Introduction
As old as human conflict itself are social practices for resolving conflict. Primatologists suggest that as mammals dependent on the social group for survival, mechanisms for restoring social harmony were essential in our evolutionary history (De Waal, 1989). Practices of conflict resolution have been documented by anthropologists across many cultures (Nader & Todd, 1978; Gulliver, 1979). However, anthropologists teach us that cultures and cultural practices are not static. They evolve and adapt to respond to new challenges. Social innovations occur that respond to problems in new ways.
Social innovations provide novel solutions to existing social challenges or problems in a way that brings benefits not only to individuals but also to the society. They provide measurable improvements over existing practices, often addressing areas that have been neglected or poorly served by market approaches or state services. Many definitions of social innovation include an empowerment dimension: changing “the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system” and transferring agency to underserved or marginalized groups (Westley, 2008).
Conflict resolution practices have also experienced innovation. While conflict resolution practices involving intermediaries have been documented for centuries (Bercovitch, 2002) and exist across many religions and cultures (Nader & Todd, 1978; Gulliver, 1979; Moore, 2003), the modern era’s increased awareness of individual human rights brought accompanying emphases on participation and agency (Moore, 2003). Conflict resolution practices evolved to address people’s demand for participation in democratic processes, and for voice in decisions that affect them (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler, 1990), including justice, fairness, and social ordering. Innovative conflict resolution processes emerged with increased attention to efficiency, participation, and self-determination, as well as attempts to counter the divisive and exclusionary framing of gains embedded in adversarial (legal) approaches to dispute resolution. The “alternative dispute resolution” movement both generated new approaches and institutions, such as community mediation centers and neighborhood justice centers, and modified existing institutions, such as adding mandatory mediation tracks to family and civil courts.
Another characteristic of innovations, social and otherwise, is that they are disseminated or exported. New ideas and technologies spread through cultures in understandable, if not always predictable, ways, depending on adopters, communication channels, time, and the social system itself (Rogers, 1962/2003). Decades of research on the diffusion of innovation have led to increased understanding of elements, process and rate of diffusion, and the way that opinion leaders, organizations, and networks play a role in the adoption or rejection of an innovation. However, while a bias often exists toward assuming innovations are positive and should be adopted (Rogers, 1962), scholars acknowledge that both positive and negative outcomes can result from the adoption of innovations (Rogers, 1962/2003; Wejnert, 2002). Innovations can even be costly: as innovation diffuses, cultural traditions and beliefs can be consumed by those of the culture bringing the innovation (Downs & Mohr, 1976). Though such models assume one-way communication and transference of the innovation, many have acknowledged the oversimplification this represents, and that in complex environments, communication and information travels in both directions, both from and back to the sender (Robertson, Swan, & Newell, 1996), and may in fact out of necessity be designed to be more participatory. As novel conflict resolution practices are exported to new settings as innovation, existing cultural traditions and beliefs are often ignored. Communication of innovation in complex environments would suggest the need for mutual information exchange and a participatory learning approach.
Cultural similarities and differences manifest in particular when cultural models “meet” in new settings where social innovations are disseminated, such as training development. In his 1995 work on training in other cultural contexts, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures, Lederach proposes a continuum from prescriptive training to elicitive training. While the most prescriptive trainers transfer “Western” ideas about ideal conflict resolution to a new culture, the most elicitive trainers distill out norms and practices from within a new culture to shape ideal conflict resolution training. Most trainers, as well as models for conflict resolution training, fall somewhere along this continuum. As cultures interact, partners learn about each other’s best practices as well as synthesize new and emergent practices for conflict resolution implementation and training. This edited book documents experiences in the intersection of traditional cultural mediation practices with Western cultural frameworks and models. In each chapter, the author(s) tells a unique story of efforts to bring together “institutional” or Western models of mediation with traditional or customary practices in a given cultural setting.
This book is in response to the developmental waves over the last approximately 30 years in the transfer of neutrality-based “institutional” or “formal models” of mediation to many developing counties with highly diverse cultures. Steeped in the cultural norms and values of Western societies such as the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia, the original carte blanche approach to this transfer has been a questionable and uneven process, highly criticized by many for its lack of attention to the local and traditional cultures and customary practices. Subsequent waves of analysis have focused primarily on documenting traditional and indigenous cultural practices. Yet curiously missing has been the recognition and analysis of the actual intermingling and interacting of Western and traditional cultural practices that have produced new and emergent practices in our global community. Documenting such innovations and lessons learned from these encounters is the next logical step in our evolution of understanding innovative and culturally relevant conflict resolution.
Growth of Mediation as Social Innovation
We begin our understanding of these encounters by first outlining the development of mediation as a social innovation in the West that then some sought to transfer and others sought to receive. Mediation, the use of intermediaries to facilitate the negotiation and decision-making of the parties themselves, is to be distinguished from conflict and dispute resolution processes where a third party acts as an authoritative decision-maker or adjudicator (Gulliver, 1979). Mediation practices have been documented across the ages, as early as the Bible (ca. 2000 BC), the Amarna letters in Egypt (1500 BC), and the Iliad (750 BC) (Bercovitch, 2002), and likely before, and across many cultures. Though most early mediators functioned within religious roles and institutions, the rise of secularism and nation-states brought secular figures playing mediative (as well as adjudicatory) roles also (Moore, 2003). North America had colonies where immigrants of both ethnic and religious sects such as Puritans, Quakers, Jews, and Chinese brought and developed alternative procedures for their communities (Auerbach, 1983; Moore, 2003) that coexisted with preexisting procedures developed by indigenous North Americans (LeResche, 1993).
Mediation as a practice and as a profession gained momentum during the twentieth century. Mediation evolved from a role attached to existing positions and professions (clergy, teacher, elected or appointed leader) to become a profession unto itself. Mediation processes that returned the decision-making authority to primary parties r...