#and seeing a Jewish person sincerely say this about another severely marginalized group?

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

This is what Zionism does to you btw

[morallygreywarden]

A few days ago, I was perusing the Dragon Age wiki (as one does) looking for info on Shale when I came across this archived thread from the now taken down Bioware forums. Dragon Age fans were posting their “random Dragon Age question(s)”, and for the first few pages of the thread, David Gaider would respond to some of them. Then I came across this question and answer:

[Image: David Gaider quotes a post by poster Alistairlover94:

“@Mr. Gaider: Was the Tome of Koslun based on the Qu'ran, the Qun on Islam, and Koslun on the prophet Muhammad?”

David Gaider responds:

“Not really, no. The Qun has nothing functionally in common with Islam, and the existence of a prophet or a book is hardly unique. The Qunari play a role in Thedas similar to Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe (combined with the Golden Horde, for good measure), which is where their Middle Eastern "flavor" comes from... but beyond that any similarities are unintentional.”]

Being a Middle Eastern Muslim person myself (specifically, I’m Palestinian diaspora currently living in Canada), this post caught my eye. And... not really in a positive way.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the Qunari connected to Arabs. That was back on some Reddit thread or another, where someone suggested that the Qunari are comparable to Arabs/the Moors/the Turks because they are a “foreign race” with a “strange religion” who’d once enforced that religion across a wide stretch of land before being forcibly pushed back. 

My reaction at the time was “nah”. Maybe not a totally certain or comfortable “nah,” as I understood it’s possible that was what Bioware was going for, but more of a “nah, I don’t want to think about that, and I’m not gonna take that into consideration in my understanding of Thedas.” Fair enough, I thought, but having seen what Gaider said on the matter, I can’t really just write it off at my own leisure anymore.

I’m not the first person to talk about this. A quick search got me results like this in which people have expressed anger at this parallel before, as well as several threads questioning if the Qunari are meant to represent Muslims that make no reference to Gaider’s response in the thread I quoted at the start of this post. That said, though, I’d like to offer my own take on it here. 

I think the first and most obvious thing to point out here is that Qunari are grey, horned giants. While their obvious coding as POC in relation to their designs and the fact they are non-human characters have been criticized before, I think it’s an important thing to mention here as well. Gaider clearly states that the Qunari possess a “Middle Eastern flavour”, i.e. they’re not meant to be a direct representation of Middle Eastern people but rather have cherry-picked parts of Middle Eastern history to use as an allegory. Regardless of their intentions, clearly many people have picked up on the connection, and when you’re a person of colour desperate for representation, the knowledge that something that’s loosely meant to represent you or “play a similar role” to you comes in the form of-- well, grey, horned giants, isn’t particularly fun knowledge to have.

Now let’s unpack what Gaider actually said. 

First, he states that any similarities between the Qun as a philosophy and Islam are unintentional. I’m going to take him at his word for it; I don’t have any interest in trying to draw parallels between the Qun and Islam, except perhaps to mention that “Qunari” is only one letter and two rearrangements away from being the word “Quran,” which, yeah, real subtle. Reading too much into it? Maybe. I wasn’t originally going to bring it up here at all, but I find it kind of funny, so there it is anyway.

However, I do want to look at what the implications of that are. While there’s differing opinions on the actual subject of “Arabic cultures in Medieval Europe” (I think he’s referring to what’s popularly known as the “Islamic Golden Age”) that I’m not interested in getting into here (because while I do have some knowledge of the time period I think there are still things that I’m ignorant about due to only having heard the story from particular perspectives, and because during that time and in those regions Arabs/Arab Muslims were in the most positions of power, I don’t think it’s for me to try to assess the period with my limited knowledge), I think it’s safe to say that the actual religion of Islam was a major factor in it. And by that I mean Islam, specifically, for what it is. It played a particular role, and to look at it as simply a placeholder where any philosophy, no matter how disconnected, can be readily and thoughtlessly filled in is reductive of the religion itself. No, the Qun isn’t meant as an allegory for Islam, but it is meant to be an allegory of the role Islam played as being a central factor to the people who the Qunari are meant to be allegorical to, and I find the careless substitution here questionable. I get that this issue isn’t a unique one even within Dragon Age let alone outside of it, but it’s worth mentioning.

