Can America Become Reconciled and Rise Again Can America Become Reconciled and Rise Again Essay

By
Charles (Bit) Hauss

May 10, 2021

Note: Chip Hauss wrote this with Antti Pentikäinen¹ but Chip did the last draft, and Antti hasn't had a gamble to read through information technology nevertheless.  And then for at present, we are listing Fleck every bit sole author.  Nonetheless, the text still refers, often, to "we" which means Antti and Bit.

Introduction

Hauss wrote the original essay on reconciliation for the Beyond Intractability knowledge base in 2003. In the seventeen years since then, the editors periodically added new material to update it. Nonetheless, by the end of 2020, the original essay had become too convoluted and as well dated considering nosotros take learned a lot virtually why reconciliation matters and why information technology is and so hard to attain. And then we decided to rewrite the whole commodity.

In the meantime, Hauss had begun working with Antti Pentikainen of the Mary Hoch Heart for Reconciliation at George Mason's Carter School of Peace and Conflict Studies. And, since Pentikäinen is responsible for some of the recent breakthroughs in our understanding of reconciliation, nosotros decided to write the new version together.

At first, we thought information technology would be easy to write. As you'll see hither, the basic principles underlying reconciliation accept non changed.  However, once we sabbatum down at our respective keyboards, nosotros realized that we had taken on a daunting job, especially if we wanted to stay within the two to four thousand word limit Hauss had in 2003.

The difficulty is not because our agreement of what reconciliation is has changed. As you volition as well see here, the core goals and principles in the 2003 essay establish their way into this one.

What's new is our experience using reconciliation. At the turn of the century, we were just commencement to see how and why it matters. Today, it is at the centre of any peacebuilding project that seeks what academics refer to as large scale social modify or even a image shift.

As a issue, one fairly short entry turned into two much longer ones.

• Role I volition explore what reconciliation is and why it is so of import, given the issues we will be facing for the rest of the 2020s and beyond.
• Part Two will focus on what we learned about turning those ofttimes abstract ideas into reality.

Together, they introduce i of the most important concepts in peace and conflict studies today.

We were in the middle of writing the penultimate draft of this article when what tin can only exist chosen a coup  attempt took place in Washington DC. One time the shock wore off, it became clear to the states that  reconciliation was not and could not be on our immediate calendar—or at any other similar historical moment anywhere. The United States will have to heal its wounds. Reconciliation will take become part of the equation, and we hope information technology does so sooner rather than after. However, as you will see in this two-part essay, some things have to happen every bit part of any reconciliation process:

• People take to be held accountable for their deportment.
• The truth well-nigh what happened has to be explored and the overwhelming majority of the population on all sides of the dispute has to take that "narrative."
• Individuals and organizations who committed abuses have to acknowledge and apologize for their actions.
• Meaning cultural and public policy changes take to be made that address the issues at pale.
• Only and then can a customs or country even think of forgiveness and reconciliation

Equally you read, continue one caveat in mind. Reconciliation is not the reply for intractable conflicts. At almost, it has to be a role of whatsoever answer.

To see that, consider the box on this page. We wrote this essay in the weeks after the 2022 presidential election in the The states when there was a lot of talk about healing our country's divisions. Although not every politician or pundit used the term reconciliation, the ideas you are about to read most got more public attention than they have at any betoken in American history—even after the Civil State of war.

Much of that word glossed over only how difficult reconciliation is to achieve. When done well, it is anything but performative. Information technology takes hard work, self-sensation, and personal integrity the likes of which ane rarely sees in social and political life anywhere or any fourth dimension. It calls on everyone to seek the truth, hold themselves accountable, and commit themselves to seeking solutions for enduring problems that will non be plant overnight.

A Brief Overview

Reconciliation is a complicated idea with several overlapping meanings as the discussion cloud  on the next folio suggests. As is often the case, online dictionaries don't clarify matters much when it comes to the fashion a concept is used in a given field. In this case, though, the Cambridge Online Content Dictionary does go a long mode toward getting u.s. started for the purposes of this commodity:

The process of making two people or groups of people friendly again after they have argued seriously or fought and kept apart from each other.

