ABSTRACT
What role culture plays in mediation also depends on how mediators perceive this role and how they organize their actions on this basis. This chapter presents a few examples taken from an interview study the authors have carried out with 21 professional conflict mediators from Europe about their attitudes to mediation as their job. A discourse-theory perspective assumes that each individual will have their subjective notion of culture and interculturality, how they affect their lives, and how to best deal with them. These notions are derived from people's participation in discourse and their interpretations. This study shows that mediators very frequently perceive mediation itself as a culture. They frequently contrast mediation with the everyday disputing culture they perceive in their country, and they also have their strategies on how to deal with culture in mediation. However, they also frequently reject the idea of cultural difference as a cause for conflict per se. This study reveals the discursive character within which people frame notions of culture in their everyday lives, i.e., they often contain seemingly contradictory positions. Accordingly, mediators see cultural differences on the one hand, and on the other hand, they deny cultural influences on mediation. Mediation is constructed as a universal tool that is not touched by cultures and can be applied to any cultural setting.
