BEYOND NEUTRALITY: Confronting the Crisis in Conflict Resolution

Excerpts from Beyond Neutrality: Confronting the Crisis in Conflict Resolution

By Bernard Mayer[1]

From Preface: Engaging Conflict, Confronting Crisis

When we have the courage to face conflict, take on problems, learn from crisis, and work on our weaknesses, we grow. This is an outlook embedded in the values of most conflict resolution practitioners. I believe this applies to our field, as well as to each of us as individuals.

The practice and profession of conflict resolution has reached a comfortable and therefore dangerous point in its development. We are accepted, established, and routinely utilized in many areas. But we are also encountering some serious warning signs that we ought not be afraid to look at and learn from. These signs include the limitations on how we are used, the continuing skepticism about what we have to offer, the mixed results of research and evaluation, the struggles of our professional organizations, and the oversupply of conflict resolution practitioners.

The challenges we face now are both helpful and exciting. By facing them courageously and with an open mind, we can grow as a field and as practitioners. These challenges give us an opportunity to consider again who we are--what is at the heart of what we do, how we think, what we believe in, and what we have to offer others. By doing this we can overcome the limits we’ve put on ourselves by how we have defined our purpose and role, and in so doing become a more powerful, respected, and ultimately useful field of practice.

But if we are afraid to confront these challenges, to face our problems, look at our limits, or listen to what others are telling us—either directly or through their actions—we risk becoming less influential, respected, and useful. In fact we risk losing our independent identity.

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This book begins with two basic beliefs. First, we need effective approaches to conflict more than ever. In the twenty-five years I have been a practicing mediator, we have not seen a significant reduction in the pernicious impact of conflict in our world, our communities, our organizations, or our society. If anything, the world is a more dangerous place to engage in conflict than ever before. Second, the field of conflict resolution has not reached its potential to impact how conflict is conducted. The profession of conflict resolution is not making significant progress in having the impact we can and ought to have.

From: Chapter One: Conflict Resolution: A Field in Crisis

Conflict resolution as a field is facing a serious crisis. The way in which this crisis is approached will determine the future shape of the field, indeed its very existence. The root of the crisis lies in the failure of the field to seriously engage in its purpose. That is, the conflict resolution field has failed to address conflict in a profound or powerful way. As a result, the public has not genuinely embraced the field. We are at a point where we can either face the nature of this crisis and grow as a result or fail to adapt and in that case very likely cease to exist as an independent field of practice.

As is usually the case with crises, we are faced with a significant opportunity as well as a major challenge. We can realize that opportunity if we are willing to grow beyond our dependence, indeed our fixation, on neutrality as a defining characteristic of what we do and if we can see our role in conflict as far broader than that of dispute resolvers. Our challenge is to change our focus from conflict resolution to constructive conflict engagement and accordingly change our view of ourselves from neutral conflict resolvers to conflict engagement specialists. If we do this, we can become a more powerful and accepted force for changing the way conflict is conducted.

This does not mean abandoning old roles, but building on them and dramatically expanding what we offer to people in conflict. To achieve this transformation, we first have to face the nature of the crisis, clearly and courageously, and then we have to open up our thinking about how we can broaden and deepen our roles in conflict. If we do this, we can rescue our field, but the challenges we face are great and the crisis serious.

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Symptoms of the Crisis

Conflict resolution professionals are not significantly involved in the major conflicts of our times. Many conflict resolution practitioners play useful but essentially marginal roles in large-scale public conflicts (e.g., Middle East, Iraq or Korea, major environmental or social policy), but we are not involved at the center of the conflict or decision making processes.

People involved in conflict do not readily or naturally turn to conflict resolvers. In many arenas, if mediators had to rely on people voluntarily asking for their services, they would have almost no business. Instead, people must be persuaded, cajoled or mandated to use mediation and related services.

Advocates, activists and governmental officials generally look on conflict resolution processes with great suspicion. After years of efforts at winning their support and trust and despite many experiences with conflict resolution efforts, activists and advocates still express a great deal of suspicion and skepticism about conflict resolution. People fear that collaborative problem solving processes will prove expensive, time-consuming, compromising and ineffective. As a result, there is ongoing and perhaps growing resistance to participation in consensus building dialogues and related conflict resolution processes.

