In this article John Paul Lederach compares mediation with nonviolent advocacy. Advocates argue that mediation reinstitutes injustice in situations of power imbalance between the parties. Mediation also tends to limit the issues, avoiding dealing with the structural problems in which many conflicts are rooted. For this reason advocates prefer adversarial and confrontational approaches to conflict. Mediators, on the other hand, believe that advocates do not understand and have no desire to learn the mediation process or work with different perspectives.
Mediators also feel uncomfortable with activists' positions of righteousness.
Lederach argues that this dispute between mediators and advocates is a nonconstructive debate, where polarization and stereotypes dominate. He suggests an alternative framing of the problem. This matrix suggests that conflicts go through different stages, each of which is best approached in a different way. In a situation of gross power imbalance, the weaker party might not even realize the injustice that is being done to him. In this case, education is needed to generate awareness of the inferior position of the low-power party.