Persuasive Information

Mediate Globally, Practice Locally

By Michael Benefiel

 

Reprinted from the November 2009 issue of the Maryland Council for Dispute Resolution official newsletter, “Resolving Issues,” pages 8-10.

 

In this short essay, I hope to feature three topics: the organization named Mediators Beyond Borders; my own experiences

with mediating in overseas locations; and some of my own observations, lessons, and questions about cross-cultural work.

 

Mediators Beyond Borders

 

This newsletter feature was written before Rachel Wohl made her presentation to MCDR for our June 4, 2009, quarterly meeting. This summary is based on my own participation in New Orleans, March 6-8, 2009. I wish to thank Rachel Wohl and Carl Schneider, whose examples and leadership motivated me to join MBB and contribute to the growth of this global mediation network.

 

Mediators Beyond Borders (MBB) Mission

 

MBB brings together experienced mediators to volunteer their skills world-wide, in collaboration with local, indigenous and global partners, to improve conflict resolution capacity and support alternative approaches to expressing, negotiating, and resolving interpersonal, political, economic, social, ethnic, and religious differences.

By fostering collaborative initiatives in partnership with on-site efforts, Mediators Beyond Borders assists in building and sustaining local capacity and training in ways that encourage forgiveness and reconciliation and integrate peace with justice. [Source for these paragraphs and following: MBB website, Orientation Manual]

 

MBB interprets “beyond borders” broadly. MBB acts across geographical, political, economic, societal, and cultural

boundaries. MBB partners with NGO’s, universities, political and activist groups, community organizations, professional

societies, environmental, commercial, and other entities worldwide to develop skills for group facilitation, public dialogue, strategic planning, collaborative negotiation, peer mediation, restorative justice, and public policy consensus building.

 

MBB uses the term “mediator,” to cover a wide range of conflict resolution practitioners including conciliators, consultants,

facilitators, consensus builders, and practitioners who conduct public dialogues, provide systems design work, facilitate restorative justice processes, and offer trauma healing.

 

New Orleans Congress, March 6-8, 2009

 

Ken Cloke and Robert Creo, along with a dedicated network of founding members, organized MBB’s first annual congress

in Allenspark, Colorado, in February 2008. I attended MBB’s second annual congress in New Orleans, along with about 60 others.

 

Participants came from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Keynote speakers included:

 

Julia Roig, Executive Director, Partners for Democratic Change;

Forrest S. Mosten, Advanced Practitioner Member,

Assn for Conflict Resolution;

John W. McDonald, Chairman, Inst. for Multi-Track Diplomacy and former U.S. Ambassador;

Trevor Maisiri, Executive Director, African Reform Institute, Harare, Zimbabwe;

Jamil Mahuad, Co-founder, International Negotiation Initiative, Harvard Law School, and former President of Ecuador.

 

It was inspiring to hear about many of the speakers’ remarkable international conflict resolution experiences. A group of MBB members were working with community members in the Lower Ninth Ward during the Congress.

 

One of the community leaders spoke at the Congress following a screening of a documentary film about the aftermath of Katrina on the Lower Ninth Ward.

 

Other MCDR members in attendance include Keith Seat, who works on MBB’s newsletter, Craig Distelhorst, who works on the Katrina project and Louise Phipps Senft who also works on the Katrina project and leads MBB’s training committee.

Overall, I thought the Congress provided both practical lessons from specific, real world projects and also touched the hopeful and aspirational qualities of the work of global mediation. I found myself energized and inspired by the workshops, narratives, and examples.

 

Projects Initiated

MBB initiated three field projects in 2008: The Liberian Initiative, A Hurricane Katrina Project with centers in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Biloxi, Mississippi, and a field project with Somali refugees in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

 

In breakout sessions, I was also able to learn about recent preparation work on potential projects in the Middle East, Zimbabwe, and Colombia. Since the Congress the MBB Board has formally approved the Middle East project, the Zimbabwe project and an assessment trip for the Colombia project.

 

Inspiring Words and Examples – Ken Cloke

 

In a 2007 essay, Ken Cloke described both the character of separation and of connection represented by borders.

I think his gift for expressing this idea merits repeating here:

 

“All conflicts take place between people; that is, at the borders or boundaries that separate individuals, cultures, organizations, and nations. Every conflict can therefore be regarded as creating or reinforcing a border or boundary that divides us....”

“Yet every boundary is also a connection, a potentially unifying element, a place where two sides can come together.

