Conflict resolution preserves power
Conflict resolution as an institutional practice serves to maintain existing power structures while providing the appearance of addressing systemic problems. The mediation industry has perfected the art of defusing revolutionary potential through procedural exhaustion.
──── The neutrality deception
Professional conflict resolution operates on the fiction of neutral mediation. Mediators claim to facilitate “win-win” solutions that satisfy all parties equally.
This neutrality is structurally impossible when parties have vastly unequal power. A landlord and tenant do not enter mediation as equals. A corporation and individual worker cannot negotiate from equivalent positions.
“Neutral” mediation inevitably favors the more powerful party by treating structural inequality as a natural starting point rather than the problem to be solved.
The process legitimizes existing power imbalances by framing them as legitimate interests worthy of protection through compromise.
──── Compromise as power preservation
The ideology of compromise assumes that all conflicts represent competing but equally valid interests that can be balanced through reasonable negotiation.
This framework systematically advantages those who benefit from the status quo. When oppressed groups demand justice and oppressors demand to maintain their privileges, “reasonable compromise” means preserving some portion of the injustice.
Splitting the difference between exploitation and liberation results in continued exploitation. The compromised solution becomes the new baseline from which future negotiations proceed, gradually normalizing previously unacceptable conditions.
──── Process over outcomes
Conflict resolution emphasizes procedural legitimacy over substantive justice. If the process appears fair, the outcome is deemed acceptable regardless of its material impact.
This procedural focus serves power by:
- Exhausting resistance through prolonged negotiation processes
- Creating appearance of fairness while preserving unfair outcomes
- Fragmenting collective action into individual grievance procedures
- Professionalizing resistance through expert mediator control
The process becomes the product, allowing institutions to claim they “addressed” problems without actually changing anything fundamental.
──── Individualization of systemic problems
Conflict resolution consistently reframes structural issues as interpersonal disputes requiring communication improvement rather than power redistribution.
Workplace exploitation becomes “communication breakdown between management and employees.” Police violence becomes “community-police relations needing improvement.” Economic inequality becomes “stakeholder interests requiring alignment.”
This reframing serves power by:
- Obscuring systemic causation behind interpersonal dysfunction narratives
- Reducing collective grievances to individual personality conflicts
- Channeling resistance energy into therapeutic rather than political work
- Implying solutions exist within current power arrangements
──── The mediation-industrial complex
Professional conflict resolution has become a billion-dollar industry with vested interests in maintaining the conflicts it claims to resolve.
Corporate mediation firms profit from workplace disputes that could be eliminated through structural changes like worker ownership or genuine democracy. Community mediation programs generate funding by processing conflicts rooted in economic inequality and state violence.
Academic conflict resolution programs produce credentialed professionals whose careers depend on the continued existence of manageable conflicts rather than systemic transformation.
The industry has successfully colonized resistance, transforming opposition into a managed service.
──── Restorative justice co-optation
Restorative justice emerged from radical critiques of punitive criminal justice systems but has been co-opted to serve state power preservation.
Community accountability processes get reduced to facilitated conversations that restore social peace without addressing underlying conditions that produce harm.
Victim-offender mediation becomes a cost-effective alternative to incarceration that maintains criminal justice system legitimacy while reducing processing costs.
Indigenous justice practices get extracted from their cultural contexts and deployed as techniques for managing rather than transforming colonial state power.
The radical potential of restorative justice gets neutralized through institutionalization and professionalization.
──── International conflict management
International conflict resolution serves imperial power by managing rather than resolving contradictions between dominant and subordinated nations.
Peace processes typically freeze existing power imbalances under the guise of stopping violence. Cease-fires become permanent arrangements that legitimize territorial conquest and resource extraction.
International mediation by powerful nations serves to manage conflicts in ways that preserve their strategic interests rather than address root causes of international inequality.
NGO conflict resolution provides legitimacy for interventions that ultimately serve imperial rather than local interests.
──── Labor relations containment
Labor mediation serves capital by channeling worker resistance into managed procedures that preserve employer prerogatives.
Collective bargaining becomes ritualized theater where unions negotiate the terms of their own subordination rather than challenging workplace hierarchy.
Grievance procedures atomize worker resistance into individual complaints processed through bureaucratic mechanisms controlled by management.
Labor-management partnerships co-opt union leadership into joint responsibility for maintaining workplace exploitation under collaborative rhetoric.
The appearance of worker voice serves to legitimize continued worker powerlessness.
──── Therapeutic governance
Conflict resolution increasingly adopts therapeutic language and techniques that pathologize resistance as emotional dysfunction requiring professional treatment.
Anger management for those responding appropriately to injustice. Communication skills training for those correctly identifying power imbalances. Emotional intelligence development for those refusing to accept exploitation graciously.
This therapeutic approach serves power by:
- Individualizing political problems as personal psychological issues
- Medicalizing resistance as emotional pathology requiring treatment
- Professionalizing solutions through credentialed therapeutic intervention
- Normalizing accommodation to injustice as mental health
──── Alternative dispute resolution capture
ADR was originally conceived as an alternative to state-controlled legal systems that served elite interests. It has been captured and integrated into those same systems as a more efficient mechanism for power preservation.
Mandatory arbitration eliminates access to courts while maintaining appearance of due process. Corporate ADR programs process employee complaints through procedures designed to minimize corporate liability.
Community mediation gets funded by the same institutions it was meant to challenge, ensuring outcomes serve institutional rather than community interests.
The alternative has become another tool of the system it claimed to replace.
──── The revolution management industry
Professional conflict resolution has evolved into a sophisticated system for managing and containing revolutionary potential.
Social movement mediation redirects collective action into individual grievance processing. Community dialogue facilitators fragment unified resistance into managed conversations between stakeholders with irreconcilable interests.
Peace-building programs in sites of struggle serve to demobilize resistance by offering hope that problems can be solved through existing institutional mechanisms.
The industry has perfected the art of making revolution unnecessary by making reform appear possible.
──── Values inversion mechanics
Conflict resolution inverts the relationship between peace and justice by prioritizing the former over the latter.
Negative peace (absence of conflict) becomes more valuable than positive peace (presence of justice). Stability trumps equality. Order supersedes freedom.
This value inversion serves existing power by making justice conditional on the consent of those who benefit from injustice.
──── Structural function analysis
Conflict resolution serves several structural functions for power maintenance:
Legitimacy production: Creates appearance that the system responds to grievances
Resistance management: Channels opposition into controllable procedures
Information gathering: Monitors and documents resistance activities
Co-optation facilitation: Recruits opposition leaders into system maintenance
Revolutionary prevention: Provides alternative to direct action
These functions operate regardless of individual mediator intentions or professional ethics.
────────────────────────────────────────
Conflict resolution as currently practiced is not neutral intervention in disputes but rather sophisticated technology for power preservation. It maintains existing hierarchies while providing the appearance of addressing systemic problems.
True conflict resolution would require transforming the conditions that produce conflicts rather than managing their symptoms. This would mean redistributing power rather than facilitating its more efficient exercise.
The question is not whether conflict resolution is well-intentioned, but whether it serves to maintain or transform the systems that generate the conflicts it claims to address.
When the process of resolution becomes more important than the substance of justice, we have created another mechanism for preserving exactly what needs to be changed.