Government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior that have in the past utilized conflict resolution processes to fulfill aspects of their mission are questioning this approach and withdrawing resources from consensus building efforts. While they may continue to see mediation as valuable for solving internal personnel disputes, increasingly they are questioning conflict resolution forums as a means for dealing with the policy making process. Some of this may reflect the particular beliefs of the current political leadership, but this trend also reflects questions that have arisen about the expense and effectiveness of consensus building forums.

Many more people want to act as conflict resolvers than to use conflict resolution services. The interest people have shown in becoming mediators, facilitators or dispute system designers has continued to outpace the interest of the public in using these services. Many conflict resolution organizations would have a hard time surviving were it not for the interest that people continue to show in conflict resolution training. But if the interest in becoming conflict resolution practitioners continues to outstrip the interest in using the services of these practitioners, people will become increasingly disinterested and perhaps resistant to training as well.

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When people do turn to conflict resolvers, they often want approaches that are out of sync with the articulated values of the field. People often want advice, recommendations, and evaluations of their case, assistance in persuading others, or vindication of their actions and positions. Often disputants more readily look to people with power or a history of power to assist them, even if these people are neither trained in conflict resolution nor credible as neutrals. In this respect, the needs of people or institutions in conflict may be contradictory to or at least very different from the values and ideologies of conflict resolution practitioners. At professional conferences the ratio of practitioners who have succeeded in making conflict resolution their sustaining source of work to those aspiring to do so is abysmally low.

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Why We Do Not Play a More Expanded Role

Answering this question is key to understanding who we are and where we are going as a field. A major purpose of this book is to offer an analysis and prescription for how to be more useful and accepted as resources in conflict. Five factors seem paramount in why we are not more involved in resolving major public conflicts:

• Disputants do not necessarily want resolution. People want to win, to build a movement, to carry on an important struggle, to achieve meaning, to address basic issues, to gain political advantage, or other similar goals. Resolution implies to many too shallow an outcome or goal. …
• Disputants do not think of themselves as in a conflict. They think of themselves as involved in a cause, a popular movement, a political effort or a policy debate, and our role is not seen as relevant to these. Conflict implies more of a relationship, an interactive process, with a potential outcome—resolution—than many people will accept. Often, accepting that a conflict exists implies that others involved either have a certain amount of power or standing that requires that they be dealt with in some way. …
• No one is very clear about what we have to offer, including ourselves. Seldom do people embroiled in major conflict think that what they need are professional neutrals or dispute system designers. … Process is a very subtle concept for most people, and what people in conflict are most aware of is their need for power, protection and good solutions. When people do understand what it is we offer, they often either do not feel a need for this or are very suspicious, perhaps viewing our services as potential vehicles for manipulation. We are often unclear ourselves about what our real value is to people stuck in conflict—and we often define our potential contribution in very limiting terms.
• Our approach to resolution often seems superficial. We often seem too eager for resolution and as a result, it sometimes seems that we are seeking solutions that do not match the level of depth at which participants experience a conflict. Too often, people feel we are promoting a “lowest common denominator” approach or a facile or short-term solution that does not address the underlying seriousness of a conflict. Focusing on communication, mutual interests, or creative exchanges, may be important and helpful, but deeply engaged disputants often do not see this as addressing their deepest concerns and values….
• People are suspicious about neutrality. People often do not trust our neutrality. They are suspicious of the concept and question, often correctly, whether we can genuinely be as neutral, impartial, and unbiased as we say we are. More importantly, perhaps, neutrality is not what people embroiled in deep conflict are usually looking for. They want assistance, advocacy, advice, power, resources, connections, or wisdom. … There are times when neutrality is essential, but conflict resolvers place too much reliance on it as an organizing feature of the role we play. In many situations, if we emphasized this less, we might actually be trusted more.

From Chapter 3: The Use (And Misuse) Of Mediation

Our Hidden Ideological Agenda

Mediation to a large extent is an ideologically driven field. Most mediators do this work not simply out of an interest in the field or a sense that this is a reasonable way to make a living, but because they believe mediation is contributing in an important way to improving our world.

