Judge Roberto Carlos Vidal López is a Lawyer and Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, where he gained a PhD in law. Since 1997 he has been a Professor and Expert Researcher there on human rights, international humanitarian law (IHL), forced migration and internal displacement. He has also studied history.

In addition to his work as a Professor, Judge Vidal López has been a Lecturer at the Universidad del Rosario and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He has worked for the Ideas for Peace Foundation, the United Nations in Colombia, the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration, the University Network for Peace, the Ombudsman’s Office of Colombia and the Brookings Institution, a major Washington-based think tank. He has also produced thirty publications, including Truth-Telling and Internal Displacement in Colombia (2012), The Participation of Internally Displaced People in Peace Processes in Colombia (2007) and Derecho global y desplazamiento interno: Creación, uso y desaparición del desplazamiento forzado por la violencia en el derecho contemporáneo (2007).

Existing research on public opinion towards Indigenous peoples tends to focus on the extent to which citizens hold racist and anti-Indigenous attitudes. In contrast, few empirical studies have examined the extent to which citizens support reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Drawing on data from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES), we construct a novel Indigenous reconciliation scale to measure non-Indigenous support for policies that seek to address the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools. We then compare this scale to existing measures of Indigenous resentment before investigating the effects of several individual-level determinants related to attitudes, elite cues, and policy preferences on support for Indigenous reconciliation policies. Our findings shed light on the ongoing efforts in settler countries in North and South America and Australasia to decolonize their settler institutions and to create new and renewed relationships with Indigenous communities in those countries.

While much scholarly attention has been devoted to analyzing governments' attempts to determine ways of remembering or forgetting the past, little is known about how the politics of remembrance affect the process of reconciliation. To what extent does conflict remembrance actually influence the shaping of collective (national) identities? Does remembering the painful past lead to reconciliation? If not, what does it do? This article addresses these questions by reflecting on the author's experience of teaching multinational groups at her university in Japan, and discussing fraught issues relating to the Asia-Pacific War (including the “comfort women”) with her classes. Drawing on class observations and student essays from 2016 to 2019, she discusses the often conflicting narratives and identities that students bring to the university classroom and the pedagogical challenges involved in negotiating these. The paper illustrates how highly selective narratives of the national past (learnt at school or absorbed from the media) affect collective identity (the way we perceive the self versus the other), and discusses implications for East Asian reconciliation and peace.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus on “The Comfort Women as Public History,” we analyze the turn since the early 2000s towards “heritagization” of this controversial issue. After reviewing the political, cultural and historiographical background to ongoing disputes over “comfort women,” we examine how the reframing of this issue as “heritage” has been accompanied by increasing entanglement with the global politics of atrocity commemoration, and associated tropes. Prominent among such tropes is the claim that commemoration fosters “peace”. However, following recent critical scholarship on this issue, and drawing on the papers that comprise this special issue, we question any necessary equation between heritagization and reconciliation. When done badly, the drive to commemorate a contentious issue as public history can exacerbate rather than resolve division and hatred. We therefore emphasise the need for representation of comfort women as public history to pay due regard to nuance and complexity, for example regarding the depiction of victims versus perpetrators; the transnational dimension of the system; and its relationship with the broader history of gender politics and the sexual subjugation of women.

This article examines statements issued by municipal governments, local organizations, and Indigenous communities that cancelled Canada Day celebrations in 2021, following news confirming physical evidence of unmarked graves at former residential schools. We argue that the statements reflect political logics of the past, present, and future, including dominant national narratives of liberal multiculturalism, residual logics of white nationalism, and emergent, transformative projects of Indigenous-defined reconciliation and resurgence. Through dominant narratives, the policy of cancelling Canada Day is presented as an expression of Canadian values, while settler-colonialism is obscured. Meanwhile, the residual white nationalism of the post-Confederation movement surfaces as statements tend to speak to an imagined normative Canadian subject who—only temporarily—suspends their celebration of the nation-state. Finally, the statements evidence emergent political forces, including Indigenous articulations of transformative reconciliation, resistance to settler-colonialism, and expressions of sovereignty, which signal the potential for major shifts in practices of national celebration in Canada.

