Role Fluidity and Working with Bias in the
Arena of Community Mediation
A practice-based account of conflict resolution practitioners combining roles of
mediator-facilitator and roles as advocate-activist, while working for social
change in the context of social injustice.
BASED ON ETNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY RESEARH INTO
YOUTH - POLICE DIALOGUES IN BALTIMORE CITY, UNITED STATES.
by Meret Muntinga Student number: 10122060 Email: meretmuntinga@gmail.com
Study Programme:
MsC Conflict Resolution and Governance (MsC CRG) (2016-2017)
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science University of Amsterdam
Thesis Supervisor:
Dr. Michelle Parlevliet (michelle.parlevliet@uva.nl)
Second Reader:
Dr. David Laws (david.laws@uva.nl)
Date of Submission: 20 July 2017
Word count:
3
“Advocacy chooses to stand on one side for justice’s sake, mediation chooses to stand on all sides for justice’s sake.”
(JP Lederach, conflict resolution practitioner and scholar, 2013)1
~
“On the ground, and on the community level, we are at ground zero right now [concerning police community relations]. […] What I suggest is that we do is that we have mediators, that come to the
scene, that place liasons.”
(Lamontre Randall, community mediator and youth advocate, personal interview 2017)
~
“I think we are actually in a time right now where you have to be an advocate, for people who are being oppressed. Mediation is bullshit. In this era we’re in right now it’s total bullshit. […] in a world
where we are killing people because they’re black, it’s bullshit.”
(JC Faulk, Baltimorean diversion-and-inclusion-professional-gone-activist, personal interview 2017).
1
I have not been able to track down the origin of this citation, unfortunately. However, it has inspired this study.
The photo on the cover was taken at North Avenue, Baltimore City, during the my visit there for fieldwork in April 2017.
5
CONTENT
CONTENT ... 5 PREFACE ... 7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ... 9 CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION ... 101.1 Dialogue Programmes in the Context of Social Injustice ... 13
1.2 Implications for Conflict Resolution Practitioners ... 15
1.3 The Case: Facilitating Youth Police Dialogues to address an Asymmetrical Structural Social Conflict in Baltimore City ... 17
1.4 An Inquiry into the Reflective Practice of Facilitators holding both Pastor and Prophet Roles 20 CHAPTER 2 – THE CASE: PRACTITIONERS FACILITATATING YOUTH POLICE DIALOGUES AT THE COMMUNITY MEDIATION CENTER BALTIMORE ... 22
2.1 Community Mediation in the US ... 22
2.1.1 Community Mediation as Conflict Resolution of the People, by the People and for the People ... 22
2.1.2 Community Mediation in the US: Sources of Origin ... 23
2.2 Community Mediation Center Baltimore ... 24
2.2.1 Youth Police Dialogues ... 25
2.2.2 Introducing the Practitioners from the Baltimore Community Mediation Center ... 26
CHAPTER 3 – THEORETICAL DEBATES AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATION OF THIS THESIS ... 28
3.1 The Ideal of Non-Bias (‘Neutrality’) versus the Practice of Being Human ... 28
3.2 Critiques on dialogue-based conflict resolution: imperatives for the mediator facilitator ... 31
3.2.1 ADR: A tool for Social Control rather than a means for Social Change... 31
3.2.2 Restorative Justice: Addressing Individual Disputes Rather than Structural Causes ... 32
3.2.3 Community Mediation: An Apolitical Conceptualization with a Political Practice ... 33
3.2.4 From Critiques to Imperatives ... 34
3.3 The Role Combination Debate ... 36
3.3.1 An Advocate-Activist cannot be a Mediator-Facilitator, and Vice Versa ... 36
3.3.2 Mayer: Conflict Resolution Practitioners should hold Ally and Third party Roles, but not in One Context ... 37
3.3.3 In Practice: The Pastor/Prophet Dilemma as Non-Binary ... 38
3.3.4 Theoretical Argument in Sum ... 39
6
3.4.1 Reflective Practice, Knowing-In-Action and Reflection-In-Action... 41
3.4.2 Framing or Interpretation of the Problematic Situation as central to Reflective Practice .. 43
3.4.3 Research Sub Questions ... 43
CHAPTER 4 – METHODS ... 46
4.1 Premises as a Researcher: Intersectional Constructivist Point of Departure ... 47
4.1.1 How Intersectionality Complements Constructivism: ‘You Make the World You Study through the Act of Studying It’... 48
4.1.2 Consequences of Intersectional Constructivism on Doing Social Science Research ... 49
4.2 Ethnographic Case Study Research ... 50
4.2.1 Justification of the Unit of Study ... 51
4.2.2 Operationalization of the Research Question... 51
4.2.3 Description of Methods ... 52
4.2.4 Limitations of Methodology, Reflexivity of the Researcher and Ethical Considerations ... 57
CHAPTER 5 – FINDINGS & ANALYSIS ... 60
5.1 Framing ... 61
5.1.1 Shared Diagnostic Prescriptive Stories of the Youth-BPD Conflict: Relational Bankruptcy leads to Relation Restoration ... 61
5.1.2 Diversion in the Practical Implications of Shared Diagnostic-Prescriptive stories ... 65
5.1.3 Frames shape Practice: The YPD programme as Joint Response ... 68
5.1.4 Framing of the youth-BPD conflict by activist against police violence ... 69
5.2 Reflective practice ... 71
5.2.1 Working with Bias through the Mechanism of Role Reciprocity ... 71
5.2.2 Pastor and Prophet Roles as Frames in which Practitioners Position Themselves ... 78
CHAPTER 6 – CONCLUDING REMARKS ... 84
REFERENCES ... 88
7
PREFACE
This thesis – This thesis is written from the perspective of conflict resolution practitioners. Also, it is written for those who assist others in getting from destructive to constructive conflict, from interpersonal to international level. I am excited to call myself a ‘future conflict resolver’2, a conflict resolution practitioner in training: learning how to analyse social conflicts and go from analysis to practice in assisting parties to fruitful conflict, as I adhere to Lewis Coser’s notion that we need social conflict in our relations and in society as a whole (1956).3 However, I always feel slightly unsatisfied when explaining the field of conflict resolution, its practices and ‘career options’. Throughout the course of my master’s programme, sometimes I have caught myself thinking: ‘How typical of you to choose a profession that is geared towards process over substance!’ Or, ‘What do I really know, what can I bring to the table?’ Not especially comforting thoughts for someone about to dive into the professional ‘rest of my life’ pool.
