Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution & Repair

by Hirsch; Alexander

• ISBN13: 9780415781732
• ISBN10: 0415781736
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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.However the distinguished contributors to this volume argue that such mechanisms of transitional justice either 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.The book features contributions well-established scholars such as Erik Doxtader, Jason Frank Bonnie Honig, Michael J. Shapiro and James Tully, and contains a wide variety of case studies including Sri Lanka, Grenada, Canada and Northern Ireland. It should be essential reading for all those with an interest in restorative justice, conflict resolution and peace studies.

Author Biography

Alexander Keller Hirsch is Lecturer in the Political Science Department at Northeastern University, and Research Fellow at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, USA.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiv
Introduction: the agon of reconciliation	p. 1
Agonism and the power of victim testimony	p. 11
A critique of law's violence yet (never) to come: United Nations' transitional justice policy and the (fore)closure of reconciliation	p. 27
Rhetorics of reconciliation: shifting conflict paradigms in Northern Ireland	p. 65
Fugitive reconciliation	p. 79
Can human beings forgive? Ethics and agonism in the face of divine violence	p. 100
The unforgiving: reflections on the resistance to forgiveness after atrocity	p. 115
Senses of justice: bodies, language and space	p. 131
The other is dead: mourning, justice, and the politics of burial	p. 149
The elements of political reconciliation	p. 166
Confounded by recognition: the apology, the High Court and the Aboriginal Embassy in Australia	p. 182
Select bibliography	p. 200
Index	p. 215
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