Reconciliation is also an old term. Its beginning employ in English dates from the fourteenth century; its Latin origins tin can be traced back some other 1000 years or more.

As you will besides come across fourth dimension and again in these 2 essays, the term oft has religious connotations. Something like reconciliation can be found in all of the world'due south major faith traditions. Still, the fact that the English-linguistic communication give-and-take has deep roots in evangelical Christian thought has contributed to some of the confusion and criticism that surroundings reconciliation today.

The underlying thought behind reconciliation is actually quite simple, which you tin can meet if we take a brief detour from peace and disharmonize studies and consider some basic bookkeeping principles. People of our generation should take engaged in a form of reconciliation each month when our banks sent the states a monthly argument nearly activity in our checking accounts. If we were adept financial citizens, we made certain that our records matched the bank's. Once we did and then, we were said to have reconciled our account, because the balance in our checkbook now agreed with the one on our bank statement.

Reconciliation in peacebuilding is never equally simple as determining that two versions of i'south banking concern balance are identical. All the same, they are akin in the sense that reconciliation in peacebuilding leads to the cosmos of interpersonal rather than arithmetics harmony, something that theologians and psychologists often refer to as the creation of "right relationships" between two individuals, a customs, or an entire society.

At that place is besides growing agreement among practitioners that reconciliation is a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for reaching a lasting peace because it leads the parties to a dispute to dig deeply into the roots of conflicts that are often decades or even centuries old. It is necessary considering it leads the conflicting parties to overcome the kinds of differences that the dictionary's authors had in mind when they used terms like "argued over," "kept apart," and "fought over."  Nevertheless, as yous volition see toward the end of Part I and more than fully in Part II, when seen simply as talking over our differences, reconciliation alone is never enough. "Sufficient" change toward a lasting peace requires substantive modify every bit well, something most observers today think has to be included in reconciliation processes themselves.

Still, the absenteeism of reconciliation can doom any peace agreement. 2 quick examples should illustrate that indicate.

Years of endeavour went into reaching agreements like the Oslo Accords that led to Israel'southward recognition of the PLO and vice versa and seemingly opened the door to stable peace between them. Those hopes, of grade, accept largely been dashed in the quarter century since the agreements were signed on the White Business firm lawn. There are many reasons why that's the instance, including the fact that the Israeli and Palestinian populations remain fearful of and angry toward each other. In the lexicon definition'south terms again, they have not come close to being friendly. If anything, nearly of their actions toward each other at the governmental and grassroots levels alike have driven them farther autonomously.

The aforementioned holds for significant, merely still fractional, reforms such as the U.Due south. civil rights acts of the 1960s. No one can deny the progress that was made equally a result of their passage. However, as the events following the murder of George Floyd have shown us, even major reforms tin only take us so far. Put simply, it is hard to imagine achieving anything that resembles stable peace without reconciliation—whether that is between Israelis and Palestinians, Whites and Blacks in the United States, or a couple trying to rebuild a relationship later a separation.

Creating Harmony

Return for a second to the overly simplistic account of reconciling one's bank account. Both financial and political reconciliation accept a like goal—creating balance or harmony, whether in one's fiscal dealings or 1'south social relationships.

From that perspective, reconciliation involves more just conflict resolution, if past that you mean more than than reaching a win/win issue or any such deal. To be reconciled, 2 parties accept to attain something akin to closure and common satisfaction on any it was that divided them. And that rarely can happen with a single deal because the kinds of conflict we are interested in—similar racism in the United States—are complicated problems that have been years (or longer) in the making and are embedded securely into everything from people's value systems to their country's public policies.

Thus, think of reconciliation as an stop product that is only reached afterward the members of a family or customs or country have adult harmonious relationships—itself not exactly a precisely divers term! They almost certainly will not accept solved all of their divisive problems, only they would have fabricated significant progress toward solving them, some of which would be all but irreversible.