Now I think it’s worth it to look at the Qunari themselves and the role that they play in Thedas as it pertains to this allegory. One of the central tenets of the Qunari is that they are, as the Dragon Age wiki phrases it, “fanatical in [...] devotion, [and] prepared to wage war throughout their entire lives as part of their attempts to "enlighten" all other races in regards to their philosophy.” The Qun may have “nothing functionally in common with Islam” according to Gaider, but if the Qunari truly play a “similar role” to that of historical Arabs/Muslims, then we can’t overlook this element. (Particularly because this isn’t the first time Thedosian history has overlapped with Middle Eastern and Islamic history: the term “templar” references the Knights Templar, which was the name of the Catholic military order that fought the Crusades, of whom Middle Eastern Jewish and Muslim people were the primary victims, particularly in Jerusalem. Another example is in the name “Inquisition” itself, a reference to a group of Catholic institutions whose goal was to combat “heresy”. One of the most famous examples of the inquisiton was the Spanish Inquisition, that was formed around the decline of the Islamic Golden Age and specifically targeted Muslim and Jewish people. Several of the other inquisitions targeted Muslims as well).

The way the Islamic Golden Age has largely been depicted in the West involves the Orientalist idea of Muslims as barbarians who’d taken control of large regions with their “heretical” religion before their rightful defeat. The Qunari aren’t portrayed that much differently: they took control of sweeping regions of Thedas for a long period of time, forcibly converting masses of people to their philosophy, before being defeated by the Tevinter Imperium. The important difference here is that in real life, the details of the Islamic Golden Age were far more nuanced than that, and the labelling of Muslims as “barbaric” and Islam as “heretical” was a deliberate tactic to justify waging a war against them on the basis of their religion. In the Dragon Age universe, with respect to the Qunari, things are what they seem. While the notion of the Qunari being “barbaric” is specifically challenged, the Qunari really did convert people forcibly to their philosophy, and this is an undebated fact. 

This is a problem because this view of Muslims and Middle Eastern people still affects us today. One of the major justifications that white supremacists use for their islamophobia is the conspiracy theory of “Islamization”-- that Muslims have a master plan to convert the entire world to Islam and conquer. For the Qunari, this is literally true-- they actually do plan to conquer and convert the entire world to the Qun. The islamophobic caricature of a Muslim screaming “infidel!” to anyone who isn’t Muslim is still very much relevant today-- and the idea that Qunari view anyone who doesn’t follow their way derogatorily is a fact.  The characterization of the Qunari, as far as it is allegorical to Middle Eastern people and specifically Muslims, could be more accurately described as an allegory to islamophobic and racist portrayals of Middle Eastern and Muslim people.The existence of Qunari as a fictional entity does not challenge stereotypes, or offer a new perspective. It instead reinforces those harmful sentiments, the same ones that are echoed by those who commit hate crimes against us, and those who target us in politics and legislation. 

Like any other marginalized group, Muslim and Middle Eastern people don’t get a lot of representation. The Dragon Age series is one of my all-time favourites, and being able to see myself reflected in the Dragon Age series would be thrilling. But “representation” like this does more harm than good. While it wasn’t the intention of the developers to represent Muslims or Middle Eastern people by the Qunari except to give them a Middle Eastern “flavour,” that “flavour” is deeply embedded with a history of racism and islamophobia. It hurts twice: first, because it’s reductive of Muslims and Middle Eastern people, turning our history into something that can be cherrypicked from at the writers’ leisure without making any respectful effort to actually represent a marginalized group, and second, because that cherrypicking is imbued with stereotypes that have been and still are used to hurt us.

I hope that these concerns are considered in future work done with the game. While I’m not sure how this problem with the Qunari could be specifically addressed in the future, I think one suggestion that could help would be to make a better effort to represent Middle Eastern people in other areas of the game. @dalishious pointed out that we still don’t know much about a lot of the human cultures, such as the people of the Anderfels, and a sincere effort to write more positive and nuanced representations of marginalized people that the series has previously snubbed with human characters could help even things out more and potentially even do a lot of good.

