Mediation can be used to manage conflict even where it is known that the conflict will continue. Here the “conflict” refers to an ongoing series of disputes of severe intensity which have occurred over an extended period of time. Mediation can serve to contain the conflict by establishing appropriate rules, structure, strategy and processes for communication and interaction, even where there is little goodwill between the parties.
This is a use of the process that deserves wider understanding. Not every conflict can be ended; some — between neighbours, within families, between commercial parties locked into long contracts, between separated parents — must instead be lived with. In such cases the purpose of mediation is not a final settlement but a working arrangement: agreed channels for communication, agreed procedures for raising grievances, and agreed boundaries that lower the temperature of each successive dispute.
Goodwill, it should be noted, is not a precondition. The structure does the work that goodwill would otherwise do. Parties who cannot yet trust one another can nevertheless follow a procedure — and it is remarkable how often the habit of procedure, maintained over time, becomes the foundation on which something closer to goodwill is eventually rebuilt.
