No abstract

Research is all about a person's engagement with an issue. But most approaches to International Relations actively discourage personal involvement by the researcher. We question the adequacy of this norm and the related scholarly conventions. Instead, we explore how the personal experience of the researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into politics. But we also note that simply telling the story of the researcher is inadequate. We engage the ensuing dilemmas by discussing how to both appreciate and evaluate autoethnographic insights. Rather than relying on pre-determined criteria, we argue that methodological uses of the self should be judged within knowledge communities and according to their ability to open up new perspectives on political dilemmas. We then advance two related suggestions: one advocates conceptualising research around puzzles; the other explores the methodological implications of recognising that producing knowledge is an inherently relational activity.

Although mediators often think of themselves as advancing a positive and progressive orientation to conflict, mainstream facilitative mediation practice subordinates conflict to harmony and does not recognize non-Western orientations to disputing. This is closely related to a lack of awareness and recognition of different ways of being or versions of selfhood. In Western mediation practice, conflict and violence are typically seen as destructive and unhelpful ways of being, and this does not allow for the constitutive and productive role of conflict in many non-Western traditions. The playing out of these assumptions in mediation practice effects an operation of power, which is particularly significant in intercultural mediations. These intercultural situations and the accompanying operation of power arise regardless of whether the dispute is among people of similar cultural background or between different cultures when-they simply require that mediations are provided through the dominant Western culture. This paper explores this operation of power through an interplay between theory and practice. In particular I draw on both the work of Michel Foucault and personal experience as a mediator, including involvement with training and related activities. In adopting a Foucaultian approach, the paper expands on the previous contributions of George Pavlich (1996a; 1996b) and adjusts for the approach taken by Dale Bagshaw (2001). The paper draws upon an assumed understanding of facilitative mediation practice and demonstrates points by reference to intercultural issues between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australian peoples. Through this approach, it is shown that in intercultural mediations explicit and implicit mediator techniques lead disputants to behave and perform their selves in ways consistent with the goals of mediation and Western norms around conflict and selfhood. The specificity of this analysis means that the findings are indicative and explorative rather than comprehensive. Nevertheless, the results highlight the need to consider ways in which researchers and mediators can begin to mitigate this operation of power and respond to cultural difference in ethical ways. The final section of the paper shows that 1 the very structure and underlying assumptions of contemporary facilitative mediation require that we be more circumspect about the postmodern possibility of valuing cultural difference in mediation than Bagshaw (2001) allows. For this reason, the paper concludes that a long-term process of cultural learning, including elicitive dialogue across cultural difference, is necessary to develop processes which respond to different approaches to conflict and modes of selfhood. Conflict, Self and Culture The question of normative orientation to conflict is often discussed in primary or alternative dispute resolution (ADR) circles, particularly in training courses, with many practitioners and advocates of mediation seeing themselves effecting a transformation in the orientation of themselves and their clients...

Recent development studies literature has begun to consider the developer's self. This welcome enlargement of the field deserves to be deepened and extended by moving beyond opposition to post-development critics, and by articulating an explicit theoretical frame for examining developers' selves. By exploring Foucault's suggestion that modern approaches to knowledge and selfhood may be entwined through developmentalism, this paper proposes a flexible and nondeterministic cultural-historical framework for considering developers' selves. Foucault's analyses of relations of power and subjectivity provide strategies for examining developers' selves, but this does not suggest that such selves can be read off the proposed framework. Examining developers' selves is necessarily a reflective ethical task, and one which requires engaging the external relations that constitute the self. Foucault provides valuable resources for this task, but there is also a need to extend upon and complement a Foucauldian approach. Pursuing our new-found interest in developers' selves by working through and beyond Foucault promises to open new professional futures and possibilities for development practice.The figure of the development professional has begun to receive attention in recent development studies literature. Ilan Kapoor has called attention to developers' selves by exploring their involvement with development as a technology of power. 1 Building upon post-development critiques and postcolonial theory, Kapoor focuses on how the cultural, institutional and geopolitical positioning of development professionals can disempower people of the South. From a different perspective Gordon Wilson shows that, contrary to some overly-simplistic post-development critiques, development professionals are not simply technocrats, and that development encounters can open spaces for reflexivity and learning. 2 Similarly, Peter Tamas shows that development professionals can have highly sophisticated understandings of their relationship with development discourse. 3 Spanning these two approaches-and moving from a broadly post-development to a more hopeful approach to professional practice-is Katharine McKinnon's analysis of development professionalism in Northern Thailand. 4 Other scholarsMorgan Brigg is at the

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as respectively biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein