Mediation – The Shapeless Art

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

ABSTRACT

This editorial argues that mediation is not a recent discipline in need of definition but a social capacity that preceded its own name, and that the effort to give it a settled form risks diminishing what makes it work. The author observes that the field’s present activity, in research, in models, and in national associations competing for standing, suggests a subject newly born and still unformed, and proposes the opposite reading: that mediation has been practised wherever people have lived together, adapting itself to the customs of every region without displacing them, and that this adaptability is a property of its shapelessness rather than a deficiency awaiting correction. From this follows a claim about training. If the capacity is already present in every person, then instruction cannot consist in transmitting it, and the task is to help a person rediscover and refine what they already possess, with critical and reflective thinking as the principal instrument. The author closes by asking whether mediation is properly described as a profession at all, and suggests that its power to heal lies precisely in its refusal to take a fixed form, since only what has no shape can adapt to the shape of each conflict it meets.

KEYWORDS

Mindful mediation, shapeless art, social skill, critical thinking, transformative practice, cultural adaptation, professionalisation, self discovery, conflict management, social healing, awareness, vocation

INTRODUCTION

When we talk about mediation nowadays, we may see that this topic turned into a global phenomenon. There are endless research articles published, instructive video lectures available, theoretical concepts and models developed, and far too many national associations to be found, trying to become the branch leaders in their corresponding countries.

This activity within the field of mediation could indicate that we talk about a topic that was recently born, that still remains unshaped, and that strongly needs our helping hand in order to find its way into life itself.

But maybe, by being too focused on putting mediation into a specific shape, we overlook and ignore its true nature, and thereby, we more likely might violate and minimize it instead of learning from its inner core, its source, and its social healing potential in general.

MAIN CORPUS

A practice older than its name

Being of such a caring nature, we may not see that mediation might have existed even before we created and used its current name, and maybe it did its purpose in a latent way, forming ever since part of our social interaction in a shapeless way, without a form, a concept, and a name.

Being practiced even without bearing a proper name may have occurred, not because the fact of finding a name was ignored and not taken care of, but maybe because this specific mindset of conflict management already had its real-life impact and served society from the very beginning of the human social coexistence.

If we analyze this content further, we may also discover that mediation most likely possessed and still possesses the ability to be transformative in a way that it found and finds its way to and was practiced in all regions of this planet by respecting the socio-cultural and religious practices of tribes, nations, and races. And by being of such a sensitive, decent, and transformative nature, it adjusted itself to the variety of cultures on our planet without rejecting any territorial customs.

A skill owned by everybody

So, what does all this mean to us living in a world of paragraphs, articles, restrictions, and strict routines? I believe that mediation offers us a lot to learn from. First of all, I believe that we need to understand that mediation is a social skill that is owned by everybody, simply because peacekeeping is a natural necessity that we find within the pool of our own very basic needs.

So, being owned by the general public also means that mankind per se can and hopefully does practice its related tools and fragments on a daily basis. And yes, I do not even specify what it actually means to realize a mediation, as it is, first of all, a mindset to work with, and second, a way of open dialog.

Correspondingly, this means that the practice of this skill may differ due to the impact of a person’s silent educator, as well as the person’s level of awareness and specific improvement of this social art.

What then is training for?

So where in all this, do the people fit who learn mediation in professional pieces of training, or who study conflict management on an academic level?

Well, this is actually very easy to understand. Such individuals are aware of the topic, its importance, and potential positive impact on society and look for further instruction.

And this instruction is a very crucial point to talk about. As previously said, we discovered mediation to be a shapeless skill of a transformative and very individual nature that was born in the mindset of mankind in the moment of experiencing consciousness for the first time. And to communicate teaching that enables an individual to practice such a shapeless skill seems to be very tricky, but it is actually what mindful mediation is all about.

We do not teach what may be called mediation per se but we accompany the individual to rediscover and to reconnect to his or her own very personal understanding of shapeless and mindful mediation within.

So, mediation seems to be found and further developed more likely within the very core of a person’s character and only secondarily in external educational settings. The strong hint here, at this point, is that the most instructive tool to discover and to learn about mediation is the reflective and critical thinking skill a person may own.

Profession or calling?

Based on these findings, we all may wonder if we can still talk about a profession of a mediator, or if it is a proper individual’s call to serve mankind?

Well, while this remains to be answered by yourself and based on your own reflections, I would like to share that to me, it means that mediation is, first of all, a gift by nature that actually all people have access to. And it is wonderful to see that it is practiced by such a broad diversity of professional branches, like teachers, social workers, psychologists, business managers, and of course by lawyers.

So what exciting finding or plea does mediation offer all professionals today?

