Reconciliation in Global Context

Reconciliation in Global Context
Author: Björn Krondorfer
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-10-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1438471815

A transdisciplinary approach to reconciliation practices and policies by an international team of scholars and scholar-practitioners. When we open the newspaper, watch and listen to the news, or follow social media, we are inundated with reports on old and fresh conflict zones around the world. Less apparent, perhaps, are the many attempts at bringing former adversaries together. Reconciliation in Global Context argues for the merit of reconciliation and for the need of global conversations around this topic. The contributing scholars and scholar-practitioners—who hail from the United States, South Africa, Ireland, Israel, Zimbabwe, Germany, Palestine, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—describe and analyze examples of reconciliatory practices in different national and political environments. Drawing on direct experiences with reconciliation efforts, from facilitating psychosocial intergroup workshops to critically evaluating official policies, they also reflect on the personal motivations that guide them in this field of engagement. Arranged along an arc that spans from cases describing and interpreting actual processes with groups in conflict to cases in which the conceptual merits and constraints of reconciliation are brought to the fore, the chapters ask hard questions, but also argue for a relational approach to reconciliatory practices. For, in the end, what is important is to embrace a spirit of reconciliation that avoids self-interested action and, instead, advances other-directed care. “This is simply the finest collection of essays on reconciliation processes working at the grassroots and mid-levels of societies I have ever seen. It takes up important issues and moves the discussion forward in each instance.” — Robert J. Schreiter, author of Constructing Local Theologies

Discourse, normative change and the quest for reconciliation in global politics

Discourse, normative change and the quest for reconciliation in global politics
Author: Judith Renner
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2018-02-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1526130629

This book offers a new and critical perspective on the global reconciliation technology by highlighting its contingent and highly political character as an authoritative practice of post-conflict peacebuilding. After retracing the emergence of the reconciliation discourse from South Africa to the global level, the book demonstrates how implementing reconciliation in post-conflict societies is a highly political practice which entails potentially undesirable consequences for the post-conflict societies to which it is deployed. Specifically, the book shows how the reconciliation discourse brings about the marginalisation and neutralisation of political claims and identities of local post-conflict populations by producing these societies as being composed of the ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of past human rights violations which are first and foremost in need of reconciliation and healing. This book will interest students and teachers of transitional justice and international relations.

Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics

Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics
Author: Catherine Lu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-11-16
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108420117

This book examines how justice and reconciliation in world politics should be conceived in response to the injustice and alienation of modern colonialism?

Reconciliation After Violent Conflict

Reconciliation After Violent Conflict
Author: David Bloomfield
Publisher:
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2003
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

How does a newly democratized nation constructively address the past to move from a divided history to a shared future? How do people rebuild coexistence after violence? The International IDEA Handbook on Reconciliation after Violent Conflict presents a range of tools that can be, and have been, employed in the design and implementation of reconciliation processes. Most of them draw on the experience of people grappling with the problems of past violence and injustice. There is no "right answer" to the challenge of reconciliation, and so the Handbook prescribes no single approach. Instead, it presents the options and methods, with their strengths and weaknesses evaluated, so that practitioners and policy-makers can adopt or adapt them, as best suits each specific context. Also available in a French language version.

Reconciliation in Afghanistan

Reconciliation in Afghanistan
Author: Michael Semple
Publisher: US Institute of Peace Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 1601270429

In this timely and thorough volume, Michael Semple analyzes the rationale and effectiveness post-2001 attempts at reconciliation in Afghanistan. He explains the poor performance of these attempts and argues that rethinking is necessary if reconciliation is to help revive prospects for peace and stability in Afghanistan.

History Education and Conflict Transformation

History Education and Conflict Transformation
Author: Charis Psaltis
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3319546813

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume discusses the effects, models and implications of history teaching in relation to conflict transformation and reconciliation from a social-psychological perspective. Bringing together a mix of established and young researchers and academics, from the fields of psychology, education, and history, the book provides an in-depth exploration of the role of historical narratives, history teaching, history textbooks and the work of civil society organizations in post-conflict societies undergoing reconciliation processes, and reflects on the state of the art at both the international and regional level. As well as dealing with the question of the ‘perpetrator-victim’ dynamic, the book also focuses on the particular context of transition in and out of cold war in Eastern Europe and the post-conflict settings of Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine and Cyprus. It is also exploring the pedagogical classroom practices of history teaching and a critical comparison of various possible approaches taken in educational praxis. The book will make compelling reading for students and researchers of education, history, sociology, peace and conflict studies and psychology.

