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According to its advocates, community mediation empowers disputants in their dealing with conflict. However, critics of the community mediation movement have often contended that far from being empowering, community mediation programs constitute a means of social control and of informal state power enhancement. This paper undertakes a socio-theoretical examination of community mediation's empowerment claims and of its criticisms. The paradigmatic and contrasting works of Habermas on communicative action and of Foucault on power, freedom and governmentality are applied to community mediation. The paper contends that although Habermas’ insights are supportive of the community mediation agenda, the criticisms they engender might provide a way to move beyond optimistically naive assumptions regarding empowering claims. Conversely, although Foucault's work has often been used to dismiss community mediation's empowerment promises, the paper argues that it is possible to re-examine the empowering potential of community mediation from a Foucauldian perspective. It concludes that community mediation can provide a space for personal empowerment, if understood in a nuanced way.

The primary goal of the Restorative Justice process is not punishment but making good the harm done by offending for the victim, the community and the offender. Offenders have to take responsibility for their actions as a precondition to addressing the harm that they have caused. Offenders become aware that a crime is committed, not against an abstraction, but against someone real, a person like themselves and against their community, who are directly and indirectly affected by what has happened. Crime and conflict affect relationships between individuals who are left outside the court system altogether by conventional justice. Proceedings and arguments of the restorative process are voluntary for all parties. People are given the opportunity to partake in mediation, or to accept reparation. The process is always confidential however; outcomes and agreements can be made public, depending on the authorisation by participants.

The chapter will examine the emergence and influence of the restorative justice movement as a bridge between communities, civil society and the state in Ireland. The chapter will focus on the Republic of Ireland, but will also examine restorative conferencing in Northern Ireland. This will be divided into a number of sections, each reflecting the emergence of a movement dedicated to the promotion of restorative justice as a vehicle for a holistic form of community-based justice in Ireland. This chapter covers the history, scope, and philosophical-political background of the restorative justice movement, providing specific examples of the interchange between this restorative justice movement and civil society in Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States. The wider potential of the restorative justice movement will be highlighted.

This potential is demonstrated in the restorative movement’s challenge to understandings of failed punitive approaches, and through its socially redemptive alternative which emphasises collective responsibility for crime amongst all of the community. The chapter will also examine the international background to restorative justice, and its theoretical understandings, with a focus on key theorists such as Strang and Braithwaite, amongst others. It will examine salient issues that underpin social justice and social control in Ireland, including the potential impacts of restorative justice policy and practice for the wider community and the state.

Mediation is defined as a process, whether referred and agreed to by the expression mediation, pre-litigation mediation, online mediation, community mediation, conciliation or any other expression of such similar import, whereby party or parties, request an independent third person referred to as mediator or mediation service provider to assist them in their attempt to reach a peaceful settlement of a dispute. The peaceful settlement of any dispute to be initiated, processed, guided and moderated in the process of successful mediation before parties, needs mediator to have four major new skills such as witness-awareness, stillness-concentration, empathy-motivation and a pragmatic-sensibility for fulfilling the aims and outcomes of mediation. These four skills are deeply inward and psychological, which can be accessed and empowered by an exercise of deepening experience called spiritual in content and application. However, a crucial interchange of meaning and value that very often come into this situation between spirituality and psychology is an important one to be mentioned here. The two seemingly distant disciplines of experience, one of psychology and another of spirituality lies in the orientation that an individual and a collective give to life and world as a whole. When life and world are accepted in totality, spirituality can be life-affirmative and world-embracing giving us a direction to the individual psychological states of though-emotion-sensation-behaviour complex to embrace and enhance values of inclusion, harmony and development at the collective and universal level. These psychological states, both individual and collective, gradually open the vision and mission of values to live within and outside, to be and to become, and finally manifest a future world of stability, order, richness and growing perfection by solving challenges that come to our existence. It makes life both spiritual and earthly. This chapter demonstrates that this kind of spiritual meaning, value and experience entering into and operating through psychological capacities give mediator four major new skills for easing the process and purpose of mediation exercise. One, an objective awareness to witness the proceedings of the mediation calmly within the conscious cognition and without having any bias and fixed beliefs towards any issues of the parties. Two, a stillness with sensory concentration to avoid unnecessary reactions or agitations that human nature is prone to in taking sides on issues or become lop-sided in approach and consequently affecting mediation's outcome of peaceful settlement. Three, an empathy that animates and motivates parties to look for win-win situation for both as against the adversarial method currently present in the legal system where one party loses and another party gains grounds, which results in bitterness in parties' relationships, rights and obligations. Four, a pragmatic sensibility or practical responsibility by which costs or damages or injuries of all kinds such as social, economic, profit-loss ratio, psychological or organizational stress etc., can be pre-calculated, meaningfully distributed and harmonized between parties by the mediator. With millions of pending legal cases in the existing system of the courts of law that are supposedly designed to provide access to justice and, unfortunately have become fragile as a result of severe shortage of resources of all kinds to deal with sheer quantity and intricate complexity of issues in the disputes, applied spirituality in mediation can pave way for easy, flexible, quick, cost-effective and satisfactory justice to both sides of the parties when these four major new skills are developed through application of spiritual experience and experiments in the whole process of mediation. The author explains in this article the method of acquiring these four major new skills in experiential form in any mediation scenario and the rationale for infusing applied spirituality in mediation. Author also discusses the Indian situation of mediation in the light of new developments sought for enhancing the alternative dispute resolution. At the end, this chapter demonstrates the bigger picture that represent the need of spirituality using these four major new skills while mediating challenges of sustainable development. It will be shown in the end how spirituality, sustainability and mediation for settlements of disputes of sustainable development have something common, core and collective. This is the premise based on which the relationship between applied spirituality and mediation in overcoming the challenges of sustainability are expressed with the help of intuitive, inspirational, integrative and intelligent actions for a sustaining our future age, new humanity and harmonious space.

