The Operations Director of the International Mediation Institute e-mailed me an article with the above title. Irena Vanenkova writes:
I would like to offer you the article Can Mediation Evolve into a Global Profession? by Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel-Litigation, GE Oil & Gas, Florence, Italy and Chairman of the Board of IMI, where he presents the perspective of a leading corporate user of mediation services on the vital issue of evolving Mediation into a Global Profession for the future growth of mediation.
Excerpt from the article:
[M]ethods of dispute resolution ... over time adapt to changes in their surrounding environments. In fact, I recently had the privilege of interviewing cultural anthropologist Robert Carniero, curator of South American ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who explained his experiences living for periods with different tribes in the Amazon basin, and their approaches to dispute resolution. As Dr. Carniero explains it, primitive and rather brutal forms of dispute resolution – such as beating each other with heavy wooden clubs – works just fine when the groups consist of no more than 50 or 100 people and those not content with the outcome can just move away.
Things get more complicated, however, as societies grow in size and complexity, and so far all large societies have evolved within them formal justice systems. In fact, it appears that societies cannot