News
A ‘MATRA Reunion’ at the Clingendael Institute
December 14, 2009. At the end of the year, it’s usually the time for family reunions. The same thing applies to the Clingendael Institute’s family of MATRA programmes: from 25-27 November, alumni from previous MATRA courses for Junior Diplomats from Eastern Europe, South Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Jordan reunited in The Hague to participate in the Alumni Course ‘Seminar in International Negotiations’.
Some of the nineteen participants had recently taken part in a Clingendael course (the participants were selected from courses prior to 2007) but others hadn’t been to The Hague for more than fifteen years – they took part in the first series of courses of the MATRA programme, organised in the early nineties of last century. Now senior diplomats, they made the trip to The Netherlands once more.
During it’s courses for junior diplomats, Clingendael always provides participants with a seminar on international negotiations. The alumni course took the participants to a whole new level of this well-evaluated training. The seminar aimed at improving the participants’ negotiation skills by offering both theory and practice of negotiation in international organisations. Through cases and role-plays on hot international topics – like for example climate change – different negotiation styles and strategies were trained. Attention was also paid to negotiation procedures and important features such as cross-cultural negotiation and the influence of cultural factors. Since the participants of this course were coming from a variety of fifteen different countries, the lessons learned were immediately brought into practice. Thanks to the MFA’s MATRA programme, the Clingendael Institute was once again able to organise a successful expert seminar for its alumni.
