Reconciliation is being urged upon people who have been bitter and murderous
enemies, upon victims and perpetrators of terrible human rights abuses, and upon
groups of individuals whose very self-conceptions have been structured in terms
of historical and often state-sanctioned relations of dominance and submission.
The rhetoric of reconciliation is particularly common in situations where
traditional judicial responses to past wrongdoing are unavailable because of
corruption in the legal system, staggeringly large numbers of offenders, or
anxiety about the political consequences of trials and punishment. But what is
reconciliation? How is reconciliation to be achieved? And under what conditions
should it be sought?
The notable lack of answers to these questions
prompts the worry that talk of reconciliation is merely a ruse to disguise the
fact that a "purer" type of justice cannot be realized--that, in being asked to
focus on reconciliation rather than on punishment, victims of past wrongdoing
are having to settle for the morally second best. By mining our pretheoretical
understandings of reconciliation, the essay arrives at a core concept of
reconciliation as narrative incorporation that at the same time suggests a way
in which reconciliation might be pursued and grounds a response to moral qualms
provoked by the use of an unanalyzed conception of reconciliation.
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