Rhetorics of reconciliation: Shifting conflict paradigms in Northern Ireland

The concept of reconciliation has endured a chequered development in the last twenty years. Not surprisingly, given its prominence in conflict transformation processes in South Africa in the 1990s, the primary usage of the concept of reconciliation was as a normative good (Hamber and van der Merwe 1998; Lederach 1997). Buoyed by the ostensible success of the South African example, pressure groups, NGOs and peace activists in a variety of political settings commandeered the idea of reconciliation to bolster their arguments (Bar-Siman-Tov 2004). However, as events unfolded in South Africa, and as the difficulties in establishing shared understandings of reconciliation emerged in combination with the problematic translation of theoretical aspirations into meaningful political institutions, a more critical perspective on reconciliation has become a central part of social and political debates on conflict transformation in recent years. These critical accounts are often still receptive to the idea that reconciliation may be a worthwhile vision to aspire to but are less forthright in the pursuit of a normative vision of reconciliation per se.