Negotiating Reconciliation in Peacemaking

Negotiating Reconciliation in Peacemaking
Author: Valerie Rosoux
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319626744

This book offers a unique approach to reconciliation as a matter for negotiation, bringing together two bodies of theory in order to offer insights into resolving conflicts and achieving lasting peace. It argues that reconciliation should not be simply accepted as an ‘agreed-upon norm’ within peacemaking processes, but should receive serious attention from belligerents and peace-brokers seeking to end violent conflicts through negotiation. The book explores different meanings the term ‘reconciliation’ might hold for parties in conflict - the end of overt hostilities, a transformation in the quality of relations between warring groups, a vehicle of accountability and punishment of human rights abusers or the means through which they might somehow acquire amnesty, and as a means of atonement and to material reparation. It considers what gives energy to the idea of reconciliation in a conflict situation—why do belligerents become interested in settling their differences and changing their attitudes to one another? Using a range of case studies and thematic discussion, chapters in this book seek to tackle these tough questions from a multidisciplinary perspective. Contributions to the book reveal some of the complexities of national and international reconciliation projects, but particularly diverse understandings of reconciliation and how to achieve it. All conflicts reflect unique dynamics, aspirations and power realities. It is precisely because parties in conflict differ in expectations of reconciliation outcomes that its processes should be negotiated. This book is a valuable resource for both scholars and practitioners engaged in resolving conflicts and transforming fragmented relations in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Germany's Foreign Policy of Reconciliation

Germany's Foreign Policy of Reconciliation
Author: Lily Gardner Feldman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0742526135

Since World War II, Germany has confronted its own history to earn acceptance in the family of nations. Lily Gardner Feldman draws on the literature of religion, philosophy, social psychology, law and political science, and history to understand Germany's foreign policy with its moral and pragmatic motivations and to develop the concept of international reconciliation. Germany's Foreign Policy of Reconciliation traces Germany's path from enmity to amity by focusing on the behavior of individual leaders, governments, and non-governmental actors. The book demonstrates that, at least in the cases of France, Israel, Poland, and Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, Germany has gone far beyond banishing war with its former enemies; it has institutionalized active friendship. The German experience is now a model of its own, offering lessons for other cases of international reconciliation. Gardner Feldman concludes with an initial application of German reconciliation insights to the other principal post-World War II pariah, as Japan expands its relations with China and South Korea.

Practicing Reconciliation in a Violent World

Practicing Reconciliation in a Violent World
Author: Michael Battle
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2005-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0819221090

How do we practice reconciliation in a world full of violence? How do we love someone at work who seems hell-bent on sabotaging a successful career? And how do religious people resolve differences when religious interpretations seem to lead to righteous indignation rather than reconciliation? We practice reconciliation, according to Michael Battle, by affirming that God is present and acting on that belief, even in the midst of something that looks more like the devil's work. Battle, who worked with Desmond Tutu in South Africa in the past, draws on his knowledge of biblical texts, as well as contemporary scholarship, to examine the ways in which each of us can practice being reconciling people.

Political Reconciliation

Political Reconciliation
Author: Andrew Schaap
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2004-11-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134249667

Since the end of the Cold War, the concept of reconciliation has emerged as a central term of political discourse within societies divided by a history of political violence. Reconciliation has been promoted as a way of reckoning with the legacy of past wrongs while opening the way for community in the future. This book examines the issues of transitional justice in the context of contemporary debates in political theory concerning the nature of 'the political'. Bringing together research on transitional justice and political theory, the author argues that if we are to talk of reconciliation in politics we need to think about it in a fundamentally different way than is commonly presupposed; as agonistic rather than restorative.