ABSTRACT
We experience conflicts personally, relationally, and culturally. Each of these requires its own techniques for resolution and transformation. Each interacts in complex, subtle, and intricate ways with the others. Each is a source of resistance and resolution, intractability and insight, revenge and reconciliation, instigation and prevention, retributive and restorative justice, stasis and transformation. Culture is how we perceive and process reality. It is a way of assigning meaning, allowing us to consider every conflict cross-cultural. Conflict is a ‘high-context’ culture, as it requires significant context to understand its meaning. Culturally informed mediation techniques and practices identify diverse contexts in order to transform people's understanding of their conflicts and capacity to resolve them. Because cultures are imagined, they can be re-imagined. Because they are open, malleable, regenerative, and plastic, they can be reshaped in mediation. This chapter offers two examples of transformational changes that took place through culturally informed mediation processes. Mediators can use culture to map alternate paths through conflict and design new maps that help people navigate their disputes. In doing so, help them evolve to higher orders of conflict and resolution, avert future conflicts, and strengthen their conflict cultures.