In such a society, people will still disagree considering there will always exist conflict. All the same, they accept "conciliated" enough that those differences cannot take us to the brink of "state of war" at everything from the interpersonal to the international levels.

Reconciliation evokes a world that is anchored in something similar the Golden Dominion, a version of which exists in all of the world's neat spiritual and religious traditions. If I treat yous with nobility and respect, you will practice the aforementioned to me. And that can happen only if we work through the issues that have divided us in both substantive and emotional terms.

Reconciliation is needed the about in the most divided societies whose intractable conflicts are difficult to solve because the antagonisms that gave rise to them are securely rooted and generations one-time. These are the societies and communities who have experienced genocide and other traumas and where dehumanization and other social maladies accept been taken to an extreme.

In curt, reconciliation leaves us with a paradox. The societies that need it the most are also those that need to change the most. Therefore, equally you lot continue reading, call back that reconciliation cannot exist achieved quickly or easily. Ironically, patience is needed in addressing problems in societies and communities in which patience is most likely to be in short supply.

And to complicate matters further, our methodologist friends would tell us that reconciliation is not a binary. You lot cannot say that 1-time adversaries are e'er fully reconciled. Instead, think in terms of the degree to which the parties to a dispute are reconciled which could be measured by points on a continuum with a harmonious society that can settle its differences without resort to violence of any kind at its more hopeful end.

Reconciliation in  the 2020s

Peacebuilders were just start to run into the importance of reconciliation when Hauss wrote the first version of this essay in 2003. Since then, it have moved onto centre phase in both our bookish and practical work for at two main reasons:

• If annihilation, the conflicts nosotros face are fifty-fifty more intractable than those of a generation agone. Many have grown out of what social scientists phone call "wicked problems" whose causes and consequences are and then inextricably intertwined that they cannot exist solved apace, hands, or separately—if they tin can exist solved at all.
• Peace and disharmonize professionals accept learned that they take to pay attention to disputes in their own countries and communities. Even mediators who worked in countries like the United States or in Western Europe were expected to deed as impartials who were oft referred to as "third party neutrals." We can no longer hope to maintain that kind of distance from the conflicts we face up because  nosotros all have a good bit of "pare in the game" on the bug that threaten to tear our countries apart.

Reconciliation alone will not bring these disputes to an end. Nevertheless, as you lot will see specially in Part 2, it is difficult to imagine making much progress on them unless we include reconciliation in the mix.

To see why, just consider one of those enduring problems that never seems to go abroad— race relations in the U.s.. As events keep reminding us, racism remains what Gunnar and Alva Myrdal called the "American Dilemma" 80 years ago. The axis of race in American life is, of course, far older, stretching back at least to the initial "discovery," settling, and conquest of the Americas.

We have fabricated progress since the Myrdals wrote their seminal book. Nevertheless, at that place is even so plenty of progress to be fabricated, as the recent discussion of and pushback against claims about systemic racism volition attest.

If we want to make the kind of progress that could somewhen end the pernicious impact of systemic racism, we volition have to adopt public policies that accost the economic, social, ecology, and other consequences of systemic racism, many of which were on center stage in 2020. Nonetheless, the public policies we adopt can simply get so far, unless and until the American people adopt cultural norms that comprehend a deracialized Us. And nosotros know that is difficult to practise given the evidence we all saw on our television screens in the months surrounding the 2022 election that showed how progress toward racial progress can make it the way of deeper reconciliation because even incremental public policies produce resentment on half-dozen all sides. Members of the social groups that seem to be losing out often lash out confronting (in this case) people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ customs. Meanwhile, many of the supposed beneficiaries of those policy reforms have grown frustrated by the slow pace of change in dealing with systemic racism and other long-standing inequities.