Cultural expertise can play a relevant role in countries where cultural diversity marks social life, as in the case of Portugal, a country where migration always characterized its past and continues to influence the present, and where the presence of ethnic and religious minorities must be noticed. In this chapter, we aim to survey the use of cultural mediation in Portuguese law, as well as case law and culture centered mediation out of courts, in order to understand whether the concept of cultural expertise, in a broad sense, might be useful. Although it is a “contested concept,” culture is understood, for the purposes of this chapter, in a dynamic and non-essentialist sense, as a valuable asset providing context and significance to people’s lives. Assuming that the State is not “culturally neutral” and that its institutions somehow reflect the established culture, issues of equality and demands for cultural recognition will necessarily arise. However, it is the duty of the State to respect and protect cultural identity. Even though cultural expertise may become relevant in several domains of the State, particular attention is given in this chapter to the role played by cultural arguments and cultural expertise in courts in Portugal. Cultural expertise is also very relevant for social intervention, and it is mobilized in the processes of cultural mediation. These processes have a low level of institutionalization in Portugal, since it is not routinely recognized in the implementation of public policies as an autonomous professional profile.

The chapter aims to analyze an innovative intervention in the context of public housing in Italy. Over the past decade, in Italy, neighborhoods with a high concentration of public housing have increasingly become spaces of exclusion, where conflicts are rife, due to a multiplicity of factors (e.g., immigration, social deprivation, ageing, health problems). In particular, because of the global economic crisis and the impoverishment of Italian families, competition and quarrels between lower middle-class natives and migrants have been exacerbated, undermining the recent fragile pattern of social cohesion. However, housing and urban policies are still residual, especially in the political agenda of mid-sized towns, which witness an ungoverned urban growth not always accompanied by a concurrent complete recognition of citizenship. Moreover, policies tackling rising social tension to reduce or prevent it are lacking. Nonetheless, at a local level, some more dynamic municipalities are starting to promote original initiatives also thanks to the sharing of the best national and international practices. In particular we wish to focus on the social mediation processes implemented to prevent conflict and promote sustainable cohabitation, improving relationships between neighbors and fostering empowerment and participation. In this perspective, the chapter explores a two-year project of social mediation for households living in public housing which has been developed in the Marche region.

In this article, we focus on alternative dispute resolution procedures, in particular third party procedures. We describe eight different procedures and provide examples of how these procedures are used in different cultural contexts. We then evaluate the procedures in terms of how they impact four key criteria that have been noted in the literature related to negotiation: process criteria, settlement criteria, issue-related criteria, and relationship criteria. We subsequently explore the potential impact of culture on evaluations of these criteria. We finish with a discussion of future directions for research and practice, emphasizing that procedural recommendations should be made carefully when the criteria for effectiveness and applicability are derived from US-centric research. In other words, there is not “one best choice” for third party procedures universal to the myriad cultures on our planet.