A world driven by power, profit and polarization by leaders in the social, economic and political spheres is crying for a new set of leaders who can negotiate a new world where fairness and justice prevail, brought about through the restoration of people-centric democratic institutions, relationships, processes and outcomes. The world needs a new genre of leader-negotiators capable of stopping the injustice and inequality inherent in the purveyors of power, profit and polarizing brand of leadership.

The quest for garnering some insights related to what such leader-negotiators should look like led to an engagement with the speeches, writings and episodes from the lives of two leader-negotiators who spent their entire lives in the struggle against deep rooted injustice in their own respective contexts. The objective was to study how they negotiated their way through the difficult terrain of seemingly insurmountable unjust structures, relationships and processes driven by the hardened inhumanity of power seeking, profit maximizing, polarizing leaders. The effort was directed towards decoding their perspectives, capabilities and sensitivities which inspired the mobilization of the deprived masses towards achieving the goal of freedom and justice for all irrespective of race, creed, nationality or caste.

Interpretative engagement with the Fisher-Ury-Patton (2012) prescription “separate the people from the problem” as applied to case studies of two leader-negotiators - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela - yielded pointers to an alternative negotiations methodology from the way they went about their struggles against deep rooted social, economic and political injustice in their contexts and in their times to craft a state of relatedness negotiations alternative for the contemporary world founded on social, political and economic justice through democratic processes.