Conciliation

Conciliation in Historical and Comparative Context

Although specific forms of conciliation have varied throughout history, conciliation as an informal way of handling disputes seems to have been widely used in premodern as well as modern societies. For instance, in seventeenth-century England, neighbors or people with influence and power in a village or the church conciliated civil disputes and petty crimes among local people. Takeyoshi Kawashima wrote that in Japan, conciliation was commonly used to settle disputes well into the twentieth century. Similarly, in twentieth-century rural Germany, villagers continued to turn to other members of their communities to conciliate disputes.

Conciliation is usually accomplished in one of two typical ways: as an extrajudicial form of dispute resolution or as a part of the judicial process. In the United States, for instance, people often used conciliation in the Puritan colonies as an extrajudicial means of individual dispute resolution. However, with economic growth, courts and lawyers took over dispute resolution. Only among immigrant minority groups, who brought conciliation practices from their home countries, did conciliation survive. Prior to the 1970s, conciliation did not constitute a significant form of extrajudicial dispute resolution. Then, in the early 1970s, Richard Danzig proposed the concept of “a community moot” to conciliate “disputants or reintegrate deviants into society.” By abandoning the adjudication model, he expected a moot to effectively handle family disputes, juvenile delinquencies, and civil disputes among and affecting community members (1973: 41–45). Within a decade, about two hundred community moots, known as “neighborhood justice centers,” were set up throughout communities in the United States. People also increasingly used conciliation in the early 1980s for family disputes, [Page 236]particularly divorce-related problems. Nevertheless, starting in the 1970s, mediation, with specialized practitioners, rapidly replaced conciliation.

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