Multi-level Conflict Transformation ― Can We Reconcile Divided Societies?

This book examines approaches to reconciliation and peacebuilding in postcolonial, postconflict, and divided societies.

Reconciliation is a concept and practice applied in many different contexts, from the immediate aftermath of post-apartheid South Africa, to the settler colonies of Australia and Canada. In different settings, with widely varying histories, populations, and intentions, divided societies have experimented with a range of mechanisms and processes intended to help them ‘reconcile.’ Yet despite the pursuit of this now often taken-for-granted goal, many questions remain about what it is these societies are attempting to achieve and how they might do so.

Many books tend to take a narrow view of these questions, as the focus is usually limited to one or other aspect of the various approaches to reconciliation. Multi-level Conflict Transformation, however, takes a different, wider approach. The book begins from the assumption that building peace and transforming conflict is about more than ending violence and creating stable political institutions, and must also involve addressing deeper social, political, historical and identity-based conflicts. Further, reconciliation is here understood as a far more difficult and long-term endeavour than is usually discussed. The cases considered in this book suggest that reconciliation is most likely an open-ended process rather than a goal—a process that requires divided societies to pay ongoing attention to reconciliatory efforts at all levels. Local efforts in these contexts must continue even after the eyes of the world have moved on from countries where the work of reconciliation is thought to be finished.

This book will be of great interest to students of reconciliation, conflict transformation, peacebuilding, transitional justice and IR in general.

Sarah Maddison is Associate Professor and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Her previous publications include Beyond White Guilt (2011) and Unsettling the Settler State (2011).