Rethinking Reconciliation and Transitional Justice After Conflict

James Hughes, Denisa Kostovicova, James Hughes, Denisa Kostovicova

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138361997
• eBook ISBN: 9780429778704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The concepts of reconciliation and transitional justice are inextricably linked in a new body of normative meta-theory underpinned by claims related to their effects in managing the transformation of deeply divided societies to a more stable and more democratic basis. This edited volume is dedicated to a critical re-examination of the key premises on which the debates in this field pivot. The contributions problematise core concepts, such as victimhood, accountability, justice and reconciliation itself; and provide a comparative perspective on the ethnic, ideological, racial and structural divisions to understand their rootedness in local contexts and to evaluate how they shape and constrain moving beyond conflict. With its systematic empirical analysis of a geographic and historic range of conflicts involving ethnic and racial groups, the volume furthers our grasp of contradictions often involved in transitional justice scholarship and practice and how they may undermine the very goals of peace, stability and reconciliation that they seek to promote.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Agency versus structure in reconciliation

James Hughes

ABSTRACT

Reconciliation theories, discourses and practices prioritize agency over structure. They suggest that inter-group conflicts involving deep cleavages such as ethnicity, race and religion can be resolved by processes involving inter-personal contacts, and achieving a desired end-state of shared values, narratives and identity. Contact between group members under optimal conditions of parity and trust is viewed as the critical tool for change. By problematizing conflictual identities and social relations as agential and inter-personal, conflicts are decontextualized from their structural environment. Structural segregation provides us with a bridging concept between the agency factors, structural dynamics of conflict, and the obstacles to post-conflict reconciliation. The case of Northern Ireland, often elevated to the status of a model for conflict resolution, is analysed to show how structural segregation is the critical barrier to the optimal group interactions envisaged by agential reconciliation, as it sustains low inter-group trust and political polarization.

Studies of reconciliation during and after conflict attach great importance to the role of individual emotions and behaviour in the fostering of good relations between groups. Much less attention is given to how the relationships between people and space are structured, for example by segregation, and how this impacts upon reconciliation efforts. The concept of reconciliation is used in peace-building discourses in such multiple ways that one wonders whether it is possible to identify a coherent consensus meaning for the term. Broadly, reconciliation encompasses all those mechanisms deployed at different levels (international, state, NGOs and civil society, the low level and personal) which aim to reshape antagonistic identities, values and behaviour that are a source of conflict. There has been a surge in interest and publications on reconciliation since the 1980s. The concept was shaped, to a large extent, by the context of the period of regime transitions in the 1980s and 1990s from authoritarianism to democracy, the global turmoil following the collapse of communism, the surge in violent national and ethnic conflicts, and then concomitant peace processes, peace settlements and the drives for transitional justice and social reconstruction after conflict. While accepting the interconnection between reconciliation and transitional justice my concern here is not with transitional justice mechanisms per se. A process of the commodification of peace-building has ensued since the 1990s. Large sums of money have been poured into these policy areas by states, international organizations and independent foundations, which has fostered professionalization and bred a new caste of “expert” consultant, often advising and mediating between groups.

Although, the general goal of reconciliation is to contrive a continuation of peace through overcoming antagonistic identities and building a “shared society”, what this entails precisely is not clearly stated. Studies of reconciliation across many disciplines (including theology, philosophy, psychology, law, history, political science, international relations and sociology), as well as policy practices, have a bias towards some variant of the values of a liberal society (see the interdisciplinary collections of Kymlicka and Bashir 2008; Nadler, Malloy, and Fisher 2008; Hirsch 2012). Reconciliation is therefore a form of normative theory, being bound up with notions of peace-making, positive transformation, toleration, atonement and harmony, that to critique it risks a charge of illiberalism, if not nihilism.

While the concept is generally lauded, the dissensus on its meaning is arrayed along a spectrum of minimalist to maximalist positions, from a pragmatic low-expectation of “peaceful coexistence” of groups to the highest level of “harmony” (Bloomfield 2006). For most liberal peace-building advocates the concept of “coexistence” is viewed negatively, as it implies that groups (and also states) are living more or less separately, in parallel, and not sharing values except perhaps not intending to destroy or seriously harm rivals. Coexistence implicitly assumes group parity, or some symmetry of power, and at the very least the absence of domination, which is what facilitates the coexistence. Yet, as we see in the analysis of segregation later, coexistence usually persists with structural segregation and various elements of asymmetry, from severe inequalities of opportunity, wealth, cultural recognition and prejudice. The assumption in the maximalist reconciliation model is that there is a linear sequence of positive steps for a “healing” reconciliation process leading to a common group think around shared values and identity, involving a combination of institutional and informal measures: from contact and dialogue to truth recovery to justice, with the effect of generating trust, mutual respect, catharsis and closure for victims, leading to reduced prejudice, shared narratives and ultimately to a harmonious shared society.

