William Ury

William Ury is an American author, academic, anthropologist, and negotiation expert. He co-founded the Harvard Program on Negotiation. Additionally, he helped found the International Negotiation Network with former President Jimmy Carter. Ury is the co-author of Getting to Yes with Roger Fisher, which set out the method of principled negotiation and established the idea of the best alternative to a negotiated agreement within negotiation theory.

Ury was educated at Le Rosey and Phillips Andover, where he graduated in 1970. In college, Ury studied anthropology, linguistics, and classics. Ury received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard. In 1979 he co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project, of which he is currently a Distinguished Fellow.

In 1981, he helped found the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Ury has worked as a negotiation adviser and mediator in conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and Venezuela, among other countries.

Ury founded and served as the director of the Harvard Nuclear Negotiation Project. In 1982, the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency requested that the Harvard Negotiation Project compile a report applying its understanding of human communication to the issue of superpower restraint to reduce the risk of a war started by accident, terrorism, mistake, runaway escalation, or misperception.

Together with Richard Smoke, Ury interviewed U.S. and Soviet specialists and government officials and published the report for the government in 1984. The information was the basis for Ury's book Beyond the Hotline. During this time, he also acted as a consultant to the Crisis Management Center at the White House, working to create Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers in Washington and Moscow, which were the subject of the first arms control agreement signed by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Together with former President Jimmy Carter, Ury co-founded the International Negotiation Network, which worked to end civil wars worldwide. A coalition including Carter and Desmond Tutu led the International Negotiation Network. Other notable people involved with the Network include Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Sonny Ramphal, and Sir Brian Urquhart. In addition, Ury teaches negotiation to international corporate executives and labor leaders to reach mutually profitable agreements with customers, suppliers, unions, and joint-venture partners.

In 2001, Ury co-founded the e-Parliament with Nicholas Dunlop. The website serves as a global forum for international elected officials to work on issues of common interest. For example, the e-Parliament has given birth to the Climate Parliament, which links thousands of elected officials from 50 countries to work together informally on renewable energy and climate issues.

In 2007, Ury founded the Abraham Path Initiative, a long-distance walking trail across the Middle East that connects the sites visited by Abraham as recorded in ancient religious texts and traditions. The Abraham Path Initiative was incubated at the Harvard Negotiation Project and is endorsed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, and other international partners.

Ury is the recipient of the Whitney North Seymour Award from the American Arbitration Association. He also received the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament for resolving ethnic conflicts. In addition, he received the 2012 Peacemakers Award from Mediators Beyond Borders. Finally, on March 11, 2022, Ury received the International Advocate for Peace Award from the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution—the country's preeminent legal journal of arbitration, negotiation, mediation, settlement, and restorative justice—as part of its Melnick Annual Symposium.