That is where reconciliation comes into play. When done right, it helps us overcome the emotional and other wounds that are an inevitable byproduct of systemic racism or any other deep social division. In the end, it is what makes progress toward dramatic and non-incremental public policy changes and their public credence possible.

But, as we besides saw amid the agonies of 2020, it is never like shooting fish in a barrel to reach reconciliation, because it requires touching the hearts and minds of millions of people. It's not simply the overtly racist practices and the attitudes that underlie them that have to modify. Nosotros all accept to question our core values and actions, including many of us who call up that we are on "the right side of history."

Even more than importantly, reconciliation tin only happen when people on all sides decide to talk with each other so that they can overcome the problems that divide them. No one has put this better than the about famous supporter of reconciliation in the world today, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was co-Chair of the Due south African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, whose remarkable accomplishments volition be covered in the second of these essays.

Forgiving and beingness reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones is not almost pretending that things are other than they are. It is not almost patting one another on the back and turning a blind middle to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, considering in the finish only an honest confrontation with reality tin bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation tin can bring only superficial healing.

While we will deal with the qualms some observers have about reconciliation in some detail in the second one-half of this essay, it is of import to at least mention one here. Both in 1990s South Africa and in the post-Trump Us, critics have argued reconciliation'southward accent on forgiveness and restorative justice amounts to the equivalent of a "get out of jail gratis" menu in some board game.

Nothing common cold be further from the truth. The South African TRC and other such initiatives were called truth and reconciliation commissions for a reason. Rather than sweeping our problems under the clichéd rug and "letting bygones be bygones," true reconciling requires squarely facing those very problems so working things out. Reconciliation ways fully coming to grips with a traumatic past and its affect on all of our lives today. Both sides have to heal in ways that go far beyond putting a metaphorical rough-and-tumble over a wound. In the language used by many of today's activists, reconciliation has to take u.s. across virtue signaling so that people on all sides brand non-incremental progress toward solving deep historical divisions.

That is only possible if progress is made in solving the noun problems. What that entails obviously depends on the circumstances on the ground, but it e'er includes a mix of public policies that directly address the situation on the basis and social-psychological programs that assistance people overcome trauma and the emotional costs of being in a conflict.

Perhaps virtually importantly of all, reconciliation requires the participation of something approaching the entire population of the community or state involved. That includes people on both sides of the dispute, albeit with one of import qualification. Those who take driveling homo rights or committed crimes against humanity have to be held accountable and publicly and sincerely acknowledge their actions before at that place is whatever hope of agreeing on what nosotros volition call a shared narrative, let alone taking active steps toward healing long-continuing wounds.

Lederach'due south Contribution

Reconciliation entered contemporary peacebuilding primarily through the work of a single and remarkable scholar practitioner. John Paul Lederach has spent his career working for reconciliation in much of the Global South and helped train other practitioners first at Eastern Mennonite Academy and later at the University of Notre Dame. With the publication of Building Peace by the United States Institute of Peace in 1998, he drew our attending to four components of reconciliation which are still at the center of our work today.²

Peace. It is difficult to imagine making much progress toward reconciliation while a conflict is withal raging. That said, Israelis and Palestinian peacebuilders have been meeting and building ties across communal lines for half a century. All the same, most peacebuilders are convinced that reconciliation work tin only brainstorm in earnest once the fighting has stopped. On 1 level, we disagree. Efforts toward reconciliation can take identify at whatsoever fourth dimension. What's more, as the cliché has it, peace is more than the absenteeism of war, and reconciliation is central to any process that takes a customs across the tensions that accompany many agreements. Still, the bones point is well taken. Even an armed stand off helps make deeper and more long-lasting progress possible.

Truth. Those of us who just lived through the 2022 U.S. presidential election and its backwash know that it is possible for people who live in the same identify to have all but totally different understandings of what the world is like. As long as that is the case, it is hard to imagine overcoming the divisions we face up in the Us today. That'southward ane of the reasons why so many countries and, now, communities, take experimented with truth and reconciliation commissions. Put but, until there is widespread agreement about what happened and who is responsible for past actions, it is also difficult to imagine a community truly overcoming divisions.

