For decades, political thinkers and official representatives have been reluctant to consider reconciliation as a relevant concept in their field.
Because of the religious connotation of the term, they have generally regarded reconciliation as a spiritual process limited to interpersonal relationships. Since the end of the Cold War, more and more specialists in history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, criminology, international relations and political science pay attention to what is designated as “probably the most important condition” for maintaining a stable peace (Bar-Siman-Tov, 2000: 237).
However, reconciliation appears as an “undertheorized phenomenon” (Long and Brecke, 2003: 147), a “controversial and rather obscure” notion (Forsberg, 2003: 73) or even a “rather crude analytical tool” (Hermann, 2004: 40-41). Therefore, it seems crucial to question the scope and limits of reconciliation as a peacebuilding process.The purpose of this chapter is neither to overcome all the shortcomings of this concept, nor to define it once and for all. It is rather to present a survey of the field of studies and issues related to reconciliation after wars and mass atrocities. Numerous scholars try to analyze how former adversaries can put the past into a manageable perspective so that it no longer blocks the development of a cooperative relationship. In this regard, two major examples are often considered: the Franco-German case and the South African case. The first one concerns a process of rapprochement after several international conflicts while the second depicts the situation of a divided society. Despite the uniqueness of each situation and the basic distinctions between international and internal processes of reconciliation, these two examples make it possible to highlight some common mechanisms.
The analysis is divided into three parts. The first one examines the various conceptions of reconciliation as a political process. The second attempts to delineate to what extent it can be appropriate to refer to the notion of reconciliation as a strategy of conflict transformation. To do so, it will emphasize the fact that at the end of an international or intercommunity conflict, the real question is not whether or not the adversarial relationship should be transformed - but rather how and when such an exercise should take place. The third and final part stresses the main limits of the concept of reconciliation when applied to the societal - and not personal - level.