Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation

Agonism, Restitution & Repair

Alexander Hirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415713658
• eBook ISBN: 9781136503375
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

1

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 ‘we’ (Nancy 2000). The founding of legal tribunals, truth commissions, official apologies, and public confessionals serve as paradigmatic exemplars. Each is established to help reconcile a society to its violent past and to shore up a new more just era ‘after evil’ (see Copjec 1996; Bernstein 2002; Barkan 2001; Philpott 2006; Meister 2010). As Martha Minow puts it, ‘the capacity and limitations of these legal responses illuminate the hopes and commitments of individuals and societies seeking, above all, some rejoinder to the unspeakable destruction and degradation of human beings’ (Minow 1999: 1).

In response to the recent spate of violent episodes and the rituals of public mourning which have cropped up to remedy them, the transitional justice literature has expanded into a now inundated field of scholarship. Since the Nuremburg trials projected techniques of redemption for victims of Holocaustic genocide at mid-century, a host of mechanisms of redress have been concocted (see Digeser 2001; Thompson 2003; Kurasawa 2007; Zolo 2009). The ethnic violence committed against Armenians, Tutsi, Bengalis, the Aché in Paraguay, Timorese, southern Sudanese, as well as countless others who have experienced mass terror and political violence in places as disparate as Northern Ireland, Chile, South Africa, Argentina, Uganda, China and Iran, exemplifies the range of scene and setting where measures of transitional justice have been taken up (see Drumbl 2007; Verdeja 2009). Interventions in the field hail from academic circles spanning the range of the humanities and social sciences – from political science, anthropology, sociology, economics and history, to literature, philosophy, theology and cultural studies.

Much of this literature has been focused on a vision of reconciliation as communitarian social harmony. Through collective acts of public 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. In ‘The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions’, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson defend this argument by lying down deliberative democratic principles in the service of ‘mutual respect’ and ‘common ground’. According to Gutmann and Thompson, such principles supply a moral justification for sacrificing criminal justice in the name of the ‘general social benefit’ reconciliation offers. The upshot of those benefits requires that citizens ‘seek common ground where it exists, and maintain mutual respect where it does not’ (Gutmann and Thompson 2000: 161). In her article ‘Moral Conflict and Political Consensus’, Gutmann clarifies what this mutual respect would entail: ‘mutual respect, the foundation upon which deliberation rests, requires citizens to strive not only for agreement on principles governing the basic structure but also for agreement on practices governing the way they deal with principled disagreements’ (Gutmann 1990: 101). In other words, for Gutmann and Thompson, reconciliation means engendering relations of equanimity between historical antagonists based on reciprocal commonality, reverence and, above all, agreement.

This approach has been generally supported of late by theorists such as Bashir Bashir, Nadim Rouhana, Johnathan VanAntwerpen and Will Kymlicka who, in a recent volume – The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies – defend the deliberative approach to transitional justice (Kymlicka and Bashir 2010). These thinkers equally stress the necessity of generating an overlapping consensus for a viable politics of reconciliation. As Bashir notes in his essay ‘Accommodating Historically Oppressed Social Groups’, ‘Reconciliation should be seen as a precondition, not an outcome, of inclusive deliberative democracy’ (Bashir 2010: 18). In other words, pace Gutmann and Thompson, a common agreement needs to develop between enemy contenders before any politics can take place.

In many ways, at their root, these approaches share an abiding debt to the work of political philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. For Rawls, famously, serious conflicts must be adjudicated and resolved before political society can be cultivated. ‘Faced with the fact of reasonable pluralism,’ Rawls argues, ‘a liberal view removes from the political agenda the most divisive issues, serious contention about which must undermine the bases of social cooperation’ (Rawls 1993: xvi). Habermas, like Rawls, stresses the democratic virtue of a pre-established agreement, with the distinction that his is a ‘communicatively achieved consensus’ (Habermas 1996a: 21).¹ For both, agreement is idealized and rational, conducted through the public use of reason, and above all vital to the normative functioning of politics.

