Unchopping a Tree

3 Political Society

❖ E stablishing a new political order after mass violence is a delicate and fraught process. The members of political society, the political elite, must balance a number of competing goals. They may, for example, choose to prosecute those responsible for crimes, therefore risking the dissolution of a fragile peace and the resumption of violence. Others may persecute their adversaries using the full power of the state, and thus weaken the rule of law. Leaders are also confronted with the difficult decision of how to allocate resources, that is, the choice between the particular demands for victim reparations and the general needs for economic development. In addition, elites must work within the set of constraints that were inherited from the transition . In some cases, there may be few limitations on their ability to pass preferred policies, as may happen in the aftermath of a war where one side decisively defeats the other; in other scenarios, they may be severely handicapped by concessions that were given to previous elites who still retain some power. While the particularities of the transition are important for gauging the range of possible policies open to leaders, there are nevertheless several ways elites can promote reconciliation. First, they can endorse peaceful political contestation over violence as the main means for dealing with conflict. This entails rethinking the domain of politics in Political Society 3 Political Society ▪ 67 such a way that replaces violence and threats with a commitment to respect pluralism and debate within the bounds of law. Combined with respect for the rule of law, such a change in elite political behavior signals the population about the nature of post-atrocity politics. Additionally, elites can influence interpretations of the past. They may spearhead efforts to recognize injustice and shape society’s understanding of its history by focusing on the origins of the conflict and encouraging public debate about violence and responsibility. However, elites should resist ignoring prior violations or promoting social amnesia by encouraging citizens to turn away from the past, and should avoid equating reconciliation with agreement among themselves to avoid the difficult issues of guilt and justice. Because of their special place in the public realm, they have a responsibility to promote thoughtful and honest debate about the past. Elites can further reconciliation by promoting museums, monuments , and other public art—what Pierre Nora (1996) calls memory sites—that make the violent past part of a shared historical narrative. Such sites redefine how society relates to the past, and can engender the kind of passionate (and painful) debate necessary to undermine collective amnesia or triumphalist histories that implicitly legitimate violations. An additional important and increasingly popular step elites may take is to offer a formal apology in the name of the state, or in the name of groups or institutions they represent (e.g., armed forces, former guerrilla movements), thus furthering the process of recognizing the suffering of victims and achieving victim acknowledgment . Apologies give symbolic recognition of the suffering of individuals , and in the process reaffirm their moral worth and dignity in a strong, public manner. Because of their increasing popularity, in this chapter I focus on the normative status of public apologies. Public apologies have become particularly popular in elite discourse over the past twenty years, and a detailed theoretical discussion of their strengths and weaknesses can illuminate a great deal about these attempts at promoting reconciliation and its complex relation toward establishing successor legitimacy and achieving political aims. While this chapter discusses several actions political society can take, the subsequent chapter is devoted to a consideration of certain key state institutions—truth commissions and the judiciary—that also directly engage issues of reconciliation. 68 ▪ Chapter 3 Before turning to an analysis of elite actions and apologies more specifically, I provide a discussion of what I mean by political society and the general transitional constraints affecting elite action. Political Society, Transitional Constraints, and Reconciliation The literature on political society is large, and includes much disagreement on the precise boundaries between formal political life and informal political mobilization. Nevertheless, most political scientists differ more on their understandings of the relation between civil and political society than on the definition of political society per se. This makes it somewhat easier to arrive at a working definition than one found in civil society debates, where the very definition of civil society is open to some contestation. Scholars normally define political society to include...