2017 is – from my Western-European, female, white, middleclass view of the world – marked by the hardening debate between the political left and right, exacerbated by Trump’s election and a gain of political right throughout the ‘Western world’, and less room for constructive dialogue towards mutual understanding between people with differences throughout society, which becomes painfully evident in the European attitude towards people seeking refuge in our continent. More than ever, I believe that any attempt to create a space where people get to talk and discuss those differences honestly and genuinely is worthwhile. We live in an era in which common sense says: ‘Yes, bring them on, those conflict resolvers!’, and yet our field is marginal.4 Thus, as much as this is a thesis based on conversations with current practitioners involved in community mediation, it is also my personal inquiry into the 50-year-old field, and what a conflict-resolution practitioner can offer the world now, written for anyone who is interested. This is a thesis with which I fight
2 Or, following Mayer (2004) a conflict specialist, since I believe that addressing conflict is indeed not only about the resolution.
3 Social conflict is defined by Coser as “[…] a struggle over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponents are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals.” (1956: 8). 4 Bernie Mayer refers to this marginal position of conflict resolution as “the paradox of satisfied users and a uninterested public”; even though the public seems satisfied when using conflict resolution services, there is a general resistance “[…] to engage in a fuller and more systemic way.”(2004: 77).
8 – as far as that is allowed in academia – against the binary thinking engrained in the field and in our minds throughout our studies, work and personal relationships and selves (including myself): either/or, good/bad, passionate/objective and advocate/mediator – obscuring the endless complexity of the social world.5
Preview – This thesis is organised into six chapters. Chapters are divided in Sections, and Sections are divided in Subsections. Chapter One is an introductory chapter, in which the puzzle of this thesis is explained and the research question posed. Chapter Two summarizes the chosen case. Chapter Three lays out the theoretical argument on which this thesis builds. Chapter Four introduces the methodology and reflects on practice and limitations of these methods. Chapter Five summarizes and analyses the findings in light of the theoretical approach and central theoretical puzzle of this thesis. Chapter Six presents and discusses the conclusion of the study, as well as future research possibilities.
Thank you for your interest in reading this thesis, and don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Meret Muntinga | Amsterdam, July 20, 2017
Email: meretmuntinga@gmail.com Phone: +31 6 547 277 52
5
Days after finishing this preface, I came across a section in the summary of Michelle Parlevliet’s dissertation. The section reads: “Such dilemma-thinking [referring to her discussion of the four dilemma’s human rights and/or conflict resolution practitioners grapple with] captures the choices available to practitioners in a simplistic binary frame, as if actors are forced to choose between only two, mutually exclusive, options for action.” (Parlevliet 2015b: 14). Dilemma thinking, or binary thinking, is problematized throughout her entire thesis. John Dewey, American philosopher, has made ‘overcoming binary-thinking and binary-doing’ centrepiece of his work: “[Dewey] devoted his life to the project of overcoming the dualisms that afflict the field of education, along with the rest of the modern world – the dualisms of thought and action, research and practice, science and common sense, the academy and the everyday life.” (Schön 1992: 121). (As if doing and thinking happen separate! As if everyday life and the academy are separated entities!) I assume on this problem in my thesis and my aim is to overcome this kind of thinking; though I am not asserting that I can entirely escape from binary thinking, since it is the way I was (largely) educated, and taught to think about the world.
9
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
- ADR: Alternative dispute resolution – conflict resolution process, often in the form of mediation
- BPD: Baltimore Police Department
- BCMC: Baltimore Community Mediation Center - CMM: Community Mediation Maryland
- DOJ: Department of Justice
- MACRO: Maryland Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office - NAFCM: National Association for Community Mediation
- YPD: Youth Police Dialogue – Dialogue programme organised by the BCMC in partnership with the BPD
10
CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION
It was a Thursday night during the winter of 2016. I was facilitating a Socratic dialogue at DenkTrip, a series of evenings a friend and I had organised at a café in Amsterdam.
That night, the topic of the evening was societal labels linked to mental illness: ‘DSM Dogmas’. I led a group of seven bright and interesting women I had only just met. I remember that I felt confident. I had practiced for this dialogue the week before and knew every step of the discussion process. First, everyone writes down a personal experience, linked to the Socratic question: What is a psychological label (a social label related to the diagnosis of a mental illness)? We democratically choose the most appropriate anecdote. Next, everyone tries to live through the experience and writes down what she would feel, think and do in the central moment of the person’s experience. I help the group to identify the assumptions that lie beneath these ways of feeling, thinking and doing. From those, we derive our leading principles and discuss them en groupe.
During the dialogue, there were moments where I seriously struggled with my role as a facilitator. I should be helping them to think together, I thought; I should not be involved based on content, nor should I bring in my own experiences. However, this dialogue revolved around an anecdote from one of the seven women in the group, a psychologist, who had diagnosed a patient of hers as having ADHD after seeing her only twice. She felt incredibly torn about this. I struggled because this had happened to me when I was sixteen. That year, I had gone from being a straight-A grammar school girl to a rebellious teenager, interested in everything but school. Within a few months, I was diagnosed with ADHD, received prescriptions, which I refused to take, and had to relate to a new part of my ‘identity’ (though I felt I was the same person I’d been when I was doing well at school).
Towards the end of the dialogue, I wanted to summarize the conversation thus far in front of the whiteboard, but struggled with getting to the core of the matter, and almost had to call time-out because thoughts like “you are chaotic!” “you are vague!” – all related to the label of having ADHD and popping up because of the night’s topic – distracted me from doing the work. Once we had concluded, I shared this experience with the group and received empathy and many positive remarks about how I had led them in the conversation.6
This experience kept me thinking. What is the function of my experiences, when am I not allowed to let them play a part in a dialogue I am facilitating? Would I have been better able to guide the participants had I not had the same experience? Or did my own personal involvement in the matter, despite not being voiced, actually help me to facilitate more effectively? The experience raises questions about the role of bias in the practice of dialogue facilitation.
I have learned that these questions apply to a student-facilitator like myself as much as they do to professional facilitators and mediators, such as the facilitators from the Community Mediation Center Baltimore (CMCB). These practitioners facilitate and mediate in various
6
11 community mediation programmes in Baltimore, Maryland (United States), including a dialogue programme between disadvantaged Baltimore youth and officers from the Baltimore Police Department (BPD): Youth Police Dialogues (YPDs).