The peace-building turn in the 1990s generated a new moral grammar and discourse about conflict, with value-laden discussions about these various processes: “truth recovery”, “dealing with the past”, “legacy issues”, “justice”, “trauma”, “victims”, “perpetrators”, “reparations”, “restoration”, “apology”, building “respect” and “trust”, “conflict transformation” and the goal of “harmony” and a “shared society” and so forth. The metaphor of a “journey” and the processual quality of reconciliation for re-establishing harmony and cooperation between antagonists are common themes (Fisher 2001, 26). Galtung identified twelve distinct processes and approaches to reconciliation that inform the work of peacebuilders which are primarily rooted around agency, dialogue and inter-personal contact (2001).

Questioning the use of “toleration” as a positive value, Brown has critiqued the “global renaissance in tolerance talk” since the 1980s (2009, 2). She observes how it was used in the past to legitimize intolerance and oppression (as in Jim Crow), and has now been transformed into “a historically protean element of liberal governance”, and as a legitimizing “discourse of power and a practice of governmentality”, in the Foucaultian sense of organizing the “conduct of conduct” (Brown 2009, 8, 11). In sum, discourses about toleration are often intolerant. Moon has also criticized the vague prelapsarian circularity to much of the reconciliation discourse, which assumes that harmonious group relations preceded the conflict, and a return to such relations was possible irrespective of the nature and dynamics of the conflict (Moon 2004).

Much of the debate on reconciliation pivots on a chicken and egg dilemma: Is reconciliation a precondition for a desired outcome, or the actual end goal itself? A much broader understanding of reconciliation is taken by Schaap (2005), who views the politics of reconciliation as not distinctive but rather inherently ordinary in the contentious politics of liberal democracy, accepting that there are always problems of exclusion and injustice that require reconciliation. Countering Schaap and others, Bashir (2012) challenges the notion that the inclusion of historically excluded and oppressed social groups can be achieved by deliberative democracy, arguing that reconciliation should be conceived “as a necessary requirement that must be fulfilled before deliberation is pursued” (Bashir 2012, 136–137).

Janus-like, reconciliation is backward looking, seeking to rectify the historical grievances of a dystopian past, and forward-looking, aiming to build a new bright future of a shared society. These two aims do not seem to be logically mutually compatible and reinforcing. Doxtader, however, has suggested that the contradictions between reconciliation as a forward-looking enterprise, and the need for recognition of different historical narratives and identities, is a positive Hegelian dynamic (Doxtader 2007). Similarly, Muldoon’s critique of the roles of selective memory in reconciliation in South Africa and Australia suggests that the antagonistic narratives of conflict should be embraced as part of a “truth-telling” process of democratic discourse (Muldoon 2003). These positions rightly draw our attention to the fact that political engagement on reconciliation is more about small steps than making quantum leaps.

Reconciliation and contact theory

The roles of agency and contact theory are given prominence in explanations for the major cases that are considered to be successful examples of post-conflict reconciliation (Germany and France after the Second World War), and reducing societal prejudice (the ending of the Jim Crow system in the USA from the 1950s). Social and policy practitioners of inter-personal inter-group contact long preceded the social science theoretical elaboration about the importance of “contact”, not only in the USA, but also as in, for example, the work of French Jesuit Jean du Rivau after 1945, who organized extensive grassroots contacts and exchanges between French and German people (Ackermann 1994). Such exchanges were later formalized and funded by governments. In the case of post-War Germany, which was a clear loser in the war, however, there was a meta-level shape-change in thinking about identity among its governing elites. Adenauer eschewed any German narrative of grievance about the war and forged a new consensus on democratic values, partly to facilitate a speedy post-war integration into the new European order and other international institutions (Feldman 2012). The shift from segregation in the USA was much slower, and resisted more intensely in the Deep South, a process which is analysed in Allport (1954), the classic study of prejudice.

The contact theory in social psychology is derived from Allport (1954) and has informed thinking on the importance of agency in the overcoming of prejudice and pathways to reconciliation globally. Allport proposed that inter-group prejudice may be overcome and trust built by promoting positive interaction between groups in non-hierarchical and non-threatening settings. In sum, he proposed equal status contacts towards achieving common goals. His work has been the theoretical foundation for the design of much of the social psychology research in divided societies. Allport shied away from proposing large scale social engineering of structural change to overcome prejudice, and favoured the use of essentially soft coercive change through top-down agential leadership responses by “executive action” and judicial activism (as in US desegregation) to change the “conditions of conformity”. When Allport argued that “it is wiser to attack segregation and discrimination than to attack prejudice directly”, he means changing values and behaviour, not attacking the structures of discrimination and segregation per se (Allport, 1954, 509).

