GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF RECONCILIATION | DR HELEN SCANLON liberal peace and the promotion of ‘one nation’ have now become widely accepted as the necessary foundations for reconciliation. legitimacy of its law”.19 However, critics, including Schaap, acknowledge that prioritising “pragmatism” may not only result in frustration among those excluded or alienated by reconciliation processes, as is currently apparent in the South African context, but ultimately it weakens longer-term sustainable peace-building. Tim Murithi and Fanie du Toit suggest that reconciliation processes have often been hijacked by elites who not only place the burden of reconciliation on victims but also, more critically, creates an unstable foundation for “social cohesion”. 20 Or, as Schaap succinctly notes, reconciliation has been used “to legitimate a particular order in which the interests of some are privileged over those of others” and this in turn, provides an “exculpatory redemption of the state and nation”.21 Peter Manning further cautions that reconciliation “might mean different things even within the same contexts and milieus”.22 As part of this global remedy to promote peace-building in countries emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule a range of tools have been deployed to advance reconciliation including truth-seeking mechanisms, public apologies and reparations. At the national level, the most commonly employed is official truth commissions, over forty of which have been created since the 1980s. Anne Orford notes constructing a “truth” about the past is presented: “at the individual level, in therapeutic terms, as a means of healing those who have been wounded by the violence of civil war, revolution, or despotism. At the collective level, establishing the truth of a contested history is understood as a necessary basis for moving forward as a nation and creating the conditions for a viable, shared life”. However, she suggests that appeals to truth in transitional contexts are in reality often mechanisms aimed at “an audience of liberal internationalists” to show those “states undergoing “transition” were also being produced as reliable subjects of the capitalist democratic order”.11 More broadly, Daly emphasises that in many transitional contexts “the evil is often so ghastly that it is unlikely to be mitigated by a greater understanding of the details” and, furthermore, the “truth is irrelevant to reconciliation not because reconciliation happens anyway but because it does not happen at all”.12 “Thick” reconciliation, linked more broadly to “positive” peace and the confrontation of structural violence, in theory promotes more holistic approaches to truth, justice and acknowledgement. As Schaap contends, concepts of restorative justice are often irrelevant in contexts where there is “no prior state of harmony that could be restored”.23 Thus, as Dustin Sharp has argued for effective reconciliation it is important for “a greater embrace of participatory and community-level approaches to justice rooted in local norms and traditions, as well as a more holistic approach to the scope of justice issues addressed in transition, including questions of economic justice”.24 Indeed numerous studies reveal that in contexts of widespread poverty, unemployment and residual inequality the concept of reconciliation has proved too abstract and removed from lived realities to fundamentally rebuild social relations. Referring to the South African context, Mahmood Mamdani argues that: “if reconciliation is not to turn into an embrace of injustice, of evil, then the pursuit of social justice needs to be recognized as a political imperative”.25 And, as Brounéus notes, conflict-related trauma must be integral to any debates around peace-building since the psychological impact of conflict influences conceptions of social cohesion and reconciliation.26 Addressing these issues are central to the promotion of gender justice. The homogenisation of understandings of reconciliation has resulted in context-specificities becoming a “blind spot”.13 Drawing on the Australian context, Nicole Henry observes that: “indigenous self-determination and sovereignty … are fundamentally at odds with the ‘one nation,’ liberal peace-building formula of reconciliation”. She notes how reconciliation deployed to promote nation-building “implicitly refuse to accommodate indigenous aspirations of difference”.14 This “blind spot” also obscures the social conditions and power relations that influence how local actors interpret and respond to reconciliation processes.15 Given the marginalised position of many women recognition of power relations and social realities are critical to reconciliation. Often dubbed the “global reconciliation industry” there has developed a hierarchy of “thick” and “thin” notions of reconciliation.16 The “thin” and most common conception of reconciliation is similar to Johan Galtung’s definition of “negative peace” in that it is centred on the “absence of violence, the absence of war”.17 This response involves the deployment of various reconciliatory terms including “peaceful co-existence”, “living together”, “social cohesion” and, in the South African context, ubuntu – each ultimately aimed at promoting “social interaction and cooperation between former enemies”.18 While sometimes incorporating a degree of legal accountability, the performance of thin reconciliation is often also seen as the pragmatic response to a violent past. As Schaap contends, following histories of marginalisation and oppression the need to address this legacy is crucial “to enable people divided by that past to coexist within one political community and to recognize the Gender and the Theory of Reconciliation The aftermath of conflict and authoritarian rule has been seen by many analysts as a window of opportunity to bring about radical reform and promote gender equality. Since the 1990s this has manifested in local and international demands for legal and political change such as the introduction of quotas for women in political spaces as well as antidiscriminatory laws. As a result, many previously perceived “private” issues such as inheritance and reproductive rights have been catapulted into the public realm in post-conflict settings. However, the widespread persistence of genderbased violence in post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings has led to questions as to whether a focus on legal 2