For clarity, definitions of central terms used throughout this thesis are provided. Practitioners are defined as professional specialists (Schön 1991: 60). BPD practitioners work at the Baltimore Police Department as chiefs and are involved in the YPD programme at an organisational level. BCMC practitioners work at the Baltimore Community Mediation Center in third-party mediator-facilitator roles. All of the BCMC practitioners who have served as informants of this study also hold advocate-activist roles, next to their work at the BCMC. No further distinction is made within these two categories of roles. The mediator-facilitator or ‘pastor’ role is understood as a third-party role; a neutral role such as mediator or facilitator in which the practitioner assists conflicting parties (Mayer 2004: 221).7 The advocate-activist or ‘prophet’ role is understood as an ally role; a non-neutral role such as advocate or activist in which one particular party is assisted (Mayer 2004: 221).8 Hence advocate-activist, ally and prophet roles are referred to as one category, and mediator-facilitator, third-party and pastor roles are referred to as one category. Conflict resolution practitioners are understood as “conflict specialists” who work in ally or third-party roles to
7
The term pastor is lent from Parlevliet; she uses the labels ‘pastor’ and ‘prophet’ to refer to the role tension between conflict resolution (facilitation) and human rights (advocacy) roles (2015: 189). These ‘religious’ terms are born out of a case in which church leaders in Zimbabwe had to hold both roles simultaneously (Parlevliet 2015: 189). Parlevliet uses the terminology of Van der Merwe, who came up with the dilemma of the prophet and the peacemaker (in: Parlevliet 2015: 248). I have chosen to follow Parlevliet instead of van der Merwe, because Parlevliet makes the argument that the dilemma between both roles is less insurmountable than asserted in literature (2015: 257).
Although I refer to mediators and facilitators as one category, the roles are not the same. Mediator is in this thesis defined as practitioners or intervenors who “[…] assist the parties in reaching a mutually satisfactory settlement for their differences, usually by means of face-to-face bargaining sessions.” (Laue & Cormick 1978: 214). Facilitators on the other hand, facilitate a dialogue process similar to mediators, however, the end goal of the sessions is not to reach an agreement.
8
Mayer does not include activist roles in his categorization of ‘ally roles’ (2004: 221), as I do. Activist and advocate roles are similar because they are both ‘working with’ roles; the intervenor works with one party instead for two (or more) parties. However; activist and advocate roles are not the same. The activist role is understood in this thesis as an intervenor or practitioner who “works closely with the powerless or non-establishment party in a conflict. […] and may become member of the group or be so closely aligned with it that they become directly involved and take the group goals as their own.” (Laue & Cormick 1978: 212, 213). An advocate on the contrary, is defined as an intervenor or practitioner who “is not a member of a disputing group, but serves as advisor or consultant to that group. […] [and] support[s] the goals of the group and promote its cause to the opponents and to the wider community.” (Laue & Cormick 1978: 213). Despite the differences, I consider these roles together throughout this thesis.
12 help people to “[…] engage in conflict in a productive and constructive way.” (Mayer 2004: 215; 193).9 Hence, I believe that “the point [of the process to bring about conflict resolution] is not how to eliminate or prevent conflict, but rather how to make it productive” (Deutsch 1973: 17). BCMC practitioners are thus perceived as conflict resolution practitioners in both
of their roles.
Throughout this thesis, I make the claim that pastor and prophet roles are mutually enforcing in the arena of community mediation in contexts of social injustice. As my data suggest, this happens through a mechanism I have called ‘role reciprocity’. Role reciprocity is defined as a two-way exchange between roles, by which setting-specific information in the form of bias and know-how learned by practitioners in the performance of the prophet role is transferred tacitly for utilisation in the performance of the pastor role, and vice versa.
First prerequisite for this mechanism to function well and for information to flow in both directions between role settings, is that both roles are performed within the same conflict context. A conflict context is defined as a spatially-bounded context in which the conflict takes place (for example, Baltimore is the context of the ‘disadvantaged youth – BPD officers conflict’). A role setting on the contrary, is defined as a spatially-bounded setting in which a role of a conflict resolution practitioner is performed (for example, the YPD sessions are a setting in which BCMC practitioners perform their roles). Second prerequisite is that both roles allow for a generic “metacultural framing” (Schön & Rein 1994: 33) in which the cause of the conflict is understood generic and fits into a broadly shared belief system. Third prerequisite for this mechanism to function well is that ally work is performed in support of the weaker party in the conflict (in this case: disadvantaged youth). Fourth and last prerequisite for this mechanism to function is that third-party work is performed within a community-rooted community mediation centre, functioning independent from the state
and the courts.
Conclusions are drawn from a case study analysis of practitioners facilitating the YPD programme, conducted in an ethnographic research framework with a three-week fieldwork period in Baltimore. Data indicate the existence of role reciprocity; however, data do not
9
Bernie Mayer proposes to refer to these professional specialists conflict specialists, and rename the field in Conflict Engagement (Mayer 2004).
13 directly back up prerequisites. Moreover, due to time constraints, none of the conclusions are verified with practitioners.
This study is relevant for conflict resolution literature since it adds a practice-informed account to scarce literature on the potential benefits of role combinations of mediator-facilitator and advocate-activist (others include Parlevliet 2015; Laue & Cormick 1978). Findings are relevant for conflict resolution practitioners holding both roles, as well as practitioners who shy away from role combination, since tacit reflection-in-practice (Schön: 1991: 50) is made explicit. Lastly, this study is relevant for policy designers because it offers insight into the relation between conflict frames, policy response options and practitioners’ professional realities.
In this chapter I shall firstly introduce dialogue programmes in the context of social injustice (1.1); then I shall turn to the theoretical debate on which this study builds (1.2); thereafter I shall introduce the case set in the structural violent context of Baltimore (1.3); after which I will state the guiding research question and conclude with the theoretical lens that has initially inspired me to inquire into practice, and that has allowed me to interpret my data from the field: Donald Schön’s notion of the Reflective Practitioner (1991) (1.4).
1.1 Dialogue Programmes in the Context of Social Injustice
As a popular saying goes: “as long as you’re talking, you can’t be shooting”; dialogues are often seen as a means of dealing constructively with conflict (Ropers 2004: 2). Dialogue programmes organized by community mediation centres, such as the YPD programme, are informed by ADR principles and restorative justice principles. Following the critique on both ADR and restorative justice, these dialogue programmes are under critique – especially when the aim is to address conflict in the context of social injustice, as I will show below.
Dialogues can have many forms and functions; in this paper however, focus is on human relations dialogues programmes, in which “work is done […] on the relational level, focussing on the causes of misunderstandings and stereotypes which typically arise between the parties [in conflict].” (Ropers 2004: 3). Human relations dialogue programmes are central to grassroots peacebuilding; peacebuilding efforts related to the local level and bringing together people who share an “interdependent fate because of a violent past” (Ropers 2004: 5). In my understanding, disadvantaged Baltimore youth and BPD officers
14 share such an interdependent fate, since they are dependent on each other despite a violent past and present. Therefore, the YPD programme is to be regarded as a human relations dialogue programme.
The YPD programme is organized by a community mediation centre, and is informed by mediation processes in the tradition of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), and dialogue processes in the tradition of restorative justice.10 ADR is a field adjacent to the juridical field that typically replaces litigation, in which intervention is conceived as a short-term mediation process to assist parties in reaching a mutual agreement (Schoeny & Warfield 2000: 266). Restorative justice evolved in line with the initiation of the ADR movement in the 1970s, and is seen as an alternative to our current criminal justice system (Lightfoot & Umbreit 2004: 418; Zehr 2014: 13). A restorative justice process, often in the form of mediation or dialogue circles, requires that victims’ harms and needs are addressed, offenders are held accountable to put right those harms, and victims, offenders and communities are involved in this process (Zehr 2014: 13).