Contact has also indirectly informed the theory of consociationalism, which since the 1990s has become a mainstay of political peace processes and institutional engineering to end conflicts in deeply divided societies. Lijphart’s notion of a “spirit of accommodation” among elites is central to his ideas about how power-sharing institutions work to produce peace by making elites work positively together through routine contact (1968). Peace agreements, consociational or otherwise, however, can be made without the conflict groups (elite or mass) agreeing on a narrative of the conflict: its root causes, its dynamics (interpreting key events and the development of the conflict over time), and the apportionment of fault (“blame”, defining “victim”, distinguishing between victim and perpetrator), or accepting that “we are all victims”, or recognizing the “little perpetrator in each one of us” (Doxtader, 133 citing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission). Moreover, while consociationalism accepts the necessity for profound structural institutional change, and transformed elite mentalities, it is also paradoxically grounded in an acceptance of deep structural segmentation of politics and society, in a sense accepting segregation and providing no mechanisms for transcending it. It is important to recognize that the conditions produced by consociational peace processes are not favourable to a shared identity or societal reconciliation.

Contact theory informs peace processes broadly through the idea of “dialogue”. In a conflict setting, this almost always refers to elite talks. Such dialogue is almost always conducted in secret, and while that may or may not insulate elites from other radical “outbidders”, or recalcitrant constituencies, it is seen as a vital way to build trust among elites – but it does exclude society. Perhaps the most recognized use of the idea of “dialogue” is in the faith-based approaches to reconciliation. The process of dialogue is less about negotiation as such, and much more derived from the Christian humanist idea that by “bringing people together” in a process of dialogue it is possible to overcome divisions irrespective of their nature, structure, ideological or material basis. Such an approach is most closely associated with Christian religious leaders and practitioners in the field such as Jean Paul Lederach and Desmond Tutu. Lederach’s and Tutu’s works stress the interaction of the personal and communal and specific social psychological aspects of individual transformation in post-conflict peace-making (Lederach 1995, 1997, 1999, 2003; Tutu 1999). In particular, it is Lederach who is the guru of the concept of “transformation”, which is concerned with developing reconciliation in society and among individuals by psychocultural means, and primarily by a focus on the “self”. Lederach is dismissive of the institutional engineering of peace-making, criticizing the “narrowness of resolution approaches” that are focused on institutions and politics, because while they may solve problems in the short term they do not create a dynamic of “constructive change”. But what kind of “constructive change” does Lederach envisage? Lederach loosely uses ill-defined concepts such as building positive “relationships”, “changing lives for the better”, and building “capacities which are creative, responsive, constructive, and non-violent” (Lederach 2003, 69, 70), without specifying how any of this will be achieved in practice or addressing the structural context of conflict.

Reducing power asymmetries so that all groups perceive equality of opportunity for material and social advancement is understood to be critical for positive inter-group contact (Malloy 2008). At the maximum groups perceive that mutual dependence and mutual respect will lead to positive outcomes for all. Here, we see a significant divergence in the studies of reconciliation between those that tend to stress the material rewards from cooperation, in terms of the ending of conflict and economic development, and those that are informed by religious belief in the spiritual benefits of recognizing common humanity. However, the basic premise at work here is that contact creates a virtuous cycle of mutual respect, shared narratives leading to a common identity, and thereby the possibilities of cooperation increase, and the potential for conflict decreases. When social scientists have attempted to measure the effects of contact, the results suggest that it has positive effects, seemingly confirming the theory. A meta-analysis of 515 studies over many decades on prejudice suggests that, even allowing for selection bias and “file drawer” problems (not reporting results that negate the theory), even unstructured inter-group contact reduces prejudice and improves attitudes toward out-groups, while the effect is enhanced under Allport’s optimal conditions (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006). The question then is not whether contact theory works, but whether it can work effectively in societies that are structurally segregated. After all, seg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Rethinking reconciliation and transitional justice after conflict
• 1 Agency versus structure in reconciliation
• 2 Decolonization as reconciliation: rethinking the national conflict paradigm in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
• 3 Transitional justice and political order in Rwanda
• 4 Norm contestation and reconciliation: evidence from a regional transitional justice process in the Balkans
• 5 Implementing transformative justice: survivors and ex-combatants at the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación in Peru
• 6 Looking beyond the state: transitional justice and the Kurdish issue in Turkey
• 7 Towards transitional justice? Black reparations and the end of mass incarceration
• 8 Race, reconciliation, and justice in Australia: from denial to acknowledgment
• Index