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An Ethic of Political Reconciliation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Daniel Philpott
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Abstract

The core proposition of this article is that reconciliation, both as a process and an end state, is a concept of justice. Its animating virtue is mercy and its goal is peace. These concepts are expressed most deeply in religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The idea of justice as right relationship is also found in the contemporary restorative justice movement, an approach to criminal justice that has emerged in the past generation.

For contemporary political orders addressing past war, genocide, and authoritarianism, the holistic justice of reconciliation involves not only the legal guarantee and actual practice of human rights and the laws of war but also a redress of the range of wounds that political injustices inflict. Reconciliation is achieved through a set of six political practices that seek to restore a measure of human flourishing. A secondary fruit of these practices is an increase in the legitimacy that citizens bequeath to their governing institutions or to their state's relationship with other states.

The article takes a close look at two of the practices that are often thought to be at odds in addressing past injustices—punishment and forgiveness—and argues that when viewed as practices that reflect and participate in a restorative concept of justice, punishment and forgiveness become compatible in principle—with important implications for the politics of facing past evil

Type
Feature
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , Winter 2009 , pp. 389 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2009

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References

Notes

1 Peace building is similar to the concept of “postconflict reconstruction,” except that it occurs not solely in the wake of wars but also of dictatorships. Postconflict reconstruction is the central concept of the conference for which this paper was originally written, several of whose papers appear in Ethics & International Affairs 23, no. 2 (2009). The term is also consistent with my usage elsewhere, including in a book manuscript from which this article is drawn, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation.

2 For religious accounts of reconciliation, see John W. De Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003); Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1996). For secular accounts, see Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001); Andrew Schaap, Political Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2005); Erin Daly and Jeremy Sarkin, Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

3 For a classic statement of the liberal peace, see Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 2nd ed. (New York: United Nations Publications, 1995). For scholarly analyses, see Roland Paris, At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Oliver P. Richmond, “The Problem of Peace: Understanding the ‘Liberal Peace’,” Conflict, Security & Development 6, no. 3 (2006), pp. 291–314.

4 Calls for legal accountability and decrials of impunity are commonly voiced by such groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. For a scholarly perspective, see Diane F. Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts: The Duty to Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime,” Yale Law Journal 100, no. 8 (1991), pp. 2537–2615.

5 On liberal thought in international relations, see Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

6 On the role of emotions in conflict, see Roger D. Peterson, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

7 For a summary of these analyses, see Charles T. Call and Elizabeth M. Cousens, “Ending Wars and Building Peace: International Responses to War-Torn Societies,” International Studies Quarterly 9 (2008), pp. 1–21.

8 Ibid., p. 2.

9 A like-minded approach, but articulated more as a praxis than as a philosophical or theological ethic, is the influential work of John Paul Lederach. See, e.g., John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 1997).

10 See Daniel Philpott, “When Faith Meets History: The Influence of Religion on Transitional Justice,” in Thomas Brudholm and Thomas Cushman, eds., The Religious in Response to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 174–212.

11 The concept of an overlapping consensus is John Rawls's. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 15. Whereas I adopt this concept, though, I do not share his commitment to “public reason” and its attendant obligation of secular argument. I am more sympathetic to the more religion-friendly concept of overlapping consensus articulated in Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 31–53.

12 See, e.g., Jennifer J. Llewellyn, “Restorative Justice in Transitions and Beyond,” in Telling the Truths: Truth Telling and Peace Building in Post-Conflict Societies, Tristan Anne Borer, ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 83–113.

13 Elizabeth Achtemeier, “Righteousness in the OT,” in G. A. Buttrick, ed., The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1962), pp. 80–82.

14 See Christopher D. Marshall, Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 51; and Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995), pp. 25–33, 57–65.

15 Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Conception of Justice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 6–7, 192; and A. Rashied Omar, “Between Compassion and Justice: Locating an Islamic Definition of Peace,” Peace Colloquy (Spring 2005), p. 9.

16 Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel.

17 Perry Yoder, Shalom: The Bible's Word for Salvation, Justice, and Peace (Newton, Kans.: Faith and Life Press, 1987), pp. 10–23; Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1990), pp. 130–32; and Ulrich Mauser, The Gospel of Peace: A Scriptural Message for Today's World (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), p. 33.

18 Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peace Building in Islam (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 60.

19 Pope John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia (Encyclical Letter, 1980).

20 See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

21 Carol Schersten LaHurd, “‘So That the Sinner Will Repent': Forgiveness in Islam and Christianity,” Dialog 35, no. 4 (1996), p. 289.

22 For an overview of the debate and examples of each position, see Elizabeth M. Bucar and Barbra Barnett, eds., Does Human Rights Need God? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005).

23 See ibid.

24 Brandon Hamber and Richard A. Wilson, “Symbolic Closure Through Memory, Reparation and Revenge in Post-Conflict Societies,” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 1 (2002), p. 40.

25 André du Toit, “The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC: Truth as Acknowledgment and Justice as Recognition,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, eds., Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 133.

26 Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 124–138.

27 Here again, see Peterson, Understanding Ethnic Violence.

28 Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri, “Trials and Errors: Principle and Pragmatism in Strategies of International Justice,” International Security 28, no. 3 (2003), pp. 5–44.

29 Marshall, Beyond Retribution, 131–39.

30 For rationales of punishment along the lines of restorative justice in several religious traditions, see Michael L. Hadley, ed., The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

31 Jean Hampton, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (1984), pp. 208–38; R. A. Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Herbert Morris, “The Paternalistic Theory of Punishment,” in Punishment and Rehabilitation, Jeffrie Murphy, ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1985).

32 For accounts of the actual practice of forgiveness in the politics of various countries, see Mark Amstutz, The Healing of Nations: The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); William Bole, Drew Christiansen, and Robert T. Hennemeyer, Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004); Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (London: Routledge, 2002).

33 For an excellent summary of criticisms of forgiveness in politics, see Thomas Brudholm, “On the Advocacy of Forgiveness after Mass Atrocities,” pp. 124–56.

34 See Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy 62 (1987), pp. 499–508; Miroslav Volf, “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice: A Theological Contribution to a More Peaceful Social Environment,” Millenium 29, no. 3 (2000), pp. 861–77; Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge.

35 Though this may seem far-fetched, in South Africa and elsewhere surprising examples of it took place. Eugene de Kock, who was head of the Vlakplass security force of the apartheid regime and known as “prime evil” for his horrific deeds, renounced these deeds from prison after being forgiven at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing by the widow of a man that he had killed. See the account of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Story of Forgiveness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003).

36 Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge.

37 Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions,” pp. 22–44.

38 Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

39 P. E. Digeser, Political Forgiveness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). For another excellent analysis of forgiveness, though one that does not necessarily confront its tension with judicial punishment, see Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).