Dilemmas of Reconciliation: Cases and Concepts (review)

We live in an era characterized by national and international attempts to address racism, sexism, and other human rights abuses. In such a context, it is natural to ask how we can/should rectify the injustices suffered in the course of such abuse. This is the difficult question addressed in this timely collection of essays and case studies. In trying to answer it, a variety of authors mix theoretical considerations with the discussion of concrete examples - among them, reconciliation in South Africa and the new Russia, peace building in Haiti, and Canada's attempt to address the grievances of Aboriginal Canadians.

Many of the essays are provocative and intriguing. Some of them demonstrate a profound willingness to address difficult and unwelcome issues. Carol Prager wrestleswith our instinctual judgment of those who commit atrocities like the Holocaust (whom we tend to see as 'moral monsters'), arguing that this reaction militates against understanding, and acts as an impediment to healing and reconciliation. In a sceptical essay on foreign intervention, Tom Keating argues that Western governments who intervene in the affairs of other nations impose Western models of social, political, and economic organization on developing societies; that their actions are burdened by difficult practical, political, fiscal, and epistemological constraints; and that they often exacerbate rather than alleviate the volatile situations they address.

Though the essays are of high quality, they form an uneasy whole. Larry May's discussion of mass rape and international crime is an incisive attempt to conceptualize international crime, but one wonders why it is included in a discussion of the details of reconciliation. Marc Forget's informative account of 'restorative justice' is closer to the mark, but it discusses the reconciliation of individual criminal offenders and their victims (and communities), a subject which raises very different issues from the reconciliation of different ethnic groups and peoples.

The problems which arise when one slides from individual to group reconciliation are evident in Trudy Govier's discussion of 'acknowledgment' and Aboriginal issues in Canada. In the course of her discussion, she repeatedly suggests that Canadians should acknowledge their collective and individual responsibility for past wrongs to Aboriginal peoples. It is difficult to argue with her suggestion that Canadians have a duty to address the issues of aboriginal groups, but one wonders if this is best accomplished by questionable claims of accountability - claims which assign responsibility for acts of abuse to individuals who are, at best, distantly related to those individuals who committed the acts in question.

Many other pressing questions of reconciliation are enumerated by David Crocker in his normative framework for 'reckoning with past wrongs.' Instead of emancipating us, might attempts at reconciliation mire us in the actions of the past? How can we be sure that such attempts will not precipitate cycles of vengeance and interminable disagreement? When past abuses are serious (and sometimes heinous), is it humanly possible to reconcile victims and perpetrators? How do we ensure that reconciliation does not function as a means of forgiving individuals who should not be forgiven? How can one know, outside the rigours of a court system, that those accused of wrongs are treated fairly (especially in cases in which victims have interests that are served by exaggerated accusations)?

In her account of reconciliation 'for realists,' Susan Dwyer attempts to deal with some of these issues by developing a weaker notion of reconciliation that is possible when forgiveness is not an option. In his conclusion to the book, Justice Richard J. Goldstone musters a rousing optimism which is fuelled by the strides that he has witnessed in the work of international courts. Though there is much in what he says, many of his remarks address issues of justice rather than reconciliation, and readers of the present volume may be more impressed by its eloquent account of the psychological, political, and practical impediments to successful reconciliation.