Secondly, as part of your preparatory work, become aware of your assumptions - about yourself, the intervention, the parties, and even possible outcomes that you might envisage. Mediators seek to be impartial, but intervenors impact upon the intervention in a very definite way. I don't think so. If the mediator has credibility, he or she does not have to subscribe to the values of any of the parties - but again, the mediator must make this transparent. Before that certain societies used to see violence as the number one means of dealing with conflict.
More affluent societies are more likely to seek an alternative.
The poorest of the poor, the illiterate and uneducated, because of lack of better understanding and better strategies, often resort immediately to violence. I think in our work we promote the value and practice of non-violence, of constructive conflict resolution. But we should be slow to condemn violence - it depends how we define it. I don't believe that, but I think we have to go into dialogue with it. The effect of violence is so important that it forces resolution.