As a result, we can therefore regard resolution as a consensual crossing of the borders and boundaries that separate us. Non-consensual border crossings are experienced as boundary violations, and may be vigorously resisted. Consensual border crossings, on the other hand, are experienced as acts of empathy and friendship, indicators of love and affection, and precursors to collaboration, problem solving, forgiveness, and reconciliation.”

 

For more information about MBB, I invite you to visit the website: http://www.mediatorsbeyondborders.org and

to join the Maryland/Washington, D.C./Northern Virgina regional MBB chapter by sending an email to rachel.wohl@mdcourts.gov.

 

My diplomatic, negotiation, and mediation experiences

 

Following a service learning project I did when I was 20 years old at a provincial medical school in Southeastern Japan, I took four years of university level Japanese language and literature courses, first at Stanford University, then at Waseda Daigaku. With this language expertise, I was hired as a translator by the U.S. National Marine

Fisheries Service in the 1970s and began my Federal career reporting on markets in Japan and U.S. Coast Guard enforcement actions off the coast of Alaska. My ethnic background is European, most recently Irish and German, so my appearance did not suggest any Japanese language skill. This was both an advantage, since expectations for

my language ability were uniformly low, and also a disadvantage, since I could never be mistaken for a native speaker of the language, no matter how many years I practiced.

 

I found myself the target of fear and suspicion at a bakery in my neighborhood. One morning, as I shopped for some fresh bread, a woman who could not find her purse pointed at me and accused me of taking it. Fortunately, the bakery clerk recognized me as a repeat customer and was unwilling to summon the police to question me

after I permitted her to search my coat and my schoolbag for a purse. I thought I understood the woman’s suspicion.

She couldn’t imagine where her purse was, there was a strange foreign man in the bakery, and the jump to a conclusion put those two events together.

 

On a more serious note, historic suspicion of foreigners and the discriminatory treatment of Koreans during the

Pacific War have led to a very restrictive control of non-Japanese residents by the Japanese police and immigration

officials. When my wife and I were living in Japan in the mid-1970s, we received a visit from the local police to get

acquainted. We carried identity cards to prove we were legal residents of Japan with valid student visas. In later years, as I reviewed student visa applications as a consular official of the U.S. State Department, I remembered my own experiences with the process.

 

During the 1980s, as the U.S. auto industry was responding to the challenge of Japanese imports in the U.S. market, I was part of the negotiating process which evolved into the complex system of voluntary limits on Japanese exports, combined with investment in U.S. manufacturing plants. U.S. consumers wanted to buy Japanese

cars and public policy did not favor setting up permanent protectionist barriers to auto imports.

 

Working beyond borders

 

As the short background may suggest, I’ve lived and worked in Japan and represented the interests of the U.S. in negotiations with skillful Japanese government officials and industry representatives. I would like to offer a few observations of how these experiences shaped my own approach to the cross-cultural work of mediation in a diverse community.

 

Three qualities have helped me in my practice of mediation: humility, curiosity, and self-awareness.

 

Riding the Embassy Elevator on Monday

 

While on assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, I moved back and forth between spaces where Japanese rules applied and spaces where U.S. rules applied. When the two spaces overlapped, the result could be mutual confusion and sometimes inconvenience. My own experience waiting in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy, which is

a high rise office building in downtown Tokyo, might amuse you and illustrate a relatively small inconvenience.

 

On Monday morning, the Embassy elevators were busy and a group of us were waiting together in the lobby. One of the elevator doors opened and I hesitated: American practice is to allow women to precede men; Japanese practice is to allow social superiors to precede others. I was in a mixed group of men and women, American

citizens and Japanese citizens. While I waited for my female colleagues to get on, they waited for me, and while waiting to see whether we were guided by Japanese or American practices, the elevator door closed and the wait started again. At that point, I smiled, my smile was returned, and we agreed to use Japanese rules on the next opportunity.

 

The experiences of living in a non-American space and working in a language other than English taught me how much of my cultural identity I take for granted. Like a fish, I rarely notice the language and cultural “waters” which surround me. One quality that attracts me to Mediators Beyond Borders is the sense of humility and

curiosity which mediators bring to new conflict. The MBB brings to complex human systems an awareness of resources offered and resources needed for collaborative partnerships.

I look forward to sharing more experiences about cultural awareness and cross-cultural skill building in future issues of the newsletter. I invite others with stories like my Tokyo elevator to share them as a way to illustrate how our cultural practices may differ from one another.

 

Michael Benefiel