Reconciliation After Civil Wars

How do former enemies reconcile after civil wars? Do they ever really reconcile in any complete sense? How is political reunification related to longer-term cultural reintegration? Bringing together experts on civil wars around the modern world – the United States, Spain, Rwanda, Colombia, Russia, and more - this volume provides comparative and transnational analysis of the challenges that arise in the aftermath of civil war.

Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation

Civil war inevitably causes shifts in state boundaries, demographics, systems of rule, and the bases of legitimate authority—many of the markers of national identity. Yet a shared sense of nationhood is as important to political reconciliation as the reconstruction of state institutions and economic security. After Civil War compares reconstruction projects in Bosnia, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, and Turkey in order to explore how former combatants and their supporters learn to coexist as one nation in the aftermath of ethnopolitical or ideological violence. After Civil War synthesizes research on civil wars, reconstruction, and nationalism to show how national identity is reconstructed over time in different cultural and socioeconomic contexts, in strong nation-states as well as those with a high level of international intervention. Chapters written by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists examine the relationships between reconstruction and reconciliation, the development of new party systems after war, and how globalization affects the processes of peacebuilding. After Civil War thus provides a comprehensive, comparative perspective to a wide span of recent political history, showing postconflict articulations of national identity can emerge in the long run within conducive institutional contexts. Contributors: Risto Alapuro, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Chares Demetriou, James Hughes, Joost Jongerden, Bill Kissane, Denisa Kostovicova, Michael Richards, Ruth Seifert, Riki van Boeschoten.

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.

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.

Civil war and reconciliation - International war and reconciliation - Rethinking rationality in social theory - Implications for policy and practice and avenues for further research.

How did civil society function as a locus for reconciliation initiatives since the beginning of the 20th century? The essays in this volume challenge the conventional understanding of reconciliation as a benign state-driven process. They explore how a range of civil society actors - from Turkish intellectuals apologizing for the Armenian Genocide to religious organizations working towards the improvement of Franco-German relations - have confronted and coped with the past. These studies offer a critical perspective on local and transnational reconciliation acts by questioning the extent to which speech became an alternative to silence, remembrance to forgetting, engagement to oblivion.

Civil war inevitably causes shifts in state boundaries, demographics, systems of rule, and the bases of legitimate authority—many of the markers of national identity. Yet a shared sense of nationhood is as important to political reconciliation as the reconstruction of state institutions and economic security. After Civil War compares reconstruction projects in Bosnia, Cyprus, Finland, Greece, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, and Turkey in order to explore how former combatants and their supporters learn to coexist as one nation in the aftermath of ethnopolitical or ideological violence. After Civil War synthesizes research on civil wars, reconstruction, and nationalism to show how national identity is reconstructed over time in different cultural and socioeconomic contexts, in strong nation-states as well as those with a high level of international intervention. Chapters written by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists examine the relationships between reconstruction and reconciliation, the development of new party systems after war, and how globalization affects the processes of peacebuilding. After Civil War thus provides a comprehensive, comparative perspective to a wide span of recent political history, showing postconflict articulations of national identity can emerge in the long run within conducive institutional contexts. Contributors: Risto Alapuro, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Chares Demetriou, James Hughes, Joost Jongerden, Bill Kissane, Denisa Kostovicova, Michael Richards, Ruth Seifert, Riki van Boeschoten.