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ABSTRACT
Despite a growth in research exploring corporeal dimensions of peacebuilding, scholarship addressing intergroup reconciliation after violent conflict currently pays too little attention to the human body, and to the consequences of the embodied impact of political violence upon reconciliation. Rather, research tends to focus upon the narrative and discursive aspects of relationships between formerly warring parties. As a result, little is understood about how corporeal experiences of war might influence intergroup reconciliation. This article contends that a paradigm shift towards an embodied approach to reconciliation is necessary, specifically in our understanding of three interrelated spheres of application: the conceptual-theoretical, the practical, and the policy-oriented pillars of intergroup reconciliation after atrocious violence. Reconciliation is in practice embodied; this has, to date, been under-appreciated in the literature and so we require a more body-aware approach to understanding reconciliation; that latter approach will in turn allow for more effective practical and policy-related interventions.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (London: Pan Macmillan, 2012).
2 Sarah Kenyon Lischer, ‘Causes and Consequences of Conflict-Induced Displacement’, Civil Wars 9, no. 2 (2007): 142–55.
3 Roddy Brett, ‘In the Aftermath of Genocide: Guatemala’s Failed Reconciliation’, in Peacebuilding, early Online Published Version (2022).
4 Valérie Rosoux and Mark Anstey, eds., Negotiating Reconciliation in Peacemaking (Cham: Springer, 2017).
5 Christine Sylvester, ed., Experiencing war (London: Routledge, 2011).
6 Swati Parashar, ‘What wars and “war bodies” know about international relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 4 (2013): 615–30.
7 Lauren Wilcox, Bodies of Violence: Theorising Embodied Subjects in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
8 Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
9 Gannit Ankori, ‘“Dis-orientalisms”: Displaced bodies/embodied displacements in contemporary Palestinian art’, in Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, eds. Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 59–90.
10 Maria Berghs, ‘Embodiment and Emotion in Sierra Leone’, Third World Quarterly, no. 32, (2011): 1399–417.
11 See for example Helen Berents, ‘An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence’, Peacebuilding 3, no. 2 (2015): 1–14; Tarja Väyrynen, ‘Mundane Peace and the Politics of Vulnerability: a Nonsolid Feminist Research Agenda’, Peacebuilding 7, no. 2 (2019); and Allison Hayes-Conroy and Alexis Saenz Montoya, ‘Peace Building with the Body: Resonance and Reflexivity in Colombia’s Legion del Afecto’, Space and Polity 21, no. 2 (2017): 144–57.
12 Väyrynen, ‘Mundane Peace’, 1–2.
13 Mariana Achugar, Discursive Processes of Intergenerational Transmission of Recent History. (Re)making our past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jodi Halpern and Harvey Weinstein, ‘Rehumanizing the Other: Empathy and Reconciliation’, Human Rights Quarterly 26, no. 3: 561–583; Amiram Raviv, Alona Raviv, ‘The Influence of the Ethos of Conflict on Israeli Jews’ Interpretation of Jewish – Palestinian Encounters’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 1: 94–18.
14 Nurit Shnabel, Samer Halabi, and Masi Noor, ‘Overcoming Competitive Victimhood and Facilitating Forgiveness Through Re-Categorisation into a Common Victim or Perpetrator Identity’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49 (2013): 867–77; Emanuel Adler and Michael Bartlett, ‘A Framework for the Study of Security Communities’, in Security Communities, eds. Emanuel Adler and Michael Bartlett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43.
15 John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997).
16 Paul Seils, The Place of Reconciliation in Transitional Justice (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2017).
17 David Crocker, ‘Punishment, Reconciliation, and Democratic Deliberation’, Buffalo Criminal Law Review 5, no. 2 (2002): 509–49.
18 Paul Seils, The Place of Reconciliation in Transitional Justice (New York: ICTJ, 2017).
19 Rose Shaw, Lars Waldorf, with Pierre Hazan, Localising Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities After Mass Violence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
20 James Hughes, ‘Agency Versus Structure in Reconciliation’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 4 (2017): 624–42.
21 Colleen Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; and Andrew Schaap, Political Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2009).
22 Lederach, Building Peace; David Androff, ‘“To not hate”: Reconciliation Among Victims of Violence and Participants of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Contemporary Justice Review 13, no. 3 (2010): 269–85.