Mercy. The ii final criteria take us its to the heart of reconciliation and, in as we will discuss in Part 2, to the controversies that surround information technology.

Lederach'south utilise of the term "mercy" should let yous know (if you hadn't figured information technology out already) that the ideas behind reconciliation have religious roots. It is a critical theological notion in all the Abrahamic faiths and is especially important to Evangelical Christians and defines part of their personal human relationship with God. For those who ask, "what would Jesus practice," reconciliation is often not just an important issue, but the nigh important one in whatsoever disharmonize.  In contempo years, reconciliation has also become an important matter for people who approach conflict resolution from a secular perspective. For them, the need for reconciliation grows out of the pragmatic, political realities of any conflict resolution procedure (see the next section).

Whatever your inspiration, mercy calls on people to shy abroad from all deportment that smack of vengeance, a point nosotros will return to after on when nosotros explore the ways peacebuilders have tried to implement these often abstract ideas. For now, information technology is enough to run into that it is hard to reconcile when and if victors celebrate or losers plot revenge.

Justice. It is also hard to imagine how we can hope to heal the kinds of deep divisions we have been alluding to in the absenteeism of steps to create a more just order in two overlapping ways, neither of which is like shooting fish in a barrel to achieve.

First, reconciliation has to be anchored in what is known every bit restorative justice that seeks to create or recreate social harmony rather than in more traditional notions in which the emphasis is placed on punishing wrongdoers. Don't become usa wrong. Restorative justice does hold them answerable; information technology just does so in ways other than penalty. And, perpetrators who exercise not accept the new narrative and issue sincere apologies for what they have washed are still subject field to traditional forms of castigating justice.

Still, fifty-fifty though the Due south African TRC had not however issued its report when Lederach wrote, its willingness to grant amnesty to people on both sides who apologized for the political crimes they committed during the apartheid years were part and parcel of what Lederach had in mind by including justice. Others get even farther and point to the demand for at least some of the perpetrators to commit themselves to taking function in redressing the wrongs that they had a part in committing. That may strike some readers as implausible. Nonetheless, information technology is something that many leaders of the one-time white-controlled regime in South Africa take done.

2nd, we tin can't promise to brand much progress toward reconciliation without addressing the bug that gave ascent to the dispute in the showtime place. Longstanding or intractable conflicts accept deep historical roots and invariably involve the long-term inequalities that led to what Johan Galtung chosen "structural violence" and is now encapsulated in such terms as "systemic racism." To use the terminology of the 2020s rather than the 1990s, information technology requires being on the "right side of history" in ways that allow the previously powerless to obtain "justice," by having their grievances met, especially when they involve identity- and other emotionally-laden bug. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, the interests of those who used to be "on top" can't be ignored either. If stable or lasting peace is e'er to take hold, all parties accept to (at least eventually) be satisfied with the event.

As a result, reconciliation cannot be value neutral and privilege the positions of each and every party to a dispute. To the caste that a society has to deal with injustices perpetrated by one side over an another (e.g., racism in the United States, anti-Catholic sentiment in Northern Ireland, hostility toward immigrants in Western Europe, the legacy of apartheid in South Africa), reconciliation requires ending those injustices while leading the individuals and social groups that used to concord ability to have the new, more equal reality.

Information technology Takes a Lot of Fourth dimension

Lederach is already responsible for ane of the few memorable one liners in the reconciliation canon. It is too one of the most discouraging.

As the story goes, he was leading a workshop on reconciliation in Northern Republic of ireland in the early 1990s. One of the participants asked him how long it would accept earlier the province'southward Protestant and Catholic populations could reconcile once a peace understanding was reached. Lederach asked when the conflict began. When the workshop participant replied with the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Lederach told him that they should program on another 3 centuries, suggesting that it takes simply equally long to get out of a disharmonize as it has been going on.

