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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
Reconciliation has two faces and two ways of knowing. One face looks out at the world and deals with it in rational terms; the other looks inward and its truths are held in the body and emotions. This latter face understands intangible intelligences – physical, spiritual and emotional – that are no less valid because they are felt. Its vocabulary centres around ‘trust;’ emotional and psychological ‘healing’ and ‘coming to terms’ with events, words that apply to individuals and their relations with others.
When a person learns to trust herself, her community or someone who betrayed her, she will know that trust first in her body, in the same way that she will identify pangs of distrust. She may say she trusts, forgives or is reconciled; she may give logical reasons why someone who has harmed her can now be trusted; but the trust is felt and may not correspond with rational processes. A restorative approach to reconciliation deals with these intangibles. It is, above all, about healing and trust building in the context of human relationships, with all the give and take that human interdependence requires.
That give and take demands something of both off enders and the off ended. To Lederach (1997) reconciliation after a conflict orinjury requires an interplay of truth, justice, mercy and peace. Truth requires acknowledging wrongs and validating losses and pain. But truth is paradoxically linked to mercy, which involves accepting what happened, forgiving, “letting go, and a new beginning.” Justice requires “the search for individual and group rights, for social restructuring, and for restitution” but it is connected to peace, which stresses “interdependence, well-being and security” (p. 29). In these relationships past and future are joined in processes involving reasserting just institutions and a positive peace12 – a concept of peace that includes justice – at the national level, and accountability and personal healing at the individual and group levels.
Acknowledgement of the past but the need to forgive; justice but the need for peace and security: these elements of post-violence recovery arise time and again. Each alone is inadequate.
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