Book description
The founding of truth commissions, legal tribunals, and public confessionals in places like South Africa, Australia, Yugoslavia, and Chile have attempted to heal wounds and bring about reconciliation in societies divided by a history of violence and conflict.
This volume asks how many of the popular conclusions reached by transitional justice studies fall short, or worse, unwittingly perpetuate the very injustices they aim to suture. Though often well intentioned, these approaches generally resolve in an injunction to "move on," as it were; to leave the painful past behind in the name of a conciliatory future. Through collective acts of apology and forgiveness, so the argument goes, reparation and restoration are imparted, and the writhing conflict of the past is substituted for by the overlapping consensus of community. And yet all too often, the authors of this study maintain, the work done in assuaging past discord serves to further debase and politically neutralize especially the victims of abuse in need of reconciliation and repair in the first place.
Drawing on a wide range of case studies, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda and Australia, the authors argue for an alternative approach to post-conflict thought. In so doing, they find inspiration in the vision of politics rendered by new pluralist, new realist, and especially agonistic political theory.
Featuring contributions from both up and coming and well-established scholars this work is essential reading for all those with an interest in restorative justice, conflict resolution and peace studies.
Table of contents
- Front Cover
- Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation
- Interventions
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: the agon of reconciliation
- 2 Agonism and the power of victim testimony
- 3 A critique of law’s violence yet (never) to come: United Nations’ transitional justice policy and the (fore)closure of reconciliation
- 4 Rhetorics of reconciliation: shifting conflict paradigms in Northern Ireland
- 5 Fugitive reconciliation
- 6 Can human beings forgive? Ethics and agonism in the face of divine violence
- 7 The unforgiving: reflections on the resistance to forgiveness after atrocity
- 8 Senses of justice: bodies, language and space
- 9 The other is dead: mourning, justice, and the politics of burial
- 10 The elements of political reconciliation
- 11 Confounded by recognition: the apology, the High Court and the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia
- Select bibliography
- Index
Product information
- Title: Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation
- Author(s):
- Release date: June 2013
- Publisher(s): Routledge
- ISBN: 9781136503375
You might also like
audiobook
The Oxford Handbook of IPOs
Initial public offerings (IPOs), or new listings of companies on stock exchanges, are among the most …
book
Get Mad, Not Even: Focus on the Future, Not Past Grievances
This Element is an excerpt from Winners Never Cheat: Even in Difficult Times (ISBN: 9780137009039) by …
book
Education, Modern Development, and Indigenous Knowledge
This book re-conceptualizes the field of international and comparative education by utilizing indigenous knowledge as a …
book
BioCoder #12
BioCoder is a quarterly newsletter for DIYbio, synthetic bio, and anything related. You’ll discover: Articles about …