Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation

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Introduction

The agon of reconciliation

Alexander Keller Hirsch

On the contemporary scene of geopolitical studies and international relations theory the subject of transitional justice is much invoked of late (see e.g. McAdams 1997; Minow 1999; Teitel 2000; Elster 2004; Roht-Arriaza and J. Mariecruzana 2006; De Greiff 2010; Leebaw 2011). Typically, the phrase is mobilized in reference to the recuperative period that political cultures undergo after a traumatic episode has come to pass. Reckoning with a conflict that has left a society riven, transitional justice seeks to reconstitute a shared sense of belonging – what JeanLuc Nancy would call a ‘being-in-common’ – a collective social identity embodied in the mutual invocation of a communal ...