And yet, when applied to cases of transitional justice, several questions arise which trouble some of Rawls’ and Habermas’ basic assumptions. If resolve must be achieved in order for politics to begin, and deep disagreement and disrespect must be ruled out ahead of time, how ought we to cope politically with conflicts that remain fundamentally irresolvable? Does not the bracketing of difference work to suspend precisely that which must be actively confronted if reconciliation is to be achieved? How would such a model of justice which seeks to reunite a divided society by adjourning difference and discrepancy avoid promoting in practice a resolution that looks more like quietist surrender by the victim to the perpetrator than harmonizing reconciliation? How might the work done in assuaging past discord further debase and politically neutralize the victims of abuse in need of reconciliation and repair in the first place? And in what ways do the twin paradigms of victim and perpetrator fail to account for what Primo Levi described as the ‘gray zone’ – that space between victims and perpetrators, peopled with ‘gray ambiguous persons’ who may be complicit in atrocity by virtue of their unquestioning acceptance?

The essays collected here start with these questions. Their aim is not to settle, but to enrich and deepen the questions’ force. More specifically, these essays are bound by the conviction that despite its exponential growth and its admirable interdisciplinary breadth, some if not most of the angles of approach, normative modes of address and popular conclusions reached by transitional justice thought fall short, or worse, unwittingly perpetuate the very injustices they aim to suture. In some cases, an injunction to ‘move on’, to leave the painful past behind in the name of a conciliatory future, is too quickly prescribed, resulting in the repression rather than release of the traumatic event. In still others, an insidious act of reification takes place in the call for reconciliation between hostile factions. In cases such as Rwanda or Bosnia, no originary pacific rapport characterized the relationship between those factions. In calling for re-conciliation or re-storation, the messy history of the conflict in question's gestation is obfuscated or erased from view.

Exploring the possibility for an alternative approach to post-conflict reconciliation, this volume provides an expressive contact zone between the praxis of transition, on the one hand, and the ethos of radical democratic thought, on the other. Drawing influence and insight from the exemplary work of a cluster of contemporary luminaries, such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière, James Tully and Sheldon Wolin, the contributors to this volume affirm the often irresolvable character of the constitutive tensions at the heart of political community. Rather than jettison serious disagreements in the name of pacifying settlement, the essays collected here affirm the dissensus and contestation endemic to transitional sites of reconciliation. In so doing, they find inspiration in the vision of politics rendered by new pluralist, new realist, and especially agonistic political theory.

As most readers familiar with the vicissitudes of contemporary democratic theory will be aware, the terms agonism and agonistic derive etymologically from the Greek áγών (agōn), signifying a brand of struggle, and in particular an athletic contest between contending agents in the midst of a religious festival. In fifth century tragic drama, the phrase was often deployed to signify the terms by which a struggle between protagonist and antagonist would be scripted in order to supply the basis of action. The concept served as an operative theme in the works of Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Weber, all of whom conjured agonism as a means of portraying politics as a mode of conflict. In tow, social and political thinkers such as Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault seized upon the agon, portraying political decisionism, public freedom and the microtechniques of power as occasions for agonistic engagement.

As opposed to pluralist or deliberative democrats, whose efforts are directed towards buttressing institutions and processes which would foster co-operation, reunion and appeasement, agonists assert the irreducible quality of conflict for the political. On an agonistic reading, deliberativists are charged with depoliticizing tensions and thus with neutralizing the very energies that buoy political action. Agonistic democrats also depart from the proceduralist liberalism that flows from the justice theory of Rawls and other advocates who are, as Dana Villa puts it, ‘so anxious to avoid conflict that they construct a set of public institutions, and a code of public argument and justification, which leave precious little space for initiatory or expressive modes of political action’ (Villa 1999: 108). Attempts to administer, bureaucratize, or otherwise domesticate the feral and fugitive quality of the political are regularly submitted to the dictates of agonistic critique (see e.g. Wolin 1989; Christodoulidis 1998; Loughlin and Walker 2007; Veitch 2007; Schaap 2009; Frank 2009).

Importantly, however, the sort of conflict agonists endorse does not resemble Georges Sorel's defense of the purging burn of revolutionary violence. Instead, it is difference, disagreement and discord, directed through channels that guard against a politics of ressentiment, which revitalize the political field. Agonists are interested in gauging these tensions in sites of struggle and contestation arising out of demands for cultural recognition (Markell 2003; Balfour 2008), questions of legitimation raised by declining political participation (Wolin 2008) and the constitutive exclusions upon which liberal principles of universalization are based (Connolly 2002; Honig 2003; Tully 2009; Rancière 2009; Muldoon 2010).