Even when Lederach uttered these lines, we had learned enough almost reconciliation to speed things upward enough to make reconciliation a product of a few generations, rather than a few centuries, of work. That said, Lederach'southward comment was on target then and is however on target now. Reconciliation takes hard piece of work. And it takes a lot of time.

Xx-First Century Insights

As important as Lederach'due south ideas were and still are, our understanding has connected to grow to the betoken that it is now an integral office of the world's most promising peacebuilding projects that are themselves far more holistic and ambitious. In the rest of this get-go essay, nosotros volition focus on three fundamental new conceptual insights and defer discussing how practitioners accept tried to implement them on the footing until the Function II.

A Single Anecdote

To encounter where nosotros are heading in the residue of this essay and in the 2d 1, consider a single example.

In 2019, Alpaslan Özerdem, the new Dean of the Carter Schoolhouse of Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Bricklayer University gave testimony about reconciliation at the opening session of that term's meetings of the United Nations Security Council.

https://youtu.be/A_I9z2aseLk

As he often does, Özerdem used the example of the famous footbridge linking the two sides of the Danube in the Bosnian city of Mostar as an example of a missed opportunity for reconciliation. The centuries-old span connected generally Muslim and Christian neighborhoods that had been destroyed in the fighting that racked Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Once the fighting finally concluded, the international community just rebuilt the bridge on the supposition that information technology was just a physical structure connecting two parts of town. In so doing, they did not give the residents of Mostar the opportunity to begin rebuilding their social and emotional customs, while they rebuilt their physical bridge.

He contrasted Mostar's experience with that of Coventry in the Britain, where he had lived and taught earlier he joined us at George Mason. Subsequently the end of Globe War Ii, the citizens of that heavily-bombed metropolis decided to rebuild it in a manner that included reconciliation-- both in the way they physically rebuilt their desperately-damaged cathedral, and in the ways that they reached out to the residents of other bombed out cities, including Dresden, Belgrade, and Warsaw, which all found themselves on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

How, he wondered, could the United nations foster projects that produced results that had the effects symbolized more by Coventry's rebuilt cathedral and its reconciling mission, than the mere functionality of Mostar rebuilt Stari well-nigh (which literally means old bridge)?

The very fact that he was invited to speak before the Security Council is itself a attestation to how far the field has come. Every bit far every bit nosotros know, it marks the first time the Security Quango has given serious attention to reconciliation and the broader peacebuilding bug that eddy effectually it. Similar national governments in the Global North, the Un has not made much progress in integrating reconciliation into the peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations under its jurisdiction. While we would love to have seen them go farther along that path by now, the fact is that nosotros welcome these get-go steps and will exist actively encouraging all global determination makers to go further in the years to come.

Insider Reconciliers and Local Peacebuilding

We are fortunate to be part of 1 those efforts at the Mary Hoch Heart for Reconciliation at the Carter Schoolhouse for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Bricklayer University.  The middle was founded in 2022 by Pentikainen, who had spent the previous twenty years working in conflict zones around the world. He had seen what happens when reconciliation efforts at the local level fall brusk or are missing altogether.  And so he decided to class a center to determine and promote "best practices" in reconciliation.  The 2 of usa met as the center was being created, and Hauss realized that he wanted to be part of it, particularly in one case it became clear that it would become involved in reconciliation initiatives in the The states.

The Mary Hoch Center's squad follows ane of the many bottom-upwardly paths that Özerdem (who arrived at GMU at the aforementioned fourth dimension that nosotros did) referred to in his U.N. talk—promoting the efforts of people Pentikainen refers to as "insider reconcilers." Insider reconcilers are rarely members of national elites who typically staff truth and reconciliation commissions. Rather, they are individuals who are in the midst of the conflict themselves and take fabricated a conscious decision to heal the wounds the conflict has produced, even while they are engaged on i side or the other of the dispute itself. Insider reconcilers come up in many forms, but they share ane thing in common. They accept decided to build better relationships with everyone in their guild, including those who have been their adversaries.

