Governance and Susceptibility in Conflict Resolution: Possibilities Beyond Control
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663907073445 |
| Author | Morgan Brigg |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
GOVERNANCE AND
SUSCEPTIBILITY IN CONFLICT
RESOLUTION: POSSIBILITIES
BEYOND CONTROL
MORGAN BRIGG
University of Queensland, Australia
ABSTRACT
Governmentality analysis offers a nuanced critique of informal western conflict reso-
lution by arguing that recently emerged ‘alternatives’ to adversarial court processes
both govern subjects and help to constitute rather than challenge formal regulation.
However, this analysis neglects possibilities for transforming governance from within
conflict resolution that are suggested by Foucault’s contention that there are no
relations of power without resistances. To explore this lacuna, I theorize and explore
the affective and interpersonal nature of governance in mediation through auto-
ethnographic reflection upon mediation practice, and Levinas’s insights about the
relatedness of selves. The article argues that two qualitatively different mediator
capacities – technical ability and susceptibility – operate in concert to effect liberal
governance. Occasionally though, difficulties and failures in mediation practice bring
these capacities into tension and reveal the limits of governance. By considering these
limits in mediation with Aboriginal Australian people, I argue that the susceptibil-
ity of mediator selves contains prospects for mitigating and transforming the very
operations of power occurring through conflict resolution. This suggests options for
expanded critical thinking about power relations operating through informal processes,
and for cultivating a susceptible sensibility to mitigate liberal governance and more
ethically respond to difference through conflict resolution.
KEY WORDS
affect; conflict resolution; culture; Foucault, Indigenous Australians; liberal
governance; mediation; power
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 16(1), 27–47
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907073445
INTRODUCTION
CRITICS OF conflict resolution informalism have for several decades
argued that community mediation and other ‘alternative’ dispute reso-
lution 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; van Krieken, 2001 for overview and analysis). The key
argument, advanced primarily by George Pavlich (1996a, 1996b),1is that
mediation and other so-called alternatives to adversarial court processes
involve a ‘governmentalization’ of the state, or the increasing involvement of
individuals in the exercise of formal (sovereign) power through informal
means (Foucault, 1997a). 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.2In this way governmentality
analyses also advance on the tendency in conventional political and social
theory to mirror liberal ontology by conceiving of the informal as a ‘zone of
freedom’ populated by pre-constituted 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 opera-
tion 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 associated formal institutions maintain their standing as the absolute
basis for order. The governmentality approach, then, offers a nuanced and
compelling analysis of the power relations operating through informal conflict
28 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(1)
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