Reconciliation after War

Historical Perspectives on Transitional Justice

Rachel Kerr, Henry Redwood, James Gow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000331240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume examines a range of historical and contemporary episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation in the aftermath of war.

Reconciliation is a concept that resists easy definition. At the same time, it is almost invariably invoked as a goal of post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and transitional justice. This book examines the considerable ambiguity and controversy surrounding the term and, crucially, asks what has reconciliation entailed historically? What can we learn from past episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation? Taken together, the chapters in this volume adopt an interdisciplinary approach, focused on the question of how reconciliation has been enacted, performed and understood in particular historical episodes, and how that might contribute to our understanding of the concept and its practice. Rather than seek a universal definition, the book focuses on what makes each case of reconciliation unique, and highlights the specificity of reconciliation in individual contexts.

This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, conflict resolution, human rights, history and International Relations.

1Introduction

A genealogy of reconciliation?

Rachel Kerr and Henry Redwood

Reconciliation has become something of a buzzword. It is regularly invoked in discussions about how societies might go about the business of contending with a violent past, presumed to be a key goal of transitional justice processes,¹ and viewed as an ‘absolute necessity’ for societies contending with legacies of violence and atrocity.² As such, reconciliation is no longer confined to its original, largely religious, connotations, denoting a relationship between individuals and their God;³ it has expanded and transformed into a central facet of most, if not all, political transitions and post-conflict peacebuilding programmes. There is now a veritable reconciliation industry, with practitioners and organisations dedicated to ensuring that individuals, states and societies reconcile with one another. At the same time, there have been numerous attempts to offer a definition of reconciliation, which have tended to centre understandings of reconciliation on the (re)building or repair of relationships at various levels within a society – from the individual to the nation.⁴ In the political and secular domain, it is often conceived of as a process, with ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ versions,⁵ from the mere absence of violent conflict to a deeper empathy and the engine of political transformation.

Despite this important work, reconciliation, as invoked in debates about peacebuilding, transition and especially justice, remains highly contested in practice as well as in meaning. For some, it is a byword for impunity, understood to be the antithesis of justice or a vehicle for a politics of distraction, diverting attention from the inequality and injustice that might have led to conflict in the first place. As a concept, whilst relative consensus exists that reconciliation is primarily about affecting relationships and linked to goals of justice and peace,⁶ there is little agreement about what needs to happen to these relationships or indeed, what constitutes justice or peace. As such, debates continue as to whether reconciliation is an outcome or a process, the engine of political transition or a politics of distraction, the antithesis of justice or the glue that holds the seemingly ‘irreconcilable’ goals of peace and justice together.⁷

This book was originally conceived as an historical exploration of reconciliation, to provide at least part of the answer to the question of what is reconciliation and how has it been achieved in the past? However, in developing the book, we soon learned that both questions missed the mark. On one hand, we feared we would run the risk of making too glib a generalisation about what is an essentially complex and contingent process. On the other hand, we came to the realisation that reconciliation is rarely ‘achieved,’ and processes of reconciliation rarely are confined to the past. Rather, as we will discuss below, by drawing on historical perspectives we sought to uncover how reconciliation had been conceived by individuals, communities and societies at different historical junctures, what were the politics and practices through which it was enacted and what were its limitations?

To this end, we commissioned experts in their fields to write about reconciliation in particular historical episodes, deliberately seeking out those not represented in the mainstream transitional justice literature, averting our gaze from the recent past and with it the well-trodden ground of transitional justice interventions carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s. This, we hoped, would open up space to move beyond the limitations of current understandings, allow us to re-evaluate the meaning of reconciliation in very different political, social and cultural contexts and ask how ideas about reconciliation might emerge at different times, in different places with different modes of understanding. In short, to attempt a genealogy.

