Good Mediator

Su-Mi Lee is assistant professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawai`i at Hilo.

• Chapter One: Mediation Chapter Two: Mediation and Mediator TrustChapter Three: Mediators’ Relational Characteristics: Impartiality and Interest Chapter Four: Two Dimensions of Trust and Two Relational Characteristics of Mediators Chapter Five: Mediation for the Borneo Dispute and the Yemen Dispute Chapter Six: Good Mediators

Lee (political science, Univ. of Hawai'i, Hilo) is interested in international relations, and in this volume she grapples with two sets of literature on mediation, one concerning disputants' trust in the mediator and the other the mediator's impartiality and interest in the dispute. She bridges these by separating trust into fairness and capacity and then linking fairness to impartiality and capacity to interest—ultimately arguing that the sum of impartiality and interest is the best predictor of both mediator occurrence and mediation success. High impartiality and high interest are best, but moderate impartiality can be offset by high interest and moderate interest can be offset by high impartiality. Two case studies examine whether interest alone or impartiality alone lead to mediation success. Lee's evidence is, at its core, statistical in nature, and she convincingly demonstrates that though the measure of impartiality predicts mediator occurrence and the measure of interest (weakly) predicts mediation success, only the sum of impartiality and interest predict both mediator occurrence and mediation success.Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.