International and Regional Perspectives on Cross-Cultural Mediation

Intercultural and cross-cultural mediation in the Western world has emerged as an object of research that has attracted a growing attention over the past thirty years. Meanwhile, static and essentialist notions of culture in communication have been challenged by dynamic and constructivist approaches taking culture as a flux that is changing permanently. The contributions in this book adopt these tendencies to cross-cultural mediation research: They center around the question if and in what ways people from different cultural groups have constructed their own notions of how conflict mediation in cross-cultural settings should be dealt with in particular. In other words: Are there different ways of handling cross-cultural conflict that may be termed as culture-specific? The contributions in this volume reveal some insights to the high complexity of this question.