Moveable Feasts: An Introduction

In many circles, dispute resolution is still frequently referred to as a movement. Elsewhere, it is increasingly thought of as a business, or a set of professional practices in legal, government, and nonprofit organizations. There are also signs that dispute resolution is beginning to be seen as an integrated academic discipline. But in all of these overlapping senses of the field, there is an implicit assumption that it is appropriate to think of dispute resolution on a national, or even transnational, basis.

But how true is that imagery? We know that "all politics is local." Is it possible that this field, too, is so affected by local cultures that to speak of it in sweeping terms embodies a conceptual error, or even sets us up for a chain of misapprehensions and consequent mistakes in policy?