Mediation in the face of contemporary violence: an unrealistic challenge?
The XII Conference of the World Mediation Forum will take place in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, from 4 to 7 November 2024. Hosted by the University of the State of Bahia, in collaboration with the Centre de recherche en droit public of the University of Montréal, the theme of the conference is: "Mediation in the face of contemporary violence". As part of its general theme, the XIIth Conference of the FMM is placing mediation at the heart of the issues surrounding different types of violence today. It proposes to explore in greater depth, but also to go beyond, without however obscuring, the 'classic' debates on the strengths, limits and risks of mediation applied to violence in an interpersonal context. It broadens the debate to the specific nature of violence that takes place in public, collective, organisational, institutional, structural and systemic spaces. This theme seems relevant at a time when structural and contextual violence are no longer the sole political and social destiny of authoritarian or dictatorial states. So-called democratic countries are also going through a period of instability and political, social, economic and identity-related fragility, resulting in exacerbated tensions and conflicts. At the same time, social movements often propose shifting the analysis of certain forms of "interpersonal" violence to the field of systemic and structural violence. In this context, we can ask ourselves how we can establish the relationship between mediation practices and these forms of violence. This question is at the heart of the theme of the XIIth Conference of the World Mediation Forum, given that the promoters, decision-makers, practitioners, researchers and theoreticians of mediation, with the exception of the vast field of international mediation, have invested little time in this type of questioning. We might ask why this absence and silence: is mediation only viable in the context of inter-individual dynamics, in which the weight of violence remains relatively circumscribed? Is it unthinkable and inapplicable in the dynamics of collective conflict? Is it the complexity of structural violence that restricts its use? Can mediation play a role in this specific type of conflict? Does collective, structural or systemic violence invalidate the potential of mediation? Does the structuring of the protagonists' power relations in these forms of violence open or close the door to the practice of mediation? What do we know about the effects of mediation when it is used in these types of violence? And how can mediation practitioners be trained to deal with this type of conflict? To answer these questions, three round tables will be held, each dealing with a specific theme: experiences, theoretical reflections and training practices.
This content has been updated on 19 November 2024 at 12h38.