In adopting a genealogical approach, we begin with a conception of genealogy as set out by Quentin Skinner: ‘When we trace the genealogy of a concept, we uncover the different ways in which it may have been used in earlier times.’⁸ Just as Skinner puts it to use to uncover the modern state, and David Armitage to uncover civil wars,⁹ we attempt a genealogy of another ‘essentially contested concept,’ par excellence, reconciliation. Rather than refine the concept and in so doing seek to ‘remove all its accreted complexities,’ we seek to uncover the different ways it has been used, following Skinner, in order critically to reflect on how it is currently understood.¹⁰ However, where we depart from Skinner is that we do not assume that the meaning of reconciliation can be uncovered as an accumulation of meaning across time, but rather, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, we seek to uncover meanings of reconciliation as they emerged and were understood at different times, without assuming progression in meaning, or even any relationship from one to the other. Following Foucault, we seek to uncover the fractured nature of history, the historical specificity of each particular reconciliatory moment, and see the ‘progression’ of history as filled with chance, contradiction and paradox.¹¹ We take up Judith Renner's argument that there is nothing transcendental about the idea of reconciliation, but it is, rather, filled with meaning as it is put into practice in various contexts.¹² Understanding how this has happened across time and space is the focus of this book.

This approach, we argue, offers three clear advantages: (1) It opens up the possibility of alternative, more historically rooted, conceptions of reconciliation beyond its relationship to the newer field of transitional justice¹³; (2) it allows us to take a sort of longue durée perspective, to set the periods of political and social upheaval under scrutiny in the context of slower and more residual transformation; and (3) it allows us to adopt a more thoroughly interdisciplinary approach. We discuss these in more detail in the following section.

Reconciliation in historical perspective

Reconciliation has come to be closely associated with the field of transitional justice as it emerged in the late-1980s and early 1990s, and is often invoked as one of its key goals. In that vein, reconciliation, as part of transitional justice, is tied into the United Nations' post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding agenda, focused on instilling peace, justice and democracy as ‘mutually reinforcing imperatives.’¹⁴ That agenda is not without its critics. In 2010, Oliver Richmond observed that, in spite of billions of dollars spent and constant revolutions in practice and theory, the success rate of ‘liberal peacebuilding’ was poor.¹⁵ In a similar vein, Elizabeth Porter noted that over a third of societies subjected to liberal peacebuilding initiatives since the Second World War returned to violent conflict.¹⁶ The statistic looks worse if a more developed understanding of peace is introduced to include proxies such as democracy, refugee return and social cohesion. Allan Sens noted that the failure rate can be as high as 88%, and Alex Bellamy found that while UN peace initiatives in the 1990s were relatively successful at preventing the re-emergence of violent conflict, 13 of the 19 countries where the United Nations had intervened retained dictatorships.¹⁷

In light of these and other critiques, Roland Paris observed that liberal peacebuilding was at somewhat of a crossroads, having gone from ‘exuberance’ in the heady optimism of the early to mid-1990s to its ‘denigration’ by ‘hyper-critical’ scholars who argue that it is fundamentally destructive and illegitimate and has done more harm than good.¹⁸ These criticisms are reflected in the transitional justice literature, where a new agenda seeks to shift our gaze from the level of international interventions and even national approaches to the ‘local,’¹⁹ and a call from feminist and post-colonial scholars to interrogate more closely who has the right to speak and dictate the conditions within which ‘peace’ is imagined.²⁰ There has also been a drive to reconceptualise and recalibrate ‘justice’ to mean transformative, not merely transitional, in which, rather than return to the status quo ante bellum, societies must undergo radical transformation to eradicate fundamental inequalities that engendered conflict in the first place.²¹

Our goal, like Paris' in relation to liberal peacebuilding, is not uncritically to applaud reconciliation, and neither is it uncritically to denigrate it as a valuable goal, but rather to make a constructive contribution to understanding how reconciliation, like transitional justice and peacebuilding, operates as a process of highly contingent and imperfect transition, in which, just as there can be no one-size-fits-all solution, our notions of what constitutes success and failure need to be carefully examined.²² In taking an historical perspective, we sought to decouple the concept from transitional justice and in so doing also to detach it from some of the normative assumptions that underpin transitional justice practice and scholarship. Rather than see it as the engine of political transformation (from authoritarianism to democracy or from war to peace), we consider reconciliation as a political process in and of itself. As Jonathan Evershed argues in Chapter 14, underneath the seeming murkiness of the term, there often lurks very clear understanding of what the political purpose of reconciliation should be in practice: in the specific context of Northern Ireland, reconciliation was presented as a return to a peaceful state of existence, where a united community is reproduced around a shared singular identity and a unitary vision of history, and where legalistic notions of ‘closure’ are supposed to ‘draw a line’ under the past, rather than open it up for deliberation.²³ By putting politics back into discussions of reconciliation, we are better able to see who is desiring it, to what ends, and for whom, and what are its outcomes.