Maybe it is the advice to leave mediation as what we found it to be today, namely a shapeless art that offers us the ability to serve mankind, by not putting it into any kind of form or structure but to discover the exciting adventure to practice an open and non-defined social skill that, based on its proper intelligence and dynamics, offers us an extremely strong social healing impact, actually of heights that are far beyond our capability of selecting or identifying a matching name for it.

SUMMARY

The argument inverts the usual relationship between a discipline and its object. Where a growing field ordinarily takes its proliferation of models and associations as evidence of maturing, the author reads the same activity as a warning that something is being enclosed which works only while it remains open. The reasoning turns on a single property: a practice with a fixed form can only be applied to situations that fit the form, whereas a practice without one can meet whatever it encounters. From this follows the claim about training that the piece exists to make. If the capacity is universal, then a course cannot supply it, and what a course can do is help a person find what they already have and sharpen the instrument by which they will refine it, which the author identifies as critical thinking rather than technique. The closing question, whether this describes a profession or a calling, is left with the reader, and the text is more interested in having posed it than in settling it.

CONCLUSION

Closing this reflection, we may still wonder why it needs to remain shapeless.

Well, being shapeless is the only possibility to adapt itself to the diversity of its practitioners, to the diversity of disputed parties, and to the diversity of conflict itself.

So, once we advance to understand the true nature of mediation, we may see that what we understand to be or call mediation adapts itself to the environmental setting of conflict and not vice versa. And thereby it teaches us important and infinite lessons that we may integrate into our proper lives.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The central claim has more support in the comparative record than the essay’s reflective form suggests, and setting that out strengthens it.

Every society that has been studied possesses arrangements for handling disputes through a third party who persuades rather than decides, and the forms they take have almost nothing in common: the Baraza in the Congo, Mato oput in Uganda, the Yoruba practice of asking the person who offended you for an explanation, the councils of elders across the Arab world, the pancayat, the Melanesian arrangements built on exchange. What is shared is the function; what varies is everything else. The author’s proposition is therefore an empirical finding as well as a reflection, and it explains something the profession finds awkward, namely that the model taught in the training rooms of Europe and North America is one local tradition among many, distinguished chiefly by having been written down and exported.

Two qualifications sharpen rather than weaken the argument. Shapelessness protects adaptability and it does not by itself protect anyone in the room; the arrangements that turn out to be most local and most traditional are frequently also the ones in which a woman, a young person, or a member of a subordinate group cannot speak. A practice that adapts to a culture adapts to its hierarchies too. The distinction that holds the essay’s argument while addressing this is between form and floor: the form should adapt to every setting, and a small number of commitments should not, among them that participation is voluntary, that a party may leave, that no one is bound by an agreement they did not make, and that the process is not used to ratify a coercion that preceded it. Those are not a shape. They are the conditions under which shapelessness remains safe.

The second concerns training. The claim that mediation cannot be transmitted because it is already present is true of the disposition and not of everything that follows from it. The research on expertise is consistent on this point and it supports the essay’s conclusion by a different route: what distinguishes a practitioner who acts well under pressure is not that they consulted no framework but that they absorbed frameworks thoroughly enough to stop consulting them. One studies models in order to be able to put them down. That reading rescues the essay from the objection it invites, which is that a beginner told their intuition is sufficient will act on whatever assumptions they happened to arrive with.

Finally, the question the author leaves open, profession or calling, has a practical dimension worth naming. Professions build entry requirements, codes of conduct, and complaint procedures, and each of these excludes people while protecting parties from harm. A field that declines to professionalise remains open to the teacher, the nurse, and the neighbour who mediate well, and it offers a person who has been badly served by a mediator nowhere to go. Neither answer is free, and the choice between them is not settled by determining what mediation essentially is. It is settled by deciding whose protection matters more, and that is a question the field has largely avoided asking aloud.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

FURTHER READING

Erdmann, D. (2021). Mindful Mediation: The Shapeless Art. Lulu Press.

Wehr, P., & Lederach, J. P. (1991). Mediating Conflict in Central America. Journal of Peace Research, 28(1), 85 to 98, on the insider partial mediator.

Lederach, J. P. (1995). Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse.

Avruch, K. (1998). Culture and Conflict Resolution. United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington D.C.

Zartman, I. W. (Ed.) (2000). Traditional Cures for Modern Conflicts: African Conflict Medicine. Lynne Rienner, Boulder.

Boege, V. (2006). Traditional Approaches to Conflict Transformation: Potentials and Limits. Berghof Research Center, Berlin.

Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Jossey Bass, San Francisco.

Bowling, D., & Hoffman, D. (Eds.) (2003). Bringing Peace into the Room: How the Personal Qualities of the Mediator Impact the Process of Conflict Resolution. Jossey Bass, San Francisco.