Ideological Production: The Making of Community Mediation

Abstract

Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

Popular Justice, Populist Politics: Law in Community Organizing

“…Thus in some sense, there are not 'two sides' (i.e. one court-based and the other community-based) to this movement, rather conflict within it and a consensus on the political and legal symbols mobilized to attract resources and establish legitimacy (Harrington and Merry, 1988). …”

“…between the official legal system and community justice alternatives as an ambiguous one, wherein ambiguity allows the community justice alternative to have a transformative effect on the wider structure of the state-sponsored legal system (Henry, 1985(Henry, , 1987; see also Harrington and Merry, 1988). This relationship can be simultaneously supportive and oppositional (Cain, 1985;Fitzpatrick, 1988).…”

Popular Justice and the Ideology of Social Transformation

“…Other forms of American community mediation make far fewer explicit references to the rebuilding of community and the implementation of selfgovernance (see Harrington and Merry, 1989). As Christine Harrington and I argue, San Francisco Community Boards connected consensual dispute settlement and community, harnessing the powerful symbol of the romanticized community of the past to the promotion of a reform which, in most of its manifestations, has far closer ties to state law than to indigenous ordering.…”

La construcción de la diversidad jurídica desde el Estado. El proceso de oficialización de las justicias indígenas en Michoacán

“…19 Sally Engle Merry ya había observado esta lógica de instrumentalización de las formas de organización comunitaria al analizar la promoción de los programas de mecanismos alternativos de resolución de conflictos promovidos por las cortes estadounidenses. Véanse Harrington y Merry 1989y Merry 2004.…”