Note: Thank you so much to @dalishious for letting me ramble about this and for looking the post over for me before publishing it! I really appreciate it :)

[suzannemcappsca]

“What The Parties Really Want” – Interview 2 – Mike McIlwrath

Bill Marsh (Editor)

This is the second in a short series of blogs interviewing regular users of mediation about what they really want from mediators and from mediation. We kicked off last month with Rebecca Clark.

This month, I have the pleasure of interviewing Michael McIlwrath, who has been the head of litigation for GE Oil & Gas since 1999, a company that in July 2017 merged into Baker Hughes, a GE Company (BHGE). Mediation has played an important role for Mike’s company in resolving disputes around the world for this technology giant, in all kinds of claims, and in all kinds of places. Mike is also a member (and past president) of the board of directors of the International Mediation Institute, and in 2016-17 may have been visible to many readers as the chair of the Global Pound Conference.

Bill: Mike, what do in-house counsel want from providers of dispute resolution services?

Mike: Thanks for letting me answer a question you had not posed, and my apologies for breaking down the fourth wall of your interview. As an in-house counsel you hear this often, and I can appreciate why it is asked. But it resonates like asking someone who is Jewish [or insert your large, diverse group here], “what do Jewish people think of the Paris airports?” It makes you cringe, because you know it’s wrong to think all people of a certain group will have the same opinions.

In-house counsel like me are all kinds of people, and we work for all kinds of companies which measure and evaluate us differently. Myself, I’m a specialist in dispute resolution for an industrial and technology company in the oil and gas sector. There are so many factors in that sentence that will set me and another in-house counsel apart. Just being a specialist is a luxury that only companies of a certain size can afford. People might think an in-house litigator is evaluated based on the cases they win, but actually I’m measured on contribution to productivity. When you think in terms of margin and operating profit, getting a result by adjudication is just one of many possibilities. Contrast that with the single lawyer of a smaller company who only has one or two significant cases at any given time among many responsibilities. She and I are likely to approach our jobs differently.

Bill: So then let’s talk about how you do things. You have appointed and used many mediators. What are the key attributes, approaches or mind-sets you look for in a mediator?

Mike: Short answer, no case is the same. An ideal mediator would know how to adapt the process and their approach to the dispute and the parties.

Longer answer takes into account that the hardest part of mediation for an in-house lawyer responsible for international cases is just getting to mediation in the first place, getting the offer to mediate accepted. So a key quality in a mediator is just being acceptable to the other side. After that there are some preferences as to style. Personally, I have never had good experiences with evaluative mediation, even in North America where it is more practiced, and try to avoid mediators who are known to try and pressure parties with their views of the merits. But really, what you want is someone you can trust and, even more than that, will be trusted by the other side. Recently, we had a large case with a German company, and their general counsel suggested mediation. But he himself had never been in a mediation; he had just heard it could be useful. To help him, we proposed a well-known German mediator we knew from past experience to be very versatile and suitable for this type of dispute. The mediation went well, and the general counsel told me afterwards he is now a convert… he says they will mediate all their cases from now on.

Bill: How do you go about selecting mediators?

Mike: I’m increasingly comfortable leaving appointments to an institution. In most cases, institutions can better match a mediator to the dispute that if we try to agree a name with the other side.

We are open with institutions and the other party that the things that matter to us are certification, training, and experience. These increase in importance as you move outside of areas familiar to you, whether geographically or in subject matter. In fact, the main reason GE joined IMI was the belief that international standards of quality would increase the likelihood of having competent mediators appointed.

There are so many lawyers or arbitrators in the world who hold themselves out as mediators without any training or understanding of what it entails. I have seen this do real damage to cases, fanning the flames of litigation rather than promoting settlement.

And, of course, it helps to be part of a larger organization like General Electric, where we can bounce around names. You can believe someone is a great mediator when colleagues say, “she/he’s a great mediator!”

Bill: What do you do when your counter-party suggests a mediator who seems to you to be unsuitable?