I will go over the critiques of both ADR and restorative justice for two reasons: 1) The YPD programme is organised and facilitated by staff trained in ADR-like mediation skills applied to a setting of facilitating dialogues, 2) the YPD programme resembles more of a restorative justice process though it is facilitated by ‘ADR trained’ practitioners. This is because the YPD programme does not address specific bad interactions between youth and police, hence it is not aimed to reach a mutually agreed upon agreement (as is central to ADR). Rather, participating police officers and youth may not have interacted prior to group dialogue. Criticisms of ADR and restorative justice informed dialogue can be divided in three strands. The first strand of critique can be regarded as the ‘trading justice for harmony’ allegation, in which the “harmony ideology” typical of these processes compromises democratic rights (Nader 1993: 1). Accordingly, these programmes are regarded as a tool for social control instead of a means for social change (Schoeny & Warfield 2000: 258). Secondly, scholars have been critical because of neglect within these methods to address structural causes,
10
In this thesis, mediation and facilitation are used to refer to similar conflict resolution processes (see footnote 6 page 11). In line with Mayer, mediation is used in this thesis as the umbrella term of both processes; mediation is hereby understood as “many types of third-party, nonbinding interventions ranging from evaluative to transformative, directive to facilitative, active to passive, and substance focused to process focused.” (2004: 84).
15 since conflicts are addressed individually (Henkeman 2012: 244). Lastly, the apolitical conceptualisation of community mediation specifically, and mediation and dialogue programmes in general, has been problematized (Neves 2009: 492; Li-On 2009: 454).
Furthermore, when aiming to resolve conflicts between unequal parties, scholars are critical (for example: Henkeman 2010: 733). When social injustice contexts aren’t taken into account, the critical scholars argue, restorative justice programmes serve “as a peacemaking process within a paradigm stacked against the poor and vulnerable.” (Henkeman 2016, online). Social injustice is in this thesis understood as structural or indirect violence:
Social justice is structural violence: “There may not be any person who directly harms another person in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.” (Galtung 1969: 171).
Police violence for example, although committed personally, is a form of structural violence since it doesn’t harm people equally. Throughout this thesis, I shall refer to indirect violence, structural violence, social injustice and unequal power relationships interchangeably. Social change is accordingly understood as moving towards a situation of an absence of structural violence, or social justice (Laue & Cormick 1978: 220; Galtung 1969: 171).
These critiques have implications for practitioners facilitating dialogue programs, such as the BCMC practitioners. In the following subsection, consequences for practitioners will be introduced.
1.2 Implications for Conflict Resolution Practitioners
Practitioners facilitating dialogue programmes in the context of structural violence find themselves in theoretical limbo: should they remain impartial and stick to their ‘neutral’ mediator-facilitator role, or should they be political to work towards social change, which would compromise the neutrality of this role?11 This tension reveals two ongoing debates in conflict resolution literature, on which this study builds; neutrality in the performance of the mediator-facilitator role and desirability of role combination of mediator-facilitators roles
11 In this thesis, I assume on Kraybill, Izumi and Cobb et al., that a mediator’s or facilitator’s neutrality is not humanly possible, and thus an illusion (respectively: 2000, 2010, 1991). The argument that mediator or facilitator neutrality is not realistic, will be established in section 3.2, page 31-35.
16 and advocate-activist roles. These debates, both related to the notion of neutrality, are introduced below.
Both debates relate to the “bailiwick” of classic conflict resolution: the need to maintain neutrality (Mayer 2004: 29). In classic conflict resolution thinking, “neutrality is understood and invoked as a stronghold against bias.” (Rifkin, Millen & Cobb 1991: 151). In this thesis, neutrality is in line with this and defined as impartiality, in the sense that none of the parties should be supported more than another, and the personal bias of the intervenor should stay
outside the mediation session (Rifkin, Cobb and Millen 1991: 152) – although I thus not
believe this is humanly possible (see foot note 10, page 12). More precisely, impartiality in this understanding is defined as the “ability to interact in the absence of feelings, values, or agendas in themselves.” (Davis 1986: 21). Bias is, in line with this classic reading of neutrality, understood as ‘personal feelings, values, or agendas’.
The first debate is about the classical imperative for mediators and facilitators of dialogue programmes to maintain neutrality, versus critical voices contradicting this neutral stance and asserting that mediators and facilitators should be political and contextualised in order to achieve social change (for example: Henkeman 2016; Neves 2009). Mediators and facilitators should be, according to critics, aware of the social and political contexts, address conflicts in structures and not individualities, and use political potential of their work as a means to achieve social injustice (for example: Neves 2009; Li-On 2009; Henkeman 2016; Schoeny & Warfield 2000). As Neves rightfully asserts, doing this is anything but impartial: “So, when they do it, are mediators walking the thin line between mediation of cases and defence of causes, or have they actually crossed it?” (2009: 492).
The second debate that is relevant for this study is about the desirability of role combination. Classic literature asserts that advocate-activist and mediator-facilitator roles should not be combined, for matters of maintaining neutrality as described above (for example: Arnold 1989; Fast 2002). In other words: one actor cannot hold both roles. Slightly diverging from this notion, it is asserted that practitioners can hold both roles in different but not in similar conflicts (Mayer 2004: 240). This argument is made recently by Bernie Mayer in his proposal that conflict resolution practitioners should include ally roles in their services in order to assist parties throughout the entire conflict process instead of solely the
17 resolution part (Mayer 2004: 84). However, he agrees with classic literature that holding both ally and third-party neutral roles in the same dispute should always be avoided (Mayer 2004: 240). The classic assertion is that combining roles of mediator-facilitator and advocate-activist might impede “role integrity” (Arnold 1998: 1) and should be therefore avoided (Fast 2002: 537). However, in practice, role combination in the same dispute has proven unavoidable at times and less problematic than classic literature asserts (Parlevliet 2015: 257). Therefore, Parlevliet suggests regarding mediator-facilitator and advocate-activist roles on a “prophet/ peacemaker spectrum” (2015: 256), which reveals the fluidity between these roles.
These two debates raise the question of how practitioners holding pastor and prophet roles in the same conflict assist parties constructively. Which leads to the case study of this research project: The practitioners of the Youth Police Dialogues from the Baltimore Community Mediation Center (BCMC), who all hold pastor and prophet roles.
