the intelligence and diplomatic communities, human rights folks, and people who are dealing with military matters, foreign affairs, and public policy. They’re from all over the world.”

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