Mike: Where we do not have an institution to default to as the appointing authority, this can be challenging. We might respond diplomatically, asking why they have suggested that person. And then we might propose some names for them to consider that we think we both might like. Actually, Bill, you were appointed in at least one case where this happened! We gave the other side a list of IMI-certified mediators and said we are happy with any of these, or feel free to propose other candidates from the IMI database. They chose you (from our list). This solution usually works.

Bill: What do you think mediators are most prone to misunderstanding about what parties really want from a mediation and a mediator?

Mike: I don’t want to be guilty of assuming all mediators are prone to make the same mistakes! That said, you do see some pitfalls more often. One is not making a minimal effort to encourage the parties to come to the mediation prepared and with a realistic goal in their head. I do not think this is laziness on the part of the mediator, but that they give the parties too much credit for knowing what they want.

Another pitfall is doing the next mediation like you did the last one (or last 200). I’m sympathetic to this desire, because I know I would want to use tools that have always worked for me in other cases. But it can be dangerous if a mediator comes to complex or international cases thinking “I will not have any joint caucuses because I think it is a waste of time to let the lawyers pontificate” or “I will not have separate sessions absent a very special special need for one”. I’ve encountered both of those approaches, and they stood out because in both of the cases they were good mediators applying the wrong approach to the dispute. They put their own self-imposed rules in front of the needs of the dispute.

Bill: How do you make the best use of any opening joint meeting in mediation?

Mike: I try not to make any openings, so may I flip your question to what’s the best I’ve seen? That would be about 10 years ago by Gavin Slessor, an employee of our Aberdeen, Scotland, plant in a mediation of one of those “impossible to settle” cases. Gavin had lost an arm and leg in an industrial accident some years before we acquired his company, and the dispute was over damages due to him. Gavin sent a letter directly to the CEO of my company at the time that he sent against the advice of his lawyer. The CEO read it, and this triggered the process that got us to the mediation. I consider that letter a form of opening statement, even if it arrived a couple of months before the actual mediation, because it set the tone of everything that came after.

While I could not promise Gavin an outcome, I did promise we would get the best possible mediator. I asked several people for names, and Karl Mackie at CEDR recommended Tony Allen as reformed litigator who had chosen to specialize in personal injury cases.

At the mediation, Gavin gave the most heartfelt opening about his injury and his life during the pendency of the litigation. With Tony’s help, which continued for weeks after the day of mediation, we eventually settled. Gavin is today a happy, respected, and productive employee. I’m not the only one who says we would not have been able to settle without his courageous letter and opening; Gavin himself says that he could not have settled without having been able to “say his piece”.

As I’ve learned from Gavin, the opening is effective most often if it is sincere and from the party, not the lawyer.

Bill: Finally, raise your magic wand and make one change to the way mediation is practiced around the world. What is it?

Mike: More frequently!

Seriously, I’m a strong believer in mandatory mediation. I’ve seen time and again how a contractual requirement often drags a party kicking to a mediation, but they still end up settling. The few arguments against mandatory litigation of commercial/civil cases are neither convincing nor based on the empirical evidence, which shows that it can be very effective.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, it seems that Mike is primarily after mediators whom both he and his counterparts can trust – which to him primarily means certification, training and experience. It clearly – and unsurprisingly – helps to be able to “bounce around” names amongst those who have already used particular mediators, something which I know many law firms do as well.

On the flip side, he is looking to avoid mediators who: – fail to encourage parties to come to the table adequately prepared and with a realistic goal in mind; and – treat all mediations the same.

Reflecting on this last point, let me issue this challenge to all mediators, especially busy ones. How much are we stuck in the rut of doing things the way we always do?

More from our authors:

EU Mediation Law Handbook: Regulatory Robustness Ratings for Mediation Regimes by Nadja Alexander, Sabine Walsh, Martin Svatos (eds.) € 195 Essays on Mediation: Dealing with Disputes in the 21st Century by Ian Macduff (ed.) € 160.00

The post “What The Parties Really Want” – Interview 2 – Mike McIlwrath appeared first on Kluwer Mediation Blog.

from Updates By Suzanne http://mediationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2017/12/04/what-the-parties-really-want-part-2-mike-mcilwrath/