In addition to highlighting the political and contingent nature of reconciliation as concept and practice, the volume seeks to diversify understandings of what reconciliation might mean beyond its current usage in transitional justice and peacebuilding theory and practice. In order to do this, we sought to uncover lesser-known attempts at reconciliation that have taken place historically and in different political and social contexts. We ask how recovering these stories might help us re-imagine reconciliation, and to understand why initiatives designed to achieve reconciliation so frequently end up reproducing many of the conditions that resulted in the violence in the first place. As has been argued eloquently elsewhere, transitional justice mechanisms, such as courts and truth commissions can do harm as well as good, dividing societies into guilty perpetrators and innocent victims, reifying identity-based divisions within society and neglecting socio-economic structural causes of violence.²⁴

This volume takes as its starting point that reconciliation is context specific and so needs to be understood as a historically contingent and dynamic concept. The particularity, and peculiarity, of the present is examined by juxtaposing it with this past.²⁵ The problem of how to contend with legacies of violence and atrocity is, after all, not new. Just as making peace predates ‘liberal peacebuilding,’ contending with the past predates ‘transitional justice.’²⁶ With these historical studies of reconciliation (or, indeed, anti-reconciliation), we offer a more eclectic range of views about what reconciliation is, and how it can be achieved, demonstrating the peculiarity of the past and the present in the process. We hope that this approach will also have practical utility, to help render peacebuilding and transitional justice interventions more effective and efficient. We seek to contribute to conversations about ‘best practice’ not by supplying a blueprint, but by identifying and drawing out the contingent and complex nature of reconciliation as imagined within specific contexts. Whilst we veer away from making universalising assumptions, perhaps one generalisation we can make is that a one-size-fits-all approach to contending with legacies of violence and atrocity that fails to take account of context and contingency, and especially politics, is acknowledged by now to be woefully misguided.²⁷ Another is that, as will be examined throughout this book, reconciliation has multiple meanings, and is invariably embedded within local power dynamics, traditions, epistemologies and world views. Starting with prefabricated ideas about what reconciliation is and should mean can blind us to this. A key contribution made possible by adopting an historical perspective is to offer an account of how meanings and approaches to reconciliation shift over time within a particular setting.

Taking an historical approach offers the possibility of a longue durée perspective of reconciliation. Too often there is a sense of impatience; reconciliation must happen immediately after the conflict has come to an end. Focusing on the present conceals how these interventions or the legacies of violence themselves have a lasting impact on society, and, crucially, how historical memory shifts over time as the past works on the present, and the present on the past. This short-termism might not only be inappropriate, but also might end up worsening relationships if transitional justice measures are imposed upon a community before they are ready. Turning to the more distant past allows us to explore how sentiments, memories and approaches to the past might change over time and with what consequence. We seek to understand and explore how reconciliation as an idea changes over time within a particular context, and how the legacies of past violence continue working to shape contemporary politics decades, and even centuries, after provisional peace has been achieved. Painful memories do not simply disappear but continue to define how a society experiences and acts in the present for a considerable time after the original act of violence has come to an ‘end.’

Finally, it is now widely accepted that an interdisciplinary approach is required in order to be able to see and understand complexity and contingency. Whether law, sociology or politics, a range of different approaches are now integrated into the study and practice of transitional justice and peacebuilding.²⁸ We argue that history has much to offer here also, beyond simply being able to explore instances of (anti-)reconciliation from the past, but bringing to bear a different approach and methodology. In particular, there is a commitment to conduct source-led research and engage in grounded theory building. The goal of the historian is to understand the past, in as much as is possible, on the terms of those subjects that experienced it. This pushes back against the desire to generalise, or to test hypotheses based on pre-conceived ideas, and instead focuses on what makes each episode unique, and what this, in turn, means for how we think about, and how we pursue, reconciliation.

It is this approach that underpins the collection of essays in this collection. Throughout, we were less interested in which par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• Preface and acknowledegments
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: A genealogy of reconciliation?
• Part I The distant past
• Part II The longue durée
• Part III Alternative perspectives
• Part IV Challenging conventional wisdom
• Index