As a result, mediators tend to be committed to an approach that does not just help people resolve their disputes, but has a further, if not always articulated, agenda of changing the way people handle conflict and interact with each other. Not all mediators come from this perspective—some would say that they are here simply to guide people to a solution to the dispute. But many mediators speak of using mediation to transform people, to empower participants, to open up new ways of communicating, and to help promote a more peaceful world. These goals step from a view of how people ought to interact, how decisions ought to be made, and how society should approach conflict, and as a result we are fairly ideologically driven in how we approach our actual practice.

Some of the values and beliefs embedded in our practice include:

• Resolution is better than conflict.
• Cooperation is better than competition
• Integrative solutions are better than distributive solutions.
• The coercive use of power is bad
• Interests are important, positions are a problem
• Communication among antagonists is desirable
• Pressuring people to accept a solution is not helpful
• Empowering disputants to solve their own problems is important

There is nothing wrong with these values. Indeed I share most of them. The problem is they are not necessarily the values of our clients. When they are, when we share these values with our clients, particularly when all parties to a dispute share these values, we are able to provide especially rich services.

… this disconnect can often lead to a situation where clients want something different from what we offer and are reluctant to use our services because they do not see it as meeting their needs. Several things that clients may want, that many mediators do not feel they can accommodate:

• Clients want to be told who is right and who is wrong. They seek vindication.
• They want to be told whether a solution being suggested is fair and reasonable or whether they are being played for a fool.
• They want help in convincing other parties of the merits of their case or the reasonableness of their proposals
• They want substantive information and advice
• They want to know how other people have solved the same problem
• They want the mediator to guide the process with a firm hand, making sure that they do not waste time and that they are not subject to attacks, dirty tricks, or a level of emotional engagement that they are not prepared for
• They want to get out of the room

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As a field, we have every right to maintain our values and to push the public and our client population to reorient their thinking. Other professions have done this fairly successfully (mental health, public medicine, child development, urban planning, education), but we are also in danger of creating too big a divide and having a difficult time broadening the reach of our services. In response to this concern, evaluative mediators might argue that their approach is the only one that will really work from a business point of view over time, and many referring attorneys would agree. The downside of this approach is that it does not really change the way conflict is addressed in keeping with the broader needs of society and the values of most of us in this business.

From Chapter 5: Conflict Resolution and Society

Why have a field called Conflict Resolution (or alternative dispute resolution)? Is this something that exists for the good of the public or is it mostly to provide a home for alienated refugees from other professional settings? In other words, does this field exist for the benefit of society or for its practitioners? Obviously, no field can exist without benefiting its practitioners in some way, but no field ought to exist solely for that purpose either. We should not be afraid to ask whether there is an important societal interest served by the existence of conflict resolution as a separate field of practice with its own professional organizations, credentialing procedures, academic programs, and identity.

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There has always been a creative tension between the characterization of conflict resolution as a movement or a profession. Many of us have seen the growth of conflict resolution and its various applications as an effort to change something fundamental about how society does its business—how decisions are made, how people are involved in the issues that affect their lives, how participatory democracy can be achieved in a practical way and in general how the public can be empowered.

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The professionalizers need the élan and energy provided by the social movement to maintain commitment and loyalty. This provides the all important normative element to motivate the involvement of practitioners in the field even when they are not receiving the business from conflict resolution work that they need to sustain themselves. But the social movement elements need the professional push to provide credibility, legitimacy and business. This provides the all important utilitarian element for the field. So there is a certain creative synergy, even symbiosis, between these two elements.

But these two aspects of the field get in each other’s way as well. The requirements of a profession for standards, quality control, credentialing, and training can exclude or marginalize the volunteers and community practitioners who are more likely to be motivated by a social change agenda. But the more the field is focused on social change and community based volunteers, the less likely it will be seen as a highly skilled profession justifying significant fees and the referral of highly complex issues. Put more bluntly, the social movement adherents can see the professionalizers as elitist, self-aggrandizing, and even reactionary while those with a professionalizing orientation can see the social movement elements as naïve, ineffective, and even flaky.

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The tension between these two thrusts of the conflict resolution field is sometimes creative, often divisive, and usually confusing. It’s not going to go away, but we can do a better job in naming it, working with it, being more creative about how we integrate these elements, and understanding its implications. To confront the issues facing conflict resolution, we have to pay attention to these two very different but equally important elements of what we do.