CMRAI-C11: Reconciliation §

Class: IS404 Created Time: December 28, 2021 3:39 PM Database: Class Notes Database Last Edited Time: January 14, 2022 8:04 PM Type: Lecture

---

• Reconciliation is a never ending process of repairing relations and emotional damage marred by conflict, violence, and loss.
• Dimensions and aspects of underlying conditions that could trigger misconceptions and misunderstandings
  • Emotional
  • Psychological

Properties of Reconciliation §

• Basic social institutions is responsible for including every citizen groups in their policy decisions
  • Equal power & voice by Marginalized groups

How to change negative attitude, perception, and behavior §

• Social space is needed for expressing grief and for naming and confronting their fears

• Exchange of both

  • Admission of guilt by perpetrator and public apology
  • Forgiveness

• Appreciate each other’s common humanity to live in the same community again

  💡 Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, recreate common identity, value again

• Injustice, inequalities, and historical grievances must be addressed to sustain reconciliation

The Context of Reconciliation §

• What type of conflict it is:
  • Racism: discrimination, marginalization
  • Oppression: human rights, free speech, political monopoly
  • Genocide
• Most challenging is to improve attitude, values, and capacities for respect and cooperation
  • Violent or long-standing conflicts removed trust in each other
• The feeling of Victimization from both sides
• Remove current source of the conflict: so it won’t be a future source of conflict
  • Central fear & needs: are to be dealt with
• Social and institutional changes: democratization, distribution of resources should support reconciliation

Overcoming the Psychology of Victimization §

• Aggressor might deny their injustices and commit more aggression
• Overcome past wounds of victimization → Build trust
• Intense struggle → dehumanization
  • Reconciliation needs to establish a constructive relationship
• Non-negotiable psychological tasks
  • can’t be solved on negotiation table
  • can be solved with contrition and forgiveness transactions
• Communal groups: eliminate feeling of threat
• New inter-communal relationship
  • Recognition of interdependence
  • Social space for cooperation

Steps to Overcoming Past Enmity §

• Reconciliation focus on how to
  1. Remedy past harms
     • Transform abusive & manipulative relationship
     • If state is aggressor: will require changes in policies and institutions
  2. Restoration of relationship
     • Restitution: hand out justice at individual and institutional level
       • Acknowledging past misdeeds
         • Not blame shifting or deny
       • Expression of remorse, offer of apology & compensation
     • Acknowledge common purposes & interests
       • Renegotiate present differences

graph LR
a(["Acknowledgement"])-->|before|b(["Forgiveness"])

Post-Conflict Justice §

• Institutional involvement to investigate for justice

  💡 Ex: Khmer Rouge Tribunal

• Retributive Justice: legal procedures to search for prosecution and punishment

  • Judge panel
  • Instead of procedural justice, reparation policies aim for compensatory justice
  • Restorative justice allows offenders the opportunity to accept and be accountable for their acts

Restitution and Reparation §

• Reparation: societal restoration through apology

  💡 Ex: Government apology in Australia for the aborigines as “Sorry Day”

• Restitution: material resources such as financial & economic

  • Restoration of seized lands, properties, belongings, and possessions

• End of War: victor unilaterally impose its terms of restitution on the defeated

  💡 Could cause problem: WW1 → WW2: Nazi-Germany revolted because the pressure

  • WW2: seizing weapons and military instead of finance