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The Power of Community Mediation: Government and Formation of Self-Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

George Pavlich
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Abstract

Recent “alternatives” to law assume diverse forms and include various community mediation programs. Proponents see these programs as a triumph of empowered individuals and communities over the state. By contrast, early critics—in their various ways—view such programs as an expansion and intensification of state control. Against both, and working with “new informalist” insights, this article focuses on the political logic of community mediation practices. Drawing on Foucault, it explores mediation as a governmentalization (cf. expansion) of state dispute resolution which marshals both techniques of discipline and self in an attempt to produce peaceful individual selves. A case study is used to analyze community mediation as a confessional institution that deploys sociocultural pressures in search of nondisputing self-identities. The article concludes that the search for fixed notions of individual, self, or even community empowerment may entrench, rather than resist, current forms of regulation in dispute resolution arenas.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , 1996 , pp. 707 - 733
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

The author wishes to thank the editor and two anonynous reviewers of Law & Society Review for their helpful comments on a previous version.

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