Mediation

Introduction to Part 1

“When, in a thousand years’ time, in the year 3000, historians study the end of the twentieth century and the year 2000, when the supercomputers they rely on, which can carry out calculations down to the last zero, scan all the texts of our period, from big books to the last magazine or newspaper, they will undoubtedly find that a word has taken over in particular the last ten years of our life. A word that is made to fit every occasion, which became magical before our very eyes: mediation” (Six and Mussaud 2002, p. 13).

A flourishing concept of mediation has become a fashionable phenomenon, which is cited in several fields. It even seems a sort of panacea that can solve conflicts of all kinds and on every level (family, society, international, etc.). Mediation, which is generally reduced to a technique, represents first of all the emergence of a new course of action that governs the relationships between individuals, but also, and more generally, the relationships between the state and civil society.

However, we quite often use the term of mediation without properly considering its stakes and foundations.

Mediation is not a vague notion, and it benefits from a rigorous definition, but it suffers from a use that is too lax. Thus, we will see in the first part of this work that the concept of mediation relies on specific elements that deserve specific attention.