The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation examines contemporary political violence and atrocity in the context of the crisis of the nation-state. It explores the way violence is used to unmake the social world and how its product: suffering, is used to try to remake the social world. Humphrey considers both the unmaking of the world through torture, war, urbicide and ethnic cleansing and the resultant remaking of the world through testimony and witnessing in the forums of truth commissions and trials. The discussion thus moves from terror to trauma.

The dissertation aims to identify and interrogate the tools for reconciliation available to societies emerging from a recent history of extreme political violence. It offers a 'multivalent' theory of reconciliation, which emphasizes the essentially disjunctured and uneven process of reconciliation across social space. Most contemporary theoretical literature on reconciliation falls into one of two camps: a 'minimalist' approach, which defines reconciliation as nothing more than peace and the return of the rule of law, and a 'maximalist' approach, which claims that broad-based repentance and forgiveness are necessary for reconciliation. The dissertation claims that neither level is satisfactory, largely because they are both 'univalent' (the first focusing only on legal institutions, the second on interpersonal, theologically-inflected relations). The dissertation argues that reconciliation is better theorized as occurring across four social levels: political society, institutional, civil society and the personal. It employs five normative concepts to analyze reconciliation across these levels: the commitment to truth, accountability, victim recognition, rule of law, and mutual respect and tolerance. Such a normative model, it is argued, offers a more nuanced theoretical understanding of how reconciliatory initiatives -- such as truth commissions, trials, public apologies and similar efforts -- can work together or at cross-purposes on different social levels.--Author's abstract.

Effective peace agreements are rarely accomplished by idealists. The process of moving from situations of entrenched oppression, armed conflict, open warfare, and mass atrocities toward peace and reconciliation requires a series of small steps and compromises to open the way for the kind of dialogue and negotiation that make political stability, the beginning of democracy, and the rule of law a possibility. For over forty years, Charles Villa-Vicencio has been on the front lines of Africa's battle for racial equality. In Walk with Us and Listen, he argues that reconciliation needs honest talk to promote trust building and enable former enemies and adversaries to explore joint solutions to the cause of their conflicts. He offers a critical assessment of the South African experiment in transitional justice as captured in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and considers the influence of ubuntu, in which individuals are defined by their relationships, and other traditional African models of reconciliation. Political reconciliation is offered as a cautious model against which transitional politics needs to be measured. Villa-Vicencio challenges those who stress the obligation to prosecute those allegedly guilty of gross violation of human rights, replacing this call with the need for more complementarity between the International Criminal Court and African mechanisms to achieve the greater goals of justice and peace building.

Nicole Fox investigates the ways memorials can shape the experiences of survivors decades after massacres have ended. She examines how memorializations can both heal and hurt, especially when they fail to represent all genders, ethnicities, and classes of those afflicted.

Narrating Political Reconciliation advances a distinctive discourse analysis of South Africa's reconciliation process by enquiring into the politics of the following: writing national history, confessional, and testimonial styles of truth, and reconciliation as theology and therapy. Moon argues that the TRC was the catalyst for, and shaped the parameters of, what is now powerful 'reconciliation industry, ' and her insights provide a theoretical framework through which to think and problematise the politics of transitional justice in post-conflict and democratizing states more generally

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.