Worlding conflict resolution and mediation expertise: in the ‘Global South’

Abstract

This chapter will focus on how the paradox at the heart of this volume plays out in the Global South. Oftentimes, it is the Global South actors’ response to the ‘expertise’ that they receive that is problematized (the so-called ‘problem of local ownership’). What often goes unnoticed is that there are (at least) two dimensions to this problem: the prevalence of actors from the Global North in shaping conflict resolution and mediation efforts and the Eurocentric slant in the assembling of conflict expertise. The chapter looks at two efforts, one based in Australia and another in Brazil, that seek to address the limits of ‘local ownership’ by addressing each of these two dimensions. The first part of the chapter introduces these two efforts. The second part presents a brief overview of the notion of worlding, distinguishing between its two understandings, ‘worlding as situatedness’ and ‘worlding as constitutive’. The third part offers a reading of these two efforts as reflecting these two understandings of worlding: where the Australia-based effort reflects on the geo-cultural situatedness of expertise in conflict resolution, the Brazil-based effort responds to its constitutive effects with regard to mediation expertise. I conclude by pointing to the need to connect the two understandings of worlding (and not apply only one or the other) in making sense of the way the book’s paradox plays out in the Global South.