23 See Colleen Murphy, ‘Political Reconciliation, the Rule of Law, and Genocide’, The European Legacy 12, no. 7 (2007): 853–65; and A Moral Theory.
24 Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Temple University Press, 2009).
25 Daniel Bar Tal, Intractable Conflicts: Socio-Psychological Foundations and Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
26 Laura Sjoberg, ‘Failure and Critique in Critical Security Studies’, Security Dialogue 50, no. 1 (2019), 77–4; Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Naomi Cahn, Dina Francesca Haynes and Nahla Valji eds., The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
27 Valérie Rosoux, ‘How Not to Mediate?’, International Affairs 98, no. 5 (2022): 1717–735.
28 Anne-Kathrin Kreft, ‘Responding to Sexual Violence: Women’s Mobilisation in War’, Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 2 (2019): 220–33; and Elizabeth Wood, ‘Conflict-related Sexual Violence and the Policy Implications of Recent Research’, International Review of the Red Cross 96, no. 894 (2014): 457–78.
29 Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, and Catia Cecilia Confortini, eds., Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research (London, UK: Routledge, 2021).
30 Magda Lorena Cárdenas and Elisabeth Olivius, ‘Building Peace in the Shadow of War: Women-to-Women Diplomacy as Alternative Peacebuilding Practice in Myanmar’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 15, no. 3 (2021): 347–66; Milena Abrahamyan, Parvana Mammadova, Sophio Tskhvariashvili, ‘Women Challenging Gender Norms and Patriarchal Values in Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation across the South Caucasus’, Journal of Conflict Transformation 3, no. 1 (2018): 46–70; and Niall Gilmartin, ‘Gendering the “Post-Conflict” Narrative in Northern Ireland’s Peace Process’, Capital & Class 43, no. 1 (2019): 89–4.
31 We are also mindful of the fact that research is in itself a deeply embodied process. See Laura Ellingson, Embodiment in Qualitative Research (New York: Routledge, 2017).
32 Richard English, ed., The Cambridge History of Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
33 Väyrynen, ‘Mundane,’ 147.
34 Ibid., 147.
35 See Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek, ‘Occupied from Within: Embodied Memories of Occupation, Resistance and Survival Among the Palestinian Diaspora’, Emotion, Space and Society 34 (2020); 100653; Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Giorgio Hadi Curti, ‘From a Wall of Bodies to a Body of Walls: Politics of Affect| Politics of Memory| Politics of War’, Emotion, Space and Society 1, no. 2 (2008): 106–18.
36 See Meredith Loken, Milli Lake, and Kate Cronin-Furman, ‘Deploying Justice: Strategic Accountability for Wartime Sexual Violence’, International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2018): 751–764; and Kerry F. Crawford, ‘From Spoils to Weapons: Framing Wartime Sexual Violence’, Gender & Development 21, no. 3 (2013): 505–17.
37 In 1963, Fanon was already pointing at the fact that ‘it is not necessary to be wounded by a bullet in order to suffer from the fact of war in body as well as in mind’. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 290.
38 See Tiina Vaittinen and Catia C. Confortini, eds., Gender, Global Health and Violence. Feminist Perspectives on Peace and Disease (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020).
39 On that point, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
40 Daniel Bar-Tal and Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, ‘From collective victimhood to social reconciliation: Outlining a conceptual framework’, in War, Community, and Social Change (New York: Springer, 2014), 125–36; Sabina Čehajić-Clancy et al., ‘Social-Psychological Interventions for Intergroup Reconciliation: An Emotion Regulation Perspective’, Psychological Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2016): 73–88; Mónica Alzate García, José Manuel Sabucedo Cameselle and María del Mar Durán Rodríguez, ‘Antecedents of the Attitude Towards Inter-Group Reconciliation in a Setting of Armed Conflict’, Psicothema 25, no. 1, (2013): 61–6.
41 Richard English, ‘The Future Study of Terrorism’, European Journal of International Security 1, no. 2 (2016): 135–49.
42 So far, such lines of inquiry have mainly concerned experiences of wartime sexual violence. See Pascha Bueno-Hansen, ‘An Intersectional Analysis of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Researching War, ed Annick T.R. Wibben (London: Routledge, 2016), 185–01.