1.3 The Case: Facilitating Youth Police Dialogues to address an Asymmetrical Structural Social Conflict in Baltimore City
The YPD programme is a human relations dialogue programme (Ropers 2014: 3) organized by a local community mediation centre in partnership with the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). Facilitators of the YPD programme facilitate dialogue between unequal parties (youth versus police) entangled in conflict within a city marked with social injustices. The lingering conflict between the BPD officers and the African-American and/or economically disadvantaged youth community, is typified in this thesis as a structural asymmetrical social conflict. Baltimore is an east-coast post-industrial city dealing with exceptional socio-economic segregation, partly along racial lines. Moreover, the city is marked by disproportionate police violence harming the African-American community. This city in distress forms the backdrop for youth living in the city and participating in the YPDs, as well the workplace for officers from the BPD, and as the context of the work of facilitators from the YPD who serve as main informants of this study. Below, I will describe the features of this case in more detail.
The BCMC is a grassroots not-for-profit community mediation centre, offering free mediation services to the residents in Baltimore. Since 2015, the BCMC has organised
18 weekly Youth Police Dialogues (YPDs), with approximately 15 officers and 15 youth from Baltimore City Public Schools (Herring 2017b, personal communication). The aim of the YPD programme is to address the conflict between disadvantaged youth and BPD officers constructively, by
“[…] reducing interpersonal and community violence by helping people find their voice, build understanding, build relations and in the end a stronger, more just and inclusive Baltimore.” (Guy 2017, personal communication)
This conflict is understood as a structural asymmetrical social conflict. Structural since the conflict is marked with social injustice in which violence is not personal (Galtung 1969: 170, 171), asymmetrical because youth and police are qualitatively unequal in power since they are state versus non-state actors (Ramsbotham et al. 2011: 59) and social because the groups “hostile attitudes are turned into [a pattern of] social action” in a “struggle over
values and claims to scarce status, power and resources in which the aims of the opponents
are to neutralize, injure or eliminate their rivals.” (Coser 1956: 37; 8, emphasis added). I shall go into two aspects of Baltimorean social injustice which are key in relation to the YPD programme, although Baltimorean social injustice concerns many more aspects, such as access to health care, access to quality education and infrastructure.
First, it is important to understand the existence of ‘two Baltimores’, one for the advantaged and one the disadvantaged. Baltimore is a major city in Maryland (US) with a 63% Afro-American population (US census 2016). The city is marked by an hourglass economy, where those with appropriate skillsets thrive and those left behind work at low-wage jobs with little potential for advancement (Alexander et al. 2014: 26):
“Poor, yes, but not uniformly so. Baltimore in fact has become, and is today ‘two cities – a city of developers, suburban professionals, and back-to-the-city gentry … and a city of impoverished blacks and displaced manufacturing workers, who continue to suffer from shrinking economic opportunities, declining public services, and neighbourhood distress.’” (Levine 1987: 103 in Alexander et al. 2014: 2, emphasis added).
This has given the city the label ‘two Baltimores’ (Department of Justice, 2016: 10). Throughout this thesis, I will refer to the Baltimore of the socially marginalised (‘the
19 impoverished blacks and displaced manufacturing workers’) as ‘the other Baltimore’, and to avoid repetition I will refer to youth from ‘the other Baltimore’ as disadvantaged youth.
Second, it is important to understand how police violence harms (economically disadvantaged) African American Baltimoreans disproportionately. Therefore, I make a distinction between community violence and police violence; the first includes all Baltimorean crimes and homicides, and the second includes crimes (such as harassment and racial profiling) and homicides by the BPD. Along with and in relation to socio-economic segregation, Baltimore has one of the highest homicide rates in the US (The Economist 2017); 2017 counts 187 homicides, which will probably make the current year the most violent since the nineties when killings more often 300 annually (Ianelli 2017).12 In 2015, Baltimore was on fire due to massive protests against police violence, known as ‘the uprising’. The protests started after an unarmed African-American man, Freddie Gray, died from injuries in police custody after being shackled on the floor by the police (The Guardian n.d.). African-Americans count for 24% of the killings by police violence, whilst they make up only 13% of the US population (Lowery 2016). The Department of Justice (DOJ) has concluded that the “BPD engages in a pattern of practice” of, amongst other things, “using excessive force” and “using enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests of African-Americans”, which results from “systemic deficiencies at the BPD.” (DOJ 2016: 3). Following the DOJ report in 2016, the consent decree was approved in April 2017, which is a court enforceable agreement to address systemic deficiencies at the BPD as formulated in the DOJ report (BPD 2017a). The YPD programme is as of January 2017 part of the mandatory in-service training for all officers (George 2017), and fits into the agreed revised training curriculum of the BPD (BPD 2017a).
Concluding, the YPDs take place in a socially unjust context. Based on evaluative data from both groups of participants, the sessions are considered beneficial (BCMC 2017b). This study does not to purport to be an evaluative account of the YPD in terms of impact (however
12
The Baltimore Sun has an online tool to view homicides: www.data.baltimoresun/news/police/homicides. On July 18 2017, the year counted 187 homicides. The Economist has visualized murder rates of 50 American violent cities in a graphic chart, in which Baltimore is categorized in the category ‘high and rising’; meaning that murder rates are relatively high compared to the other 49 cities, and rising compared to past years (The Economist 2017).
20 interesting and relevant that would be (see for example Charkoudian & Bilick 2015: 272). I set out to understand how practitioners work for their goals of social injustice, while holding advocate-activist and mediator-facilitator roles.
1.4 An Inquiry into the Reflective Practice of Facilitators holding both Pastor and Prophet Roles
Throughout this thesis, I aim to make sense of the professional practices in the performance of pastor and prophet roles in the arena of community mediation and community advocacy and/or activism situated in a context of social injustice. Therefore, the research question is as follows:
How do BCMC practitioners involved in a dialogue based conflict resolution program addressing structural asymmetrical social conflict between disadvantaged youth and police officers from the Baltimore Police Department in Baltimore city, work towards social change from their roles as mediator-facilitators and activist-advocates?
This question has given me insight into the function of role combination, since the performance of both roles (as ‘working towards social change’) is explicated. Fieldwork data are interpreted through the theoretical lens of reflective practice, as described by Donald Schön in his book ‘the Reflective Practitioner’ (1991).
Donald Schön’s notion of the reflective practitioner demonstrates the relevance of the practitioners’ own insights and the relevance of practice-based-theory, central to this study. Reflective practice is defined as “a communicative and self-reflective practice of reciprocal inquiry.” (Schön 1992: 123). Through reflection on practice, facilitated by conversations with BCMC practitioners, their tacit knowledge is made explicit. Furthermore, data are understood from the perspective of framing theory. Framing should be understood as “a particular way of representing knowledge and the reliance on (and development of) interpretative schemas that bound and order a chaotic situation, facilitate interpretation and provide a guide for doing and acting.” (Laws & Rein 2003: 173, emphasis added). It follows from this definition of framing that the ways in which the conflict is framed provides ground for action; both in the form of the design and execution of the YPDs as a joint
CMCB-21 BPD partnership, and in the way practitioners work towards their goals of social change. In other words: interpretation (frames) and action (practice) are interdependent.