Even though we may be the merely ones to apply the term "insider reconciler," the Mary Hoch Middle is by no means unique in this respect. Build Up, which organizes the annual Build Peace conference that combines peacebuilding, technology, and the arts, anchors all of its programs on the demand to exist both non-neutral (i.e., have stands on the "right side of history") and not-polarizing. Peace Directly supports and trains local peacebuilders around the globe, many of whom explicitly anchor their work in reconciliation. Earlier this year, Republic of chad Ford of Brigham Young University-Hawaii' published Dangerous Honey which focuses on the power individuals and organizations gain when they "plough toward" the people they disagree with and thereby accept the kickoff step in settling a dispute. Ford himself is an accomplished mediator who has a decade-long appointment with Peace Players International which uses basketball game as a tool to bring young people in divided societies together through projects in the Center East, the Balkans, Due south Africa, and, now, American cities. Ford likewise serves as a consultant for the Arbinger Institute which helps individuals see how they place themselves in psychological "boxes" that keep them from being able to have creative initiatives in their lives, including in (but non limited to) periods of disharmonize.

Toward Positive Peace

The interest in reconciliation reflects a broader shift in the entire field. While we still clarify the bug we face, we are less guilty of engaging in what Notre Dame'southward George Lopez called "Gloom and Doom 101" in describing our work a generation ago. Instead, we have focused more on reconciliation and other concepts that point toward constructive solution to the bug that gave rise to the conflict in the start place.

Disquisitional here has been the work on positive peace which the Institute for Economics and Peace has been promoting for the terminal decade. As this diagram suggests, its scholars usually refer to reconciliation in passing, which means we can just do the same here.

Nonetheless, it is implicit in what they mean by peace. And, more importantly for our purposes, they understand that reconciliation and peace in general cannot be sustained unless a country or community makes progress on each of the viii elements depicted in this diagram.

A Systems Perspective and Correct Relationships

Lederach, the Plant for Economic science and Peace, and almost of the people nosotros work with at the Alliance for Peacebuilding and George Stonemason University take also come up to anchor their work in systems theory, which we can also simply touch on here. Basically, systems theory is based on the assumption that everything and everyone is somehow interconnected and, therefore, that what I do affects anybody else and vice versa.

To illustrate what that ways in action, we intentionally made the next diagram too small to read, even on a big screen, because there is no need to read whatever of the entries to see the basic bespeak. Considering a organization consists of a number of interconnected feedback loops, what goes around literally comes around.

This is important for reconciliation considering it gives empirical support for the Gilt Rule. If I don't "do unto you as y'all would exercise unto me," it tend to breed resentment, a desire for revenge, and more. That often puts supporters of reconciliation in a hard-to-resolve dilemma, every bit was certainly the case when we had to deal with the insurrection in Washington that was taking place while we were finishing this essay.

To be sure, President Trump and the other perpetrators had to be held accountable for their actions. On the other hand, considering nosotros now know that our deportment toward them volition have future repercussions, we also knew that nosotros would be best off if nosotros could seek restorative justice solutions that could also open the door to discussions that could assistance Americans overcome their divisions—however yous choose to define "overcome."

On to Action

That is as well a plumbing fixtures way to finish Office I of this essay because we have gone almost as far equally we can get past considering reconciliation primarily as an abstruse concept. The time has come up to explore how peacebuilders have tried to implement it on the ground in the years since Lederach outset brought reconciliation to our attention. We will talk about that in Reconciliation - Part ii: Making Reconciliation Happen.

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ane. Charles Hauss is Senior Fellow for Innovaton and Board Member Emeritus at thursday Alliance for Peacebuilding. Antti Pentikäinen is founder of the Mary Hoch Centre for Reconciliation at the Carter School for Peace and Disharmonize Resolution at George Mason University. Chip tin can be reached at chip@charleshaussinfo.

ii. John Paul Lederach. Edifice Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1998.

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Source: https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/reconciliation

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