ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the absence of practical guidelines for the practice of neutrality is a function of the rhetoric of neutrality. It presents a deconstruction of neutrality—examining the meaning of neutrality as emergent from a set of interrelated, interdependent terms: justice, power, and ideology. The relative absence of any research on the practice of neutrality suggests that neutrality functions like a folk concept, talked, practiced, and researched on the basis of tacit and local understandings, contained in rhetoric about power and conflict. The paradox of neutrality is that from within the existing rhetoric of "impartiality" and "equidistance," neutrality implies detachment; yet in practice it requires the mediators' proactive involvement. Rhetorically, "neutrality" has been used as a weapon against ideology in mediation. Attention to the narrative structures and processes in mediation provides a theoretical basis for examining political processes in mediation as those involved in the construction and legitimation of stories.
