On Reconciliation After Extreme Political Violence And Atrocity

The dissertation aims to identify and interrogate the tools for reconciliation available to societies emerging from a recent history of extreme political violence. It offers a 'multivalent' theory of reconciliation, which emphasizes the essentially disjunctured and uneven process of reconciliation across social space. Most contemporary theoretical literature on reconciliation falls into one of two camps: a 'minimalist' approach, which defines reconciliation as nothing more than peace and the return of the rule of law, and a 'maximalist' approach, which claims that broad-based repentance and forgiveness are necessary for reconciliation. The dissertation claims that neither level is satisfactory, largely because they are both 'univalent' (the first focusing only on legal institutions, the second on interpersonal, theologically-inflected relations). The dissertation argues that reconciliation is better theorized as occurring across four social levels: political society, institutional, civil society and the personal. It employs five normative concepts to analyze reconciliation across these levels: the commitment to truth, accountability, victim recognition, rule of law, and mutual respect and tolerance. Such a normative model, it is argued, offers a more nuanced theoretical understanding of how reconciliatory initiatives -- such as truth commissions, trials, public apologies and similar efforts -- can work together or at cross-purposes on different social levels.--Author's abstract.