The puzzle of this thesis exists in the theoretical tension of YPD facilitation practitioners who – in line with classic conflict resolution philosophy – adhere to the notion of neutrality as a stronghold against bias whilst they voice their bias outside the facilitation session, in terms of outspoken ideas on the social justice and social change supporting the community. It follows from the assumption of “the illusion of neutrality” (Kraybill 2000), that in practice, multiple roles must influence one another in some way or the other; the question is in which ways and by what mechanisms.
The study is a practice-based account in which “tacit recognitions, judgements and skilful performances” (Schön 1991: 50) from practitioners working towards social change in advocate-activist and mediator-facilitator roles, are revealed. From this inquiry into practice in the tradition of inter alia Laws’ and Forester’s accounts of practitioners’ “situated performances that unfold within the particularity of a given setting” (2015: 345), I aim to build on existing conflict resolution literature asserting that role combination is not only unavoidable but also not necessarily problematic (Parlevliet 2015: 256). With this thesis, I aim to expand the thinking about ‘practitioners roles’ and what it means to ‘practice towards social change’ from seemingly conflicting roles in the field of conflict resolution.
In the following chapter I will contextualize the unit of analysis of this study, by providing background information on community mediation in the US, and the Baltimore centre.
22
CHAPTER 2 – THE CASE: PRACTITIONERS FACILITATATING YOUTH POLICE
DIALOGUES AT THE COMMUNITY MEDIATION CENTER BALTIMORE
This chapter sets out with the meaning of community mediation, simply understood as mediation by and for the community. It reveals, however, that many community mediation centres aren’t ‘community rooted’. Rather, many centres in the US are court-affiliated. This disparity stems from two different sources originating in the 1970s; bottom-up community empowering movements on the one hand and reformist initiatives focussed around the inefficiency of the courts system on the other. This background is important in light of understanding the position of the Community Mediation Center Baltimore (CMCB), grassroots, non-profit, and funded by a state-led organisation but independent from the courts. As I will discuss in the concluding chapter of this thesis, this grassroots community-rooted character of the BCMC is considered the fourth prerequisite for the mechanism of ‘role reciprocity’ to function.
First, I will explain what is meant by community mediation (2.1.1). Then I go into its origins (2.1.2). Third, I will provide background information on the BCMC (2.2) and explain what happens in the YPDs (2.2.1). Lastly, I will introduce the BCMC practitioners who have informed this study (2.2.2).
2.1 Community Mediation in the US
2.1.1 Community Mediation as Conflict Resolution of the People, by the People and for the People
“The contemporary field [of community mediation] is uniquely an American experience” (Hedeen 2004: 101). In 2011, a study reported that the US then counted approximately 400 community mediation centres (Corbett & Corbett 2011). However, as in other arenas of conflict resolution, community mediation programmes and services play a peripheral role in the conflicts that communities face, despite the proven potential to make a major contribution (Mayer 2004: 77). Community mediation can be simply described as “mediation by and for the people” (Charkoudian & Bilick 2015: 270), or similarly, “dispute resolution of the people, by the people, [and] for the people” (Hedeen 2004: 101). The US
23 National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM) website gives the following definition:
“Community mediation offers constructive processes for resolving differences and conflicts between individuals, groups, and organizations. It is an alternative to avoidance, destructive confrontation, prolonged litigation or violence. It gives people in conflict an opportunity to take responsibility for the resolution of their dispute and control of the outcome. Community mediation is designed to preserve individual interests while strengthening relationships and building connections between people and groups, and to create processes that make communities work for all of us.” (NAFCM 2017, online)
In this definition, the notion of “community organised” has fallen away. This is because a fair number of community mediation centres are not grassroots, but public non-court agencies, court-affiliated organisations, or university-based organisations (Charkoudian & Bilick 2015: 254). In the definition provided by the Baltimore centre (BCMC), community mediation “provides a non-profit framework for assuring access to mediation services at the community level with control and responsibility for dispute resolution maintained in the community.” (BCMC 2017a). This definition illustrates their position as a private grassroots not-for-profit organisation.
The difference between state-affiliated and community-rooted becomes clear when looking at the origins of community mediation in the US, which I will do in the next section.
2.1.2 Community Mediation in the US: Sources of Origin
The emphasis on the citizen-run, community-oriented character of community mediation and avoiding “prolonged litigation” (NAFCM 2017) within an inefficient court system is rooted in two primary sources of community mediation in the US (Hedeen 2004: 102).
The first source is the political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which embraced community mediation as “an empowering tool for individuals and communities seeking to regain control over their lives away from governmental institution – the courts – regarded not only as inefficient but also oppressive and unfair.” (Li-On 2009: 455). This perspective led to the birth of grassroots non-profit mediation centres, such as BCMC. The
24 second source of community mediation stems from governmental and non-governmental reformist initiatives “focused primarily on redressing the inefficiency of the court system” (Li-On 2009: 455). This second source is linked with the growth of the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) movement as a field adjacent to legal practice in the US and elsewhere.
Community centres throughout the US thus have different sources of origin, a fact that undoubtedly influences their programmes and services. Indicators of the type of community mediation centre include whether the centre is independent or court-affiliated, where funding comes from and the number of cases referred to by governmental agencies (e.g. the courts, police department), versus by the community (e.g. self-referrals, schools) (Charkoudian & Bilick 2015: 234, 246, 239). A quantitative study in 2014 agrees that even though the philosophy of a centre might be that citizens can use services by the community mediation centre to resolve their disputes, the “reality is that the vast majority of cases are referred from courts. [And,] this referral pattern challenges the centres’ ability to maintain their independence and commitment to self-determination.” (Charkoudian & Bilick 2015: 239).
The “two streams of innovation” (bottom up versus top down origins) that led to the birth of community mediation (Hedeen 2004: 102) prove insightful in relation to role reciprocity; this mechanism seems to function within the performance of pastor and prophet roles by practitioners from a grassroots centre, who are regarded by the community as being ‘on their side’ and support the weaker party in the conflict through their ally work. For this reason, I will address the character of the BCMC in the next section.
2.2 Community Mediation Center Baltimore
The BCMC is private, not-for-profit and grassroots. Since it opened in 1995, BCMC has provided free mediation services to the city of Baltimore (BCMC 2017). The BCMC is one of the seventeen mediation centres supported by Community Mediation Maryland (CMM). CCM is a state-wide organisation that supports seventeen grassroots centres across Maryland. CCM was founded in 1999 by a number of member centres, together with the Maryland Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office (MACRO), an administrative office of the
25 courts to promote ADR throughout Maryland. CCM supports centres through funding, training, technical assistance and the development of various partnerships (CMM 2017; MACRO 2017).
