1st Edition
Reconciliation after War Historical Perspectives on Transitional Justice
This edited volume examines a range of historical and contemporary episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation in the aftermath of war.
Reconciliation is a concept that resists easy definition. At the same time, it is almost invariably invoked as a goal of post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding and transitional justice. This book examines the considerable ambiguity and controversy surrounding the term and, crucially, asks what has reconciliation entailed historically? What can we learn from past episodes of reconciliation and anti-reconciliation? Taken together, the chapters in this volume adopt an interdisciplinary approach, focused on the question of how reconciliation has been enacted, performed and understood in particular historical episodes, and how that might contribute to our understanding of the concept and its practice. Rather than seek a universal definition, the book focuses on what makes each case of reconciliation unique, and highlights the specificity of reconciliation in individual contexts.
This book will be of much interest to students of transitional justice, conflict resolution, human rights, history and International Relations.
1. Introduction: A genealogy of reconciliation
Henry Redwood and Rachel Kerr
Part I: The Distant Past
2. Remembering What One Has Forgotten: Athenian Reconciliation After War (Crimes)
Robin Osborne
3. Jesuit Peace-Making in the Kingdom of Naples: Reconciliation in Early-Modern Europe
Stephen Cummins
4. Reconciliation and Oblivion in the English Republics
Imogen Peck
Part II: The Longue Durée
5. 1917 In 2017: A ‘Useless’ Past? Remembering and Forgetting the Bolshevik Revolution
Natasha Kuhrt
6. One Hundred Years of Reconciliation: Fractured Memories o the Finnish Civil War
Teemu Laulainen
7. The Paradox of Reconciliation: Early Post-War Chinese-Japanese Experience in Regional and Comparative Perspective
Daqing Yang
8. There Once Was A Country: The Construction and Deconstruction of Yugoslavia
Jelena Subotic
9. The Unreconciled US Civil War
James Gow and Rana Ibrahem
Part III: Alternative Perspectives
10. Religion and Reconciliation: Power, Practice and Rejections of the Truth and Reconciliation Project in South African and Bosnian Contexts
George R. Wilkes
11. Burying the Hatchet: Exploring Indigenous Practice of Reconciliation Among Pastoralist Communities in East Africa
Anne Kubai
12. If You Are Not Careful, Reconciliation Will Be Spreading All Over The Country’: Reconciliation in Britain’s Humanitarian Aid to Post-War Germany, 1919-1925
Ben Holmes
13. The Art of Healing and Reconciliation in Canada
Jonathan Dewar
Part IV: Challenging Conventional Wisdom
14. Reconciled to What? Community Relations and the Anti-Politics of Reconciliation in Northern Ireland
Jonathan Evershed
15. Reconciliation Without Transitional Justice? The Challenges of Imposed Reconciliation in Spain
Rosa Ana Alija-Fernandez and Olga Martin-Ortega
16. Unhealed Wounds: The Limits of German Reconciliation in the Case of Distomo, Greece
Olga Burkhardt-Vetter
17. Reconciliation As An Ongoing Political Project: The Case of Japan
Madoka Futamura
18. Epilogue
Henry Redwood
Biography
Rachel Kerr is a Reader in International Relations and Contemporary War in the Department of War Studies and co-Director of the War Crimes Research Group at King’s College London, UK.
Henry Redwood is a Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK.
James Gow is Professor of International Peace and Security and Co-Director of the War Crimes Research Group at King’s College London, UK, and Non-Resident Scholar, Liechtenstein Institute, Princeton University, USA.
