A call to action and practical guide that reveals how a grassroots conflict-resolution movement became entangled with the systems it was created to challenge, and provides a framework for communities and practitioners to reclaim mediation as a community-owned, culturally responsive, and liberatory practice.

This book is an interdisciplinary, community-centered examination of how community mediation in the United States evolved from a grassroots movement rooted in Civil Rights organizing and community empowerment into a field increasingly shaped by courts, government funding, professionalization, and institutional priorities. Tracing more than six decades of history, Dr. Teni-Ola Adunni Ogunjobi reveals how resource dependency and unequal power relationships can shift mediation away from community ownership and toward institutional efficiency.

Drawing on decolonization theory, structural violence, conflict prevention, and original qualitative research with 30 community-based and court-connected mediation practitioners and collaborators across 16 U.S. states, Dr. Ogunjobi connects historical analysis with lived practitioner experience. But the book does not stop at critique. It offers a framework for reclaiming mediation through community power, cultural responsiveness, conflict prevention, regenerative justice, and community self-determination. More than a critique of institutionalized mediation, the book provides practitioners, organizations, and policymakers with concrete frameworks, assessment tools, implementation strategies, and policy recommendations for putting community power back into practice.

Timely, accessible, and deeply informed by practitioner-scholar experience, Decolonizing Mediation bridges scholarship and practice for academics and graduate students as well as mediators, nonprofit professionals, policymakers, community organizations, and community peacemakers seeking more equitable, culturally responsive, and community-centered approaches to conflict resolution.