Abstract
As the chapter title suggests, this is a large and challenging under-taking, so a little modesty would not go remiss. Despite some experience as a scholar and a practitioner in the life cycle of a seemingly intractable conflict, one needs to be conscious of one’s limitations, particularly one’s own ethnocentrism. In 1996, I participated in a workshop on reconciliation in Bosnia at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London that exposed key Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs to relevant experiences of leaders from Northern Ireland, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, El Salvador, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the aftermath of civil conflict. I chaired the opening session on the role of religious institutions in reconciliation with contributions from two clergymen from Northern Ireland who had played crucial roles in bringing the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and loyalist paramilitaries into negotiating a peace that culminated in the signing of the Multiparty Agreement in Belfast in April 1998. Both individuals displayed a high degree of moral and physical courage in creating the paradigm shift that moved the region out of what appeared to be a never-ending conflict. They had borne witness and they had lessons to impart. But soon it became obvious that their message was not being heard because they spoke within the narrow frame of Christian sectarianism.
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Notes
Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 34.
Brandon Hamber, “Does the Truth Heal? A Psychological Perspective on Political Strategies for Dealing with the Legacy of Political Violence,” in Burying The Past, ed. Nigel Biggar (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003).
Nancy Soderberg, The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2005).
Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare and the Course of History (New York: Gotham Books, 2006).
John Hume, Personal Views: Politics, Peace and Reconciliation in Ireland (Dublin: Town House, 1996), 46–76, 111–48.
Brigid Laffan and Jane O’Mahoney, Ireland and the European Union (London: Palgrave, 2008), 201–18.
Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 3.
C. R. Vance and D. A. Hamburg, Pathfinders for Peace: A Report to the UN Secretary-General on the Role of Special Representatives and Personal Envoys (New York: Carnegie, 1997).
Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2012), 304.
This analysis is reinforced by Michael Ignatieff, “The New World Disorder,” The New York Review of Books, LX1, no. 14 (September 25, 2014): 30–33.
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Penguin Books, 2012), xix. The title is drawn from the closing remarks of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1861 and deserves to be quoted in full: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriotic grave to every living hearth and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chains of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” These plangent remarks, delivered in a time of darkness, can serve as a subtext for this chapter.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SCM Press, 1967), 25.
Andre Brink, “Free Thoughts,” The Observer Magazine (February 13, 2000), 24–5.
Alex Boraine, What’s Gone Wrong?: On the Brink of a Failed State (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2014).
Mahmood Mamdani, “The Logic of Nuremberg,” London Review of Books (November 7, 2013), 34. The article compares the Nuremberg and CODESA processes and places the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in this context: “The TRC displaced the logic of crime and punishment with that of crime and confession.”
See also, Roelf Meyer, Paradigm Shift: The Essence of Successful Change, A Personal Experience (mimeographed paper, 1999), an account by one of the key negotiators from the National Party.
W. B. Arthur, interview conducted by Joel Kurtzon in Strategy and Business (1998) 11, 2 (1998), p. 103.
David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, and Chris Thornton, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1999). The title speaks for itself. The book caused some controversy because it included every death—that is, it recognized “the other” in a society in which the binary condition of friend and enemy still held.
Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), xiii.
Sassoon Sofer, “The Diplomat as a Stranger,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 8, no. 3 (1997): 181.
Norman Porter, Rethinking Unionism: An Alternative Vision for Unionism (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1996), 3–6.
Byron Bland, Marching and Rising: The Ritual of Small Differences and Great Violence in Northern Ireland (Stanford, CA: Center for International Security and Arms Control, 1996), 10–11.
Niall O’Dochartaigh, “‘The Contact’: Understanding a Communication Channel between the British Government and the IRA,” in Public Diplomacy, Cultural Interventions and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, ed. Joseph J. Popiolkowski and Nicholas J. Cull (Los Angeles: Figueroa Press, 2009), 57–71.
M. R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 82–83.
Joseph Montville, Track Two Diplomacy: The Development of NonGovernmental Peace Promoting Relationships (Limerick: Irish Peace Institute, 1986), 1.
For a fuller version, see Paul Arthur, “Multiparty Mediation in Northern Ireland,” in Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World, ed. Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1999), 471–503.
H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 236–45.
See, for example, Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
R. Errera, “Memory, History and Justice in Divided Societies: The Unfinished Dialogue between Mnemosyne and Clio” (unpublished paper, Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio, 1999).
M. Smyth, “Remembering in Northern Ireland: Victims, Perpetrators and Hierarchies of Pain and Responsibility,” in Past Imperfect: Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland and Societies in Transition, ed. B. Hamber (Derry: Initiative on Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity, 1998).
J. B. Elshtain, “Politics and Forgiveness,” in Biggar, Burying the Past (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003), 45–64.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). A full discussion of these issues can be found at pp. 803–31.
See Susan Pedersen, review of The Life of R. H. Tawney, by Lawrence Goldman, London Review of Books, 36, no. 16 (2014): 29–30.
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Arthur, P. (2016). Thinking Beyond Conflict and Confrontation. In: Mannion, G. (eds) Where We Dwell in Common. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137503152_2
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