What’s the good of getting angry with a person? Some would argue that angry emotions like indignation or resentment are intrinsically good when they are an apt response. But many think this answer is not fully satisfactory. An increasing number of philosophers add that accusatory anger has value because of what it communicates to the blamee, and because of its downstream cultivating effects on the blamee.

Mediators and conflict resolution strategists share an interest with philosophers in the value of reactive attitudes for interpersonal communication, but prominent thinkers from those fields arrive at rather different verdicts about the effects of accusatory anger. On a more therapeutic approach to interpersonal conflict, angry accusation is commonly understood to obfuscate mutual understanding and to have bad downstream effects on the blamee.

Below, I discuss how the compassionate communication approach casts doubt on the purported valuable effects of angry accusation, and I provide empirical support for this worry. I argue that philosophers should reconsider their empirical assumptions about the human psychology of discord, and hypothesize that accusatory anger is unlikely to have the communicative and cultivating effects that it is purported to have. I conclude by highlighting further empirical and ethical questions this hypothesis generates.

This essay brings Black Studies, now commonly referred to as Africana Studies, further into the public humanities dialogue. Scholars in the public humanities field are urging a practice of humanities that is collaborative and committed to racial and social justice, especially in the context of community-based scholarship. The origin and current protocols of Black Studies are also community-centric and operate within a liberatory framework in that it is ultimately concerned with the vitality of Black people across the diaspora. The essay describes the correlation between Black Studies and public humanities and discusses the usefulness of both disciplines in reckoning with slavery and its legacies at higher education institutions. In addition to giving a short genealogy of public humanities and Black Studies, the essay uses William & Mary’s Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and Chesapeake Heartland: An African American at African American Humanities Project at Washington College as examples on how to possibly navigate the challenges ahead as public humanists and Black Studies scholars critically engage with the public on memorialization, reconciliation, and redress.

A Christian approach to suffering, sin, and evil cannot offer now a full theodicy. We now ‘know in part’ only regarding divine purposes in allowing suffering, sin, and evil. We can clarify instead how God interacts in righteousness with people as their God of promise and voucher in the midst of suffering, sin, and evil. To that end, this article illuminates a divine effort toward human reconciliation with God in righteousness and resurrection, despite our gaps in explaining suffering, sin, and evil. It identifies current reconciliation with God and resurrection by God that do not fully explain suffering, sin, and evil, but can be a voucher now in human experience and life for eventual eschatological reparations promised by God. If the Spirit of God can be such a voucher, so also can the reconciliation and resurrection now empowered by that Spirit. This article recognizes a special role for the divine ‘fruit of the Spirit’ identified by Paul. It also explains how this role figures in spiritual resurrection with Christ now, in advance of any resurrection of the body. The article contends that the spiritual resurrection in question emerges through reconciliation with God now in volitional cooperation with God’s unique moral personality traits.

This article focuses on Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission’s (NRC) archival holdings, which hold enormous value as a source for scholarly research but constitute a target of destructive forces, prompting the government to impose restrictive policies to regulate access to them. This article argues that in spite of the prevailing restrictions, opportunities exist for original enquiry into the NRC and Ghana’s human rights history through the piecemeal and selective access offered by the various repositories to researchers.

In the subsection “Grammar of Eros (The Language of Love)” in section 2 of book 2 of The Star of Redemption, the beating heart of the work, Franz Rosenzweig offers a peculiar portrait of the event of revelation. What is presented is a dramatization of the encounter between the loving God and the beloved human soul, a developing scene consisting of a series of utterances and experiences, many of which appear unwarranted. Why does Rosenzweig present revelation in this manner? This article seeks to explain the seemingly arbitrary twists and turns in the dramatized “plot” through which Rosenzweig depicts revelation by demonstrating that it follows in its main features the prevalent Protestant understanding of revelation as encompassing not only divine self-disclosure but also the discovery of sin, confession, forgiveness of sin, reconciliation, attainment of selfhood, and redemption, and is framed according to the directives of the Lutheran foundational principle of “at once a sinner and justified (Simul Justus et Peccator). In so doing, it exhibits Rosenzweig’s deep embeddedness in the Protestant theological discourse of his time and shows that The Star should be understood in light of the contemporary Protestant theology.