The majority of BCMC’s funding comes from grants. Currently, the largest funder of the BCMC is MACRO (Gay 2017, personal communication). However, the BCMC operates independently from the state-led MACRO. The MACRO funding model is “an exemplary approach that reinforces the values of CM [community mediation] while supporting the centres in providing services to the courts and outside the court system.” (Kent 2005: 76, in: Charkoudian & Bilick 2015: 239). Referrals in the current fiscal year for the BCMC are 18% community and 20% schools, as opposed to 23% office of the states’ attorney, 20% prison and 2% police (Gay 2017, personal communication). Thus, also in referral patterns, the BCMC does not lean towards the ‘state-led side’ of community mediation.
The centre provides ‘traditional’ community mediation services, catering towards disputes between family members, neighbours and employer-employee. In addition, the BCMC has successfully collaborated with CMM to develop innovative mediation programmes tailored to current community needs “[…] to respond to complex and social challenges in which relationships matter.” (CMM 2016). To address increased police-community tensions, the centre “[…] offers services to support dialogue and give voice to everyone. Residents, leaders, and police need space to listen and hear each other in order to build deeper understanding and to create lasting change. For solutions to be sustainable, everyone must have a voice in the process.” (BCMB 2017c).
As of January 2016, BCMC offers Police Complaint Mediation, for face-to-face mediation of complaints between police officers and members of the public about difficult interactions. Furthermore, the centre also piloted the YPDs immediately following the uprising in 2015.
2.2.1 Youth Police Dialogues
The Youth Police Dialogues offer voluntary youth participation, but are part of the in-service training for all new cadets and current officers. Participation for BPD officers is thus obligatory. Per session, 15 youth and 15 officers participate. Participating youth are from Baltimore city’s public schools, and age between 12 and 18. The dialogue takes places at the
26 BCMC in Baltimore. YPD sessions last a 5-hour day, preceded with 1-hour preparation. Participants meet once.
Session are prepared two days in advance with youth, and on the morning of the session with police officers. The goal of these preparations is for youth and officers to “support [them] find their voice, learn about their emotional intelligence and prepare emotionally for the dialogue.” (BCMC 2017c). During the actual dialogue, youth and police officers meet in their regular clothing; police officers come in uniform, which allows “the group to consider and direct confront biases and power issues with all of the authenticity that comes with the symbolism of the uniform.” (BCMC 2017c). The morning programme (10am-noon) is focussed around “getting to know each other as people”, hence interactive activities are undertaken, exploring points of coming ground (BCMC 2017c). Participants for example share their values, in the form of completing the sentence “A value that I learned from someone that I respect is..” (BCMC 2017c). Lunch is provided and eaten informally together. During the afternoon programme (1pm-3pm) participants expand personal dialogue to joint conversation about how positive future interactions would look like, and what individuals can do to support these positive interactions. In the closing round of the dialogue, every participant makes a personal commitment to something he or she will do differently in the future.
Based on qualitative evaluative data gathered by the BCMC, youth and officers regard the dialogue as beneficial. More research is needed to know if, and how, the YPD programme had impact on a more structural level.
2.2.2 Introducing the Practitioners from the Baltimore Community Mediation Center
Four conflict resolution practitioners serve as the main informants of this thesis. These practitioners are all active as staff or volunteers at the BCMC:
1. Erricka Bridgeford, African-American Baltimorean female (44). Co-facilitator of YPD, mediator at BCMC, Director of Training at BCMC (staff). Also: Motivational speaker, social activist and legislative advocate to support disadvantaged Baltimoreans and to
27 reduce physical and emotional violence in Baltimore. Involved with at (inter alia): Baltimore Girls, Village Keepers, Ceasefire Baltimore.
2. Michelle Herring, African-American Baltimorean female (40). Co-facilitator of YPD, mediator at BCMC, police/community mediation coordinator (staff). Also: Social activist to support disadvantaged communities in Baltimore. Involved with (inter alia) Baltimore Girls and Ceasefire Baltimore.
3. Lamontre Randall, African-American Baltimorean male (24). Youth representative on the BCMC board, mediator at BCMC (was a one-year fulltime volunteer member of AmeriCorps). Also: community organiser via his organisation Be More Group, youth advocate, youth advocate and representative on the Youth Advisory board of the BPD.
4. Patrice Shelton, African-American Baltimorean female (28). Volunteer co-facilitator and mediator at the CMCM, one-year full-time volunteer member of AmeriCorps. Also: Youth mentor at Y achievers.
I talked to each of these informants once, during an interview of at least 90 minutes. On a more informal basis at two public events relating to police-community relationships, I also spoke to Shantay Guy, African-American Baltimorean female (43), and executive director of the BCMC. Her statements are used as background information, and she has helped me to fact-check BCMC-related matters (via Facebook Messenger). Secondly, I interviewed Samantha Baker-Carr, Caucasian female from New Jersey (28), who is also co-facilitator of the YPD and on-staff volunteer coordinator. However, I couldn’t use this interview since it wasn’t focussed on the topic of role combination. Lastly, I also refer to Lorig Charkoudian throughout this thesis. She founded the BCMC in 1995 when she was at graduate school at John Hopkins University. She is now the executive director of CMM and occupies the role of community facilitator and mediator at BCMC. She is also a social science researcher (inter alia into the topic of community mediation), legislative advocate, social activist to empower the disadvantaged, and running for delegate for the Maryland General Assembly. Unfortunately, I couldn’t interview her, due to her overfull calendar in the fieldwork period of this study.
28
CHAPTER 3 – THEORETICAL DEBATES AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATION OF THIS
THESIS
This chapter sets out the theoretical framework informing this study into the practitioners’ accounts of working towards social change from advocate-activist roles and mediator-facilitator roles. This chapter draws particularly on two debates, namely neutrality in the performance of the mediator-facilitator role and desirability of role combination of mediator-facilitators roles and advocate-activist roles. These two debates are derived from three bodies of literature, namely literature asserting that neutrality is unattainable and undesirable, critiques on dialogue programmes, and literature about the theories and practice of role combination. Building on this literature, it is argued that there is a tension between the need for a contextualised and political mediator, to address structural conflict while, at the same time, holding fast to the conviction that mediators should not occupy both pastor and prophet roles. This raises the question of how practitioners holding both prophet and pastor roles perform their roles in practice and deal with this – at least theoretical – tension. This question is inquired from the perspective of the Reflective Practitioner; by which skilful practice reveals a “knowing more than we can say.” (Schön 1991: 51).
First, I will turn to the debate around the neutral stance of the mediator-facilitator (3.1). Next, building on the stance that neutrality is not possible, I will turn to critiques of dialogue programmes facilitated from the neutral mediator-facilitator role (3.2). Third, I will explain the debate around role combination between ‘biased’ prophet roles and ‘neutral’ pastor roles (3.3). Last, I will introduce the perspective of reflective practice, with a central role for (re)framing, and introduce the sub questions of this thesis (3.4).
