Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation

5

Fugitive reconciliation

Alexander Keller Hirsch

Ours is a time distinguished by catastrophic violence. Such an aphorism has so oft been repeated that it has become quite nearly platitudinous. The horrible inventory of the twentieth century's brutal excesses – from Chile to Bosnia; Armenia to Darfur; Cambodia to Rwanda – is recounted so regularly that the catalogue's pang no longer seems to strike the same chord it once did. It is almost as though we have become resigned to the fact of violence, accustomed to expect its terror. When, at the century's close, Eric Hobsbawm typified ours as an ‘age of extremes’ (1996), or Jonathan Glover announced this as ‘the epoch of genocide’(2001), no one seemed to blink.

If the question of the prevalence of ...