This volume suggests that agonism affords post-conflict thought a valuable store of insight otherwise subdued by status quo theories of transition. Though the authors below exhibit varying degrees of allegiance to this genealogy of agonistic thought, they are each alike drawn to that space where reconciliation and agonism overlap. In terms of topical variety, the essays collected here offer a panoply of vantage points from which this overlap might be viewed. A host of diverse geopolitical coordinates serve as case studies, and a range of methodological tactics are employed. In exploring what an agonistic accounting of reconciliation looks like for post-conflict societies, several important current debates are invoked and grappled with in these pages, including: the prospect for forgiveness in the aftermath of nominally unforgivable violence; the politics of loss, public mourning and memorialization; the ethics of anger and resentment; poststructuralist approaches to political subjectivity; political theologies of restitution; pluralism, multiculturalism and tolerance; the nature and meaning of political responsibility and moral repair; trauma, healing and the messianic promise of a justice ‘to come’.

In Chapter 2‘Agonism and the power of victim testimony’, Sonali Chakravarti asks how anger – and other such ‘difficult’ and ‘unsocial emotions’ – expressed during oral and public testimonials by those who experienced violence exposes new questions for the agonistic approach to transitional justice. In particular, Chakravarti focuses on how such testimonials can ‘allow for dissonant narratives, a rejection of narrowly rationalistic approaches, and provide a place to see patterns of political critique that would not emerge in other institutions’. Still, when victim testimony bucks against those aspects of truth commissions designed to quell enmity, it can serve as a powerful beacon for reconciliation that also pushes agonistic critique to revalue restorative justice as a measure of repairing fractured political relationships. As Chakravarti writes, ‘It is not enough to say that anger is part of the remainder of politics and will continue to haunt public life …’ Anger, when articulated by victims, also provides orientation for strengthening social and political ties after mass violence.

Erik Doxtader, in his contribution to the volume, ‘A critique of law's violence yet (never) to come: United Nations’ transitional justice policy and the (fore) closure of reconciliation’ (Chapter 3), stakes out a similar point of departure. ‘Today,’ writes Doxtader, ‘there are signs that transitional justice aims to convert – with disturbing fervor – the constitutive and agonistic quality of reconciliation into a demand (if not a command) for the adversarial, a commitment to the (prior) definition and application of a rule of law.’ Doxtader's basic aim is to reflect on this turn against reconciliation's ‘turning right about’ and, in his own terms, ‘to plot at least one of the ways in which reconciliation's place has been largely closed and then foreclosed from the premises and promises of transitional justice’. Taking the United Nations as his case study, and especially a number of its policy documents and debates that have appeared over the last decade, Doxtader traces the UN's erasure and expressed aversion to reconciliation's ‘unaccountable’ ambiguity. In concluding, Doxtader turns to the question of how the institution's case for standardizing the language of transitional justice recognizes the rule of law at the expense of misrecognizing the law's rule of recognition, ‘that is, the fully transitional problem of how to constitute the grounds of the law's power in the wake of violence, including legal violence’. More than simple oversight, for Doxtader, the UN's presumption against reconciliation points directly to its importance – a potential for words that stand before the law and compose a critique of how the law's violence may preclude precisely the claiming of human rights that transitional justice policy presents as it ultimate warrant.

In ‘Rhetorics of reconciliation’ (Chapter 4), Adrian Little engages Doxtader directly. Challenging the ‘rhetorical theory of reconciliation’ represented in Doxtader's work on South Africa, Little contends that coming to terms with reconciliation means drawing on concepts of paradigm shift (Kuhn and Agamben), and also the insights of complexity theory (Cilliers and Zolo). In exploring this terrain, Little turns to the transitional case of Northern Ireland, and argues that ‘there does not have to be a clear definition of reconciliation to underpin a conflict transformation process. Rather, reconciliation can act as a general heading under which a rhetorical space can be established that enables a more...

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