3.1 The Ideal of Non-Bias (‘Neutrality’) versus the Practice of Being Human
The extensive debate on the notion of the mediators’ ‘neutrality’ is an indicator of the broader conversation around the possibility and desirability of a ‘neutral’ role of the conflict practitioner, and how that can be defined. Parting assumption of this thesis can be summarised as the “illusion of neutrality”, which implies that being neutral in the sense of not having or showing bias is humanly impossible (Kraybill 2000: 293). Consequentially, it is not realistic to believe that practitioners are able to leave all bias (including their
29 experiences from the performance of other roles) ‘outside the facilitation’. Furthermore, it is questioned whether non-bias is always desirable. Below I will establish my view on ‘neutrality’.
Mayer points out that mediators in particular – who depend on neutrality the most – seem to be clear about how to go about it in practice, “But when we discuss how to conceptualise neutrality […] we are often confused, inconsistent, and divided.” (2012 (?): 859). Therefore, neutrality in mediation can be labelled a “folk concept”, meaning there are only tacit understandings of what it means and how it precisely works in practice (Rifkin, Millen & Cobb: 1991: 151).
In this thesis, I assume Rifkin, Cobb and Millen’s general understanding of neutrality, central to classic conflict resolution: “neutrality is understood and invoked as a stronghold against
bias.” (1991: 151, emphasis added). In this reading, the ideal of neutrality equates to the
notion of impartiality, in the sense that none of the parties should be supported more than any other, and the personal bias of the intervenor should stay outside the mediation session (Rifkin, Cobb and Millen: 152). More precisely, impartiality is defined as the “ability to interact in the absence of feelings, values, or agendas in themselves.” (Davis 1986: 21). The first underlying assumption is that showing bias towards the subject of mediation of one of the parties is ‘bad’ or will ‘compromise the process’. The second assumption is that the conflict resolution practitioner is biased but can act without incorporating those biases by leaving them unpronounced and avoiding personal interference of any kind. I would like to question both of these assumptions. I will start with the second assumption (‘an intervenor’s lack of bias is possible’), which will lead me to the first assumption (‘an intervenor’s bias compromises the process’).
Being neutral in the sense of not having or showing bias is humanly impossible: “there is no such thing as a detached or objective observer.” (Kraybill 2000: 293). Everything we do as humans and thus as practitioners communicates values. When two people fight and the intervenor sits silently in the corner of the room, she or he communicates, willingly or otherwise, the value ‘fighting is permitted’ (Kraybill 2000: 293).13 Therefore, every human
13 Note that ‘communicating’ is not necessarily voicing. Rather, I understand communicating in the sense that bias impacts the process one way or another, consciously or unconsciously.
30 being is to varying degrees subject to the operation of implicit bias, defined as “discriminatory biases based on implicit attitudes or implicit stereotypes.” (Izumi 2010: 91,92). Hence, it is unrealistic to believe that a mediator enters a mediation as a “neutral” entity, “free from judgements, values, ideologies, attitudes and pre-conceived perceptions”, contrarily “like other human beings, mediators bring prejudices and preferences into the sessions.” (Izumi 2010: 121, 122). The position that being human means having and communicating bias is a point of departure of this thesis.14
Moreover, neutrality (or non-bias) may not be desirable. Mayer rightfully points out that neutrality might not be what people entangled in conflict are looking for; “They want assistance, advocacy, advice, power, resources, connections, wisdom.” (2004:17). Mayer has pointed to the need go “beyond neutrality” in conflict resolution, and include other ‘non-neutral’ roles in the field (2004), for example by offering clients advocacy or conflict escalation services. Furthermore, it is questionable whether the ideal of ‘neutrality’, understood as a stronghold against bias, is desirable within the practice of mediation, in which two parties are assisted in a dialogue process. Instead of regarding communication as a transmission of messages, I understand mediation (and facilitation) as a “reciprocal interaction of storytelling.” (Rifkin, Millen, Cobb 1991: 160). Mediators ideally facilitate the ‘co-construction of coherent narratives’; mediators are active participants in helping parties to produce stories that are recognized by others as coherent. In this process, they will have to help some parties – based on gender, age, race or anything that can be experienced as problematic to construct as story – more than others to produce coherent stories: “mediators will necessarily have to adjust their interventions to account for the political nature of narrative interaction.” (Rifkin, Millen, Cob 1991: 161, 162).
Concluding, non-bias in mediation and facilitation, I assume, is not realistic, and moreover, not desirable. As a field, we have over-identified with the role of the ‘third-party neutral’ as the holy grail for a conflict resolution practitioner (Mayer 2004: 29), but what if bias has a function in assisting parties to move towards constructive conflict? In the next section I will turn to critiques of dialogue programmes, which hold on to the classic understanding of neutrality.
14
This point of departure is in line with the constructivist epistemology from this thesis, see section 4.1, page 47-50.
31 3.2 Critiques on dialogue-based conflict resolution: imperatives for the mediator facilitator
Dialogue programmes in the tradition of Alternative Dispute Resolution and restorative justice programmes have been critiqued, especially when applied in contexts of social injustice (Henkeman 2012; Nader 1993; Neves 2009). The ‘neutral’ stance of the conflict resolution practitioner in her role of mediator or facilitator has been put under pressure. Critics assert that practitioners in the role of mediator-facilitator of dialogue programmes, especially in contexts of social injustice, should be political and contextualized. Following my understanding of the impossibility and undesirability of neutrality, and of mediation as the co-construction of coherent narratives, I adhere to the call for a political contextualized mediator-facilitator.
I turn to these critiques because community mediation can be understood as the grassroots and volunteer-driven form ADR, serving as a by-communities-for-communities substitute to the traditional adversarial litigation process (Charkoudian & Billick: 2015: 270; Hedeen 2003: 267); or as a community rooted restorative justice informed dialogue facilitation, as is the case with the YPD programme at the BCMC.
The following is divided into three sub-sections in which I discuss the critiques of ADR (3.3.1), restorative justice (3.3.2) and community mediation (3.3.3) respectively, in relation to the notion of pacification, individualising societal problems or neglecting structural causes, and the disparity between theory and practice in terms of political potential. These critiques can intersect: for example, neglect of structural causes concern ADR, restorative justice and CM, since these processes are obviously related and build upon each other.
3.2.1 ADR: A tool for Social Control rather than a means for Social Change
The anthropologist Laura Nader is one of the first to be outspokenly critical of the ADR movement. Nader asserts that ADR mediation serves as an alternative within the already present legal structure, which enables individuals to resolve their conflicts, but leaves underlying structures that may perpetrate the conflict and existing power inequalities unaddressed (Nader 1993: 1; see also: Fast 2002: 532). This “harmony ideology” she defines as “the belief that harmony in the guise of compromise or agreement is ipso facto better than an adversary posture.” (Nader 1993: 3). The function of the harmony ideology was to
