Christopher W. Moore - The Mediation Process: Practical Strategies for Resolving Conflict

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Christopher W., 1947

The mediation process : practical strategies for resolving conflict / Christopher W. Moore. 4th Edition.

1 online resource.

Includes index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-118-41974-8 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-118-42152-9 (epub) ISBN 978-1-118-30430-3 (pbk.) 1. Mediation. 2. Conflict management. I. Title.

HM1126

303.6'9dc23

2014003584

For Susan, my life and professional partnerin play, learning, and peacemakingand Ben and Bess, my parents, who gave me their values and supported my aspirations throughout their lives.

All interpersonal relationships, communities, organizations, societies, and nations experience disputes or conflicts at one time or another. Conflict and disputes exist when people or groups engage in competition to achieve goals that they perceive to be, or that actually are, incompatible. Conflict is not necessarily bad, abnormal, or dysfunctional; it is a fact of life. But when it goes beyond competitive behavior and acquires the additional purpose of inflicting serious physical or psychological damage on another person or group, it is then that the negative and harmful dynamics of conflict exact their full costs.

Conflicts and disputes do not inherently have to follow a destructive course; they can lead to growth and be productive for those who are involved. Whether this happens or not often depends on the participants' ability to devise mutually acceptable procedures for cooperative problem solving, their capacity to lay aside distrust and animosity while they work together to resolve differences, and on their ability to develop solutions that satisfactorily meet their individual and common needs and interests. Many people in conflict are unable to do this on their own. They often need the help of a third party, an individual or group of people who are not directly involved in the conflict, to assist then to reach mutually acceptable solutions.

Mediation, one form of third-party assistance, has long been used to help disputants voluntarily settle their differences. It has been effectively practiced in almost all periods of history, in most cultures, and used to resolve a wide variety of types of disputes. Until relatively recently, however, there have been few works that detail what mediators actually do to aid people in conflict to reach agreements.

For the past thirty-five years, I have been actively engaged as a mediator of international, public policy, environmental, ethnic, organizational, personnel, community, and family disputes, and as a conflict management consultant, trainer, and designer of dispute resolution systems. My practice has taken me across the United States, more than fifty countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America, the Middle East, Eastern and Western Europe, and the South Pacific, and to multiple indigenous communities. This broad experience has convinced me that there are some common mediation principles and procedures that can be applied effectively to help address and resolve a wide range of conflicts in many contexts and cultures. My belief has been confirmed by the expanding experience and literature in the field of mediation.

There is a continuing need for integrative how-to books on the various ways that mediation is and can be practiced. The Mediation Process: Practical Strategies for Resolving Conflict is my contribution to meet this need. It integrates the practice and research of others and my personal experience and describes some of what we have learned about the mediation process as it has been applied in diverse contexts and settings. The contents for this fourth edition have been greatly expanded and significantly rewritten since the first, second, and third editions, to encompass some of the exciting new developments and applications of mediation in the commercial, interpersonal, and public disputes arenas, and incorporate some of what I have learned about the practice of mediation in different cultures. The book outlines how mediation fits into the larger field of dispute resolution and negotiation and presents a comprehensive, stage-by-stage sequence of activities that can be used by mediators to assist disputants to reach mutually beneficial agreements.

This book has been written for several important groups of people. First are potential or practicing mediators who are or will work in a wide variety of arenas and who have repeatedly expressed a need for a comprehensive description of mediation theory and process. The book should be helpful to future or current practitioners in international, public policy, environmental, organizational, community, family, and interpersonal mediation, as well as in many other areas of practice.