43 Élise Féron, Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men. Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); Nicola Henry, ‘Witness to Rape: The Limits and Potential of International War Crimes Trials for Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 1 (2009): 114–34; Donna Pankhurst, ed., Gendered Peace: Women’s Struggles for Post-War Justice and Reconciliation (London: Routledge, 2012); and Vincent Druliolle and Roddy Brett, eds., The Politics of Victimhood in post-conflict Societies: analytical and comparative perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac Millan, 2018).
44 Widespread research exists on the intergenerational (embodied) impact of the Holocaust. See, among many others, Liliane Kshensky Baxter, ‘To Heal and Recreate Ourselves: Shame, the Holocaust, and nonviolence’ (PhD diss., Emory University, 2002); Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and John J.Sigal and Morton Weinfeld, Trauma and Rebirth: Intergenerational Effects of the Holocaust (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1989).
45 We use the term ‘choreography’ here in the sense proposed by Tarja Väyrynen, Eeva Puumala, Samu Pehkonen, Anitta Kynsilehto and Tiina Vaittinen, Choreographies of Resistance: Mobile Bodies and Relational Politics (London, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).
46 Cynthia Cohen et al., ed., Acting Together I: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence (New York: NYU Press, 2011); Sebastian Kim, Pauline Kollontai and Sue Yore, ed., Mediating Peace: Reconciliation Through Visual Art, Music and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016); and Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, ed., Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016).
47 Brett, ‘In the Aftermath’.
48 Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree; Sabina Čehajić-Clancy and Michal Bilewicz, ‘Moral-Exemplar Intervention: A New Paradigm for Conflict Resolution and Intergroup Reconciliation’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 30, no. 4 (2021): 335–42.
49 Anna Petrig, ‘The War Dead and their Gravesites’, International Review of the Red Cross 91, no. 874 (2009), 341–69; Sandra Rios, ‘Dignification of Victims Through Exhumations in Colombia’, Human Rights Review 22, no. 4 (2021): 483–99.
50 Daniela Jara, Children and the Afterlife of State Violence (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 25.
51 Simon Robins, ‘Constructing Meaning from Disappearance: Local Memorialisation of the Missing in Nepal’, International Journal of Conflict and Violence 8, no. 1, (2014): 104–18; Adam Rosenblatt, Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015); and Eva Willems, Open Secrets & Hidden Heroes: Violence, Citizenship and Transitional Justice in (Post-)Conflict Peru (PhD manuscript, Ghent University, 2019).
52 Anne-Lise Purkey, ‘Justice, Reconciliation, and Ending Displacement: Legal Empowerment and Refugee Engagement in Transitional Processes’, Refugee Survey Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2016): 1–25.
53 Roger Zetter, ‘Refugees and Their Return Home: Unsettling Matters’, Journal of Refugee Studies 34, no. 1 (2021): 7–22.
54 Görkem Aydemir, ‘Contingent Homes: Mobility and Long-Term Conflict in the Contested Periphery of Georgia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34, no. 1 (2021): 23–5.
55 Shirin Hirsch, ‘Chilean Exiles, Reconciliation and Return: An Alternative View from Below’, Journal of Refugee Studies 29, no. 1 (2016): 82–7; Katy Long, The Point of No Return. Refugees, Rights, and Repatriation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Juan Prieto, ‘Together after War While the War Goes On: Victims, Ex-Combatants and Communities in Three Colombian Cities’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012): 525–46.
56 David Mendeloff, ‘Truth-Seeking, Truth-Telling, and Postconflict Peacebuilding: Curb the Enthusiasm?’, International Studies Review 3, no. 6, (2004): 355–80.
57 Jacobus Ciliers, Oeindrila Dube, and Bilal Siddiqi, ‘Reconciling After Civil Conflict Increases Social Capital but Decreases Individual Well-Being’, Science 352, no. 6287 (2016): 787–94. See also Sabina Čehajić-Clancy, Amit Goldenberg, James J. Gross and Eran Halperin, ‘Social-Psychological Interventions for Intergroup Reconciliation: An Emotion Regulation Perspective’, Psychological Inquiry’ 27, no. 2 (2016): 73–8.
58 Sandra Rios et Natascha Mueller-Hirth, eds., Time and Temporality in Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies (London: Routledge, 2018).
