Governance and Susceptibility in Conflict Resolution: Possibilities Beyond Control

Abstract

IntroductionCritics of conflict resolution informalism have for several decades argued that community mediation and other "alternative" dispute resolution processes in the West entrench rather than mitigate regulation and governance. The most credible and nuanced critique that has emerged thus far draws upon a broadly Foucauldian approach (see Matthews 1988; Pavlich 1996a: 67-88; for overview and analysis). The key argument, advanced primarily by George Pavlich 1 (1996a; 1996b), is that mediation and other socalled alternatives to adversarial court processes involve a "governmentalisation" of the state, or the increasing involvement of individuals in the exercise of formal (sovereign) power through informal means (Foucault 1997a: 68). In this mode of governance, subjects act upon and discipline themselves without direct state intervention in a paradoxical exercise of "freedom" that generates behaviours and ways of being in concert with (neo-) liberal state goals. This acting-upon-oneself, which is managed by mediators and other conflict resolution experts, helps to constitute rather than challenge formal regulation.Formal and informal demarcate and bring each other into existence as citizens accept the formal sanctions of law and state on the basis of the "freedom" exercised in conflict resolution and the informal realm more broadly (see Fitzpatrick 1988;1992).This nuanced critique of informalism has several advantages. It challenges the popular and sometimes unequivocal imagining of conflict resolution as normatively opposed to the juridical and the formal both within states and the wider (liberal) global order. This allows a more satisfactory understanding of the interplay of formal and informal spheres than is available through earlier critiques that tended to debate informalism through oppositions between formal/informal and control/freedom. 2 In this way governmentality analyses also advance on the tendency in conventional political and social theory to mirror liberal 2 ontology by conceiving of the informal as a "zone of freedom" populated by preconstituted subjects. Instead, the informal sphere is suffused with power relations crucial to the operation of liberal governance.Individual subjects do not exist apart from power relations in this operation of governance, but come into existence, or are manufactured (Foucault 1997b: 59), through a range of diverse and apparently apolitical practices from education to therapy and conflict resolution. By inducing subjects to pursue their own welfare these practices generate particular ways of being and behaving, including understandings of selfhood, order and dispute, aligned with those sanctioned by the state. Governance thus proceeds through what may be termed "regulatory practices of freedom". By providing a means for regulating the majority of subjects' behaviours through apparently apolitical means, the non-interference of law, sovereignty and the state is possible. A sphere of "freedom" is thus carved out apart from state intervention while the state and as...

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