Newsletter 4 | December 2011

Vol. 2, no. 2 – New issue!

Dear all,

The Journal of Conflictology has just published its latest issue at http://joc.uoc.edu. We invite you to visit our website to view the articles and book reviews of interest. For the first time, these are now also available as ePUB files (compatible with e-readers).

On the occasion of this year’s elections in Nigeria, the issue opens with an interview delivered by the Nigerian political scientist Sadeeque Abubakar Abba. The second contribution by Ubong Essien Umoh and Idara Godwin Udoh employs linguistic theory to explain the use of the numerous adjectives used when we talk about “peace”:
qualifiers such as “positive”, “warm”, or “conditional”, the authors argue, are employed by peace scholars as peace means different things to different people. Suggesting that thought is influenced by the availability of appropriate words in a given cultural context, they conclude that to examine the discourse of peace is an excellent way to look at the limits of our understandings thereof. In his article Bryan Nykon takes a closer look at the influence of feature films on our beliefs in the legitimacy of violence. Drawing on the knowledge of conflict dynamics, he puts forward a number of specific suggestions of how to develop humanizing elements within films.

Transitional justice is the topic of Padraig McAuliffe’s article. In critically assessing the use of transitional justice mechanisms, he stresses the value of paradigmatic transitions sensitive to local conditions. Paul van Tongeren presents a policy brief on infrastructures for peace, which have received growing attention due to predictions that political violence will increase in the near future. Such structures to deal adequately with ongoing or potential violent conflicts are lacking in many instances and have successfully been built up in a number of countries, as the policy brief shows.

The development of the idea of ombudsing is traced in the issue’s PIONEER section, which reflects on the multicultural antecedents and especially the Scandinavian origins of the nowadays more and more popular practice. Finally, this issue’s PROFILE presents the work of Mediators Beyond Borders, an NGO supporting local peace building capacities in underserved areas and advocating the use of mediation in public policy disputes.

What these comparative, communicative and cognitive analyses indicate is that patterns of social relationships and the shared experience and memory of common histories will have an impact on disputants’ modes of perceiving and addressing conflicts. In a sense, the empirical work serves to confirm the experience that many will have had in communication across cultures, though that experience is more likely to have led to frustrations with the logic and priorities of the negotiation counterpart. In particular, as these differences rest on the weight given to relationships, it will seem – to Western negotiators, and in Western mediation – that at times “face” and “facts” come into conflict, and that the communication tools used to preserve face – indirectness, vagueness – compete directly with the pursuit of facts.[1] Conversely, Asian negotiators or mediators will observe that the Western pursuit of “facts” or the literal truth seems abrasive and ignorant of the importance of pursuing a “public” truth that will preserve relationships.

But . . . don’t try that in the Post Office. And the difference? In Lucca, there’s a shared, tightly understood set of norms; in the Post Office, the norm is competitive.

But what provokes this comment is my experience in a wonderful small general store, opposite the megastore Mustafa’s (their new, gleaming, stainless steel eyesore). I called into the packed jumble of provisions to get fruit, which turned into an expedition to pick up irresistible pickles, curry condiments etc. While there were three tills operating, there was no obvious (to me) queuing process. So I stood more or less in front of one of the tills, where there was only one person in front of me. There were other customers off to the side, but nowhere near the tills. The till operator caught my eye but gave no acknowledgement. But when the person in front of me moved off, the till operator called past me to one of the people standing off to the side. Aha! There was a system.

Interestingly, and unlike in NZ, no-one pointed out to me that I was pushing in on the line. It was assumed – in a high-context culture way – that I’d pick up the message. And no doubt once I moved off to nonchalantly buy more items and return to the back of the queue, there were nods of approval, even if not obvious to me.

I like that.

1. the adaptation of traditional processes to make use of new technologies (Chinese community mediation goes “online”?); and
2. the foundational role of mediation not so much as private settlement as a form of community and normative dispute settlement.

And this is where the irony of the inquiry struck me. The question we’re asking ourselves is, at least in part, what changes and adaptations do we need to make to our models of ‘conventional’ negotiation when we work in non-Western contexts. The starting assumption – which makes sense – is that the bulk of negotiation pedagogy and theory is Western in origin and orientation. But here are two starting questions:

1. For those who have been around this field – especially mediation rather than negotiation – for long enough, you’ll recall that much of the inspiration for the development of non-judicial forms of dispute resolution came from comparative and ethnographic studies of non-industrial societies. Without producing a string of citations at this stage, we know that, in addition to the inspiration that came from community-based activism (Alinsky and others) and from critiques of legalism in the early days of Critical Legal Studies, considerable impetus came from looking at mediation in China (pre- and Post-Mao); Liberia (the people’s courts); the Kpelle moots of the Tiv, Barotse and Nuer of Africa; the panchayats of India; and from work of legal anthropologists like Nader, Roberts, Diamond, Benedict and so on. Here’s the first version of the irony: having drawn on that inspiration and having, in the last nearly 40 years, developed a practice of mediation that has shifted from being marginal and “alternative” to mainstream and closely embedded in many legal systems, we’re now in the business (often literally) of re-exporting mediation back to the countries and regions from which we borrowed it in the first place.
2. The second issue is possibly less an irony than a conceptual problem: if we are looking at what happens to “our” models of mediation when we take the practice and pedagogy into, say, China, there’s not just the matter of bringing mediation back to a place where it is already 5000 years old, but rather the conceptual issue – albeit unconscious – of taking the Western models as the “norm” and asking how these might need adaptation. This has resonances with the ideological challenges of early Fem-Crit and Race-Crit theory, pointing out the implicit assumption that the “male” and the “white” was the norm to which might be added any refining touches from the hitherto marginalised communities.

But even without an awareness of the theories about cultural difference, there are those who come up with disarmingly simple guides to good practice. Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in my hairdresser’s chair, getting the usual trim, and of course all around were people who couldn’t be separated from their mobile phones (it’s also interesting to observe, on a Saturday morning, the number of Chinese gentlemen of a certain age who are getting the grey covered up – which explains why I’ve seen so few men with silver hair, except for those to whom it lends the right degree of gravitas). Anyway, one gentleman – I assume a real estate agent from the anything-but-private phone call – asked his interlocutor one very simple and gracious question: “How may I address you?“

This is relevant in light of IMI criteria dealing with understanding hierarchies, power distance and so on. It’s also relevant to the concern raised by my students going to Paris for the ICC’s mediation competition, that it seemed to them that people were using first names in mediation sessions, and this is not something they’d comfortably do. In the event, there was a mixed bag of strategies from mediators, despite what I understood to have been their briefing, and most assumed that the mediation norm would be the informal style. One or two indicated that mediation was typically informal but gave participants – students from a wide range of countries – a choice of forms of address. But in the context of a competition like this , there remained a degree of uncertainty and asymmetry in forms of address.

So, the question by the real estate agent is as good as it gets. And far more nuanced, for example, than the uninvited convention in cold-calling salespeople in New Zealand, who assume from the outset that first names can and will be used. And in terms of the criteria for intercultural competence, this is just a simple practice of inquiry about the other person’s preferences.

Summit website: http://www.mediation-leadership.com

Organisations approved by the ISC as an Inter-Cultural Qualifying Assessment
Program (ICQAP) will assess mediators for their mastery of inter-cultural
dynamics and qualify mediators for IMI Inter-Cultural Certification. The
launch of this new initiative is planned for late 2011 following a public
consultation period and testing of the criteria in a pilot program.

This initiative has attracted much interest and support from users,
mediators, trainers and providers and will be presented at the Annual Spring
Conference of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution in Denver in April 2011.

Comments on the criteria are invited by April 30, 2011 and can be sent to
intercultural@IMImediation.org. All comments received will be greatly
appreciated and individually acknowledged.

To read the draft Criteria, click here
<http://imimediation.org/intercultural-certification-criteria>

<http://imimediation.org/intercultural-certification-criteria> To download
the draft Criteria in PDF, click here
<http://imimediation.org/index.php?cID=290&cType=document>