59 Élise Féron, ‘Diaspora Politics: From “Long Distance Nationalism” to Autonomization’, in Migration and Organised Civil Society – Rethinking National Policy, eds. Dirk Halm and Zeynep Sezgin (London: Routledge, 2013), 63–8; and Élise Féron, ‘Transporting and Re-Inventing Conflicts: Conflict-Generated Diasporas and Conflict Autonomisation’, Cooperation and Conflict 52, no. 3 (2017): 360–76.
60 Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004); Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Pan Macmillan, 2006); and Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (London: Bodley Head, 2017).
61 Oliver Richmond and Gezim Visoka, ‘Peace-Making: New Technologies are No Panacea’, Nature 590, no. 7846, (2021): 389.
62 Mark Latonero, ‘Big Data Analytics and Human Rights’, in New technologies for human rights law and practice, eds. Molly Land and Jay Aronson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 154–55; Petra Molnar, ‘Technology on the Margins: AI and Global Migration Management from a Human Rights Perspective’, Cambridge International Law Journal 8, no. 2 (2019): 305–30; and Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, and William Isaac, ‘Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence’, Philosophy and Technology 33, no. 4 (2020); 659–84.
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66 Sapolsky, Behave.
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69 Carmen Goman and Douglas, L. Kelley, ‘Conceptualizing Forgiveness in the Face of Historical Trauma’ in Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict and Memory in Everyday Life, eds. Monica Casper and Eric Wertheimer (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 80.
70 Thomas Brudholm and Valérie Rosoux, ‘The Unforgiving. Reflections on the Resistance to Forgiveness After Atrocity’, in Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation: Agonism, Restitution and Repair, ed. Alexander Hirsch (New York, Routledge, 2013), 115–30.
71 Nevin Aiken, Identity, Reconciliation and Transitional Justice: Overcoming Intractability in Divided Societies (London: Routledge, 2013); Jesse Austin, ‘The “Ceasefire Babies”: Intergenerational Trauma and Mental Health in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland’, Public Health Review 2, no. 1 (2019): 1–5; and Nyla Rosler and Nimrod Branscombe, ‘Inclusivity of Past Collective Trauma and its Implications for Current Intractable Conflict: The Mediating Role of Moral Lessons’, British Journal of Social Psychology 59, no. 1 (2020): 171–88.
72 Emma M. Seppala, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Stephanie L. Brown, Monica C. Worline, C. Daryl Cameron, James R. Doty, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
73 S Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness (London: Penguin, 2011).
74 Kora Andrieu, ‘Civilizing Peacebuilding: Transitional Justice, Civil Society and the Liberal Paradigm’, Security Dialogue 41, no. 5 (2010); 537–58; Seils, The Place of Reconciliation; Brett, ‘In the Aftermath’.
75 Christine Bell, ‘Peace Agreements: their nature and legal status’, The American Journal of International Law 100, no. 2 (2006): 373–12; Wendy Lambourne, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding after Mass Violence’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (2009): 28–48; and Chandra Lekha Sriram, Jemima García-Godos, Johanna Herman, Olga Martin-Ortega, Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground: Victims and Ex-Combatants (London: Routledge, 2012).
76 Andrieu, ‘Civilizing Peacebuilding’, 539.
77 Madhur Joshi and Peter Wallensteen, Understanding Quality Peace: Peacebuilding after Civil War (London: Routledge, 2018).
78 Brandon Hamber and Grainne Kelly, A Working Definition of Reconciliation (Belfast: Democratic Dialogue, 2004).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Roddy Brett
Roddy Brett is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the causes, consequences and legacies of political violence and how societies and states move on from mass violence and he has two decades of experience as a senior policymaker in these themes. He currently leads the ESRC-funded project Getting on with it: Understanding the Micro-Dynamics of Post-Accord Intergroup Social Relations.
Richard English
Richard English is Professor of Politics, and Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, at Queen's University Belfast. His books include Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (2003), Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (2006), Terrorism: How to Respond (2009) and Does Terrorism Work? A History (2016).
Élise Féron
Élise Féron is Docent and senior research fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute (Tampere University, Finland). Her main research interests include feminist peace research, conflict-generated diaspora politics, as well as the multiple entanglements between conflict, violence and peace. She has notably explored these issues in Eastern Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and the South Caucasus.
Valerie Rosoux
Valerie Rosoux is a Research Director at the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). She teaches International Negotiation, Politics of Memory, and Transitional Justice at the University of Louvain (Belgium). She has a Licence in Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Political Sciences. She is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy. Since 2021, she is a Max Planck Law Fellow.