ABSTRACT
This short concluding chapter aims to shift the focus of inquiry from the relation between legal theory and negotiation studies within the legal academy, to an internal look at the evolving discipline of dispute-resolution and its intellectual layers. My aim is to provide a narrative in which models of mediation are described as evolving in parallel to the intellectual climate of their time. By presenting mediation studies as being conditioned by time and place, I try to demarcate the lines between developments within the field and other social phenomena. I also try to point to 'the next step', or the next model that might answer current 'burning' disputes, those which involve mainly identity struggles.
