Reconciliation After War: Historical Perspectives on Transitional Justice

his 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, this 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.

Introduction: A Genealogy of Reconciliation?

The chapter introduces the edited volume, and sets out its core questions and premise. This is to offer a fresh take on what reconciliation means, and might mean, by looking to historical and forgotten instances of reconciliation, and particularly those which fall outside the usual scope of transitional justice and peacebuilding research. In particular, we argue, this draws attention to the specificity of reconciliation attempts, the important of a longue duree perspective, an emphasis on interdisciplinarity and finally can open up new and novel understandings of reconciliation in the face of what we argue remains a limited and constrained understanding of the term.

The core questions we asked the authors ere:What does the term 'reconciliation' mean during the events you have studied? How was it pursued? How did it unfold? Which particular harm was seen as needing to be redressed? Which were the key actors driving the process? Was it deemed successful? Why, or why not? On whose/what terms?