John Murray

John Murray is a senior consultant with CMPartners, a conflict management firm based in Cambridge, MA. He specializes in negotiation, communication and facilitation skills training and coaching for individuals in public and non-governmental organizations as they address communal conflict, with particular attention to water and other natural resource concerns. Mr. Murray provides training and mentoring work with Israelis and Palestinians, and with professionals from most Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In the past five years he has co-authored three articles on the Jordan River basin, its history and the opportunities for shared benefit.

Mr. Murray’s background includes military service, state-level elective office, law practice, and teaching both in law schools and international relations programs. Most recently, he concluded six years as adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), teaching a course in international conflict settlement methods. John Murray retired from full-time teaching in 2005 as Professor of Practice in International Relations at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and Associate Director of Maxwell’s Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC).

Prior to teaching at Syracuse, John Murray taught conflict management and international law at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and before that, at Texas Tech School of Law in Lubbock, TX. In the 1980s and early 1990s John Murray served as acting executive director, then as president, of the Conflict Clinic, Inc., a negotiation and mediation firm established with the support of Professor Roger Fisher and the Harvard Negotiation Project. During this time John Murray co-authored the first two editions of a law school text on alternative dispute resolution.

Mr. Murray entered the teaching and consulting fields after having served as state senator in the Iowa Legislature for ten years in the 1970s, and before that as an associate with the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City, and then executive assistant to the Governor of Iowa.

John Murray received a BA with Honors from Cornell University, a Master’s Degree in Public Law and Government from Columbia University, and a JD from the University of Iowa College of Law, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Iowa Law Review.