Dr. Sarah Federman, an Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies, began her career as an international advertising executive negotiating in over 10 countries with companies such as Google, Discovery, and NFL. A job transfer from Manhattan to Paris exposed her to physical remnants of the world wars along with the stories and traumas that lingered. This ignited her desire to use her business savvy and seek further education so that she could help prevent such mass atrocities.

 

Her award-winning book Transformative Negotiation: Strategies for Everyday Change and Equitable Futures (University of California Press 2023) was just named by Forbes as one of the ten best negotiation books of all time. The book, written with the help of her graduate students in Baltimore, guides readers how to use negotiation skills to move from positions of precarity to stability. The book also introduces a win-win-win model, inspired by John Rawls’ justice work. This model challenges us to look beyond the satisfaction of those at the negotiating table to also consider how agreements affect people, animals, or ecosystems not party to the deliberations.

 

Her new book, Corporate Reckoning: How Businesses Can Address Historic Wrongs, will be published by MIT Press in April 2026. Her related TedX talk on the role of businesses in mass atrocities was selected by the main TED for global distribution.
 

Federman is also the author of the award-winning Last Train to Auschwitz: The French National Railways and the Journey to Accountability (University of Wisconsin 2021) and published two co-authored anthologies, Introduction to Conflict Resolution: Discourses and Dynamics (2019) and Narratives of Mass Atrocity: Victims and Perpetrators in the Aftermath (2022). She has also written for the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Ethics and Smithsonian. In 2022, Federman testified twice before Congress concerning the responsibility of U.S. banks to respond to their slavery ties.  

 

In addition to teaching a variety of classes at Kroc, she is a frequent instructor at the U.S. Department of State and their Foreign Service Institute where she trains future diplomats.