What chance does reconciliation stand after decades of violent conflict Precursors of reconciliation

1
What chance does reconciliation stand after
decades of violent conflict? Precursors of
reconciliation in Northern Ireland and Chile
Masi Noor Rupert Brown, Sussex University,
England
2
Background to the The Troubles in N. Ireland

• Contradictory political identity aspirations
• Protestants (Unionist/ Loyalist) wish to see N.
  Ireland to remain part of the UK
• Catholics wish to see the reunification of the
  island of Ireland (Nationalist/ Republican)
• Catholics 44 and Protestants 53 in N.I.
  (Census, Dec 2002).

3
Impacts of the conflict

• No. of deaths since 1969 approaching 4000 in
  population of 1.7 million
• Just over half of them civilians
• Other indices40.000 to 50.000 injured
• Living victims trauma segregation

4
Background to the conflict in Chile

• Legacy of Pinochets rule
• Competing evaluations of the regime
• Political left vs. political right orientations

5
Impacts of the conflict

• Deep division in the population re. their
  political history
• 3,000 killed or disappeared
• Many more tortured or exiled

6
Reconciliation?

• In both contexts all violence has significantly
  decreased
• In both contexts, most people do not wish a
  return to violence
• But do most people desire to be reconciled?

7
What manifests reconciliation?

• Challenge
• Change of collective worldviews
• Tranformation in the hearts and minds

8
Obstacles to such the transformation
process

• a painful embarrassing past
• Blurred boundaries between victim and perpetrator
  groups due to mutual victimisation
• lack of consensus re. causal factors of the
  conflict assignment of responsibility for it

9
Precursors of an orientation of
reconciliation

• Intergroup forgiveness
• Conscious decision
• self-other-exploratory process
• Implications (counter forgetting
  non-undermining)
• Biased evaluation of past violence
• Highlighting ingroups suffering
• Justification for ingroups violent action
  portrayed as legitimate response

10
Competitive Victimhood

• Competitive processes are (Brewer Brown, 1998
  Hewstone, Rubin Willis, 2002).
• Competitive Victimhood (i.e., the perception that
  the ingroup has suffered more than the outgroup)
• A way of dealing with conflict during the
  conflict and in post-agreement contexts
• e.g., the talk of what-aboutry mural
  paintings on the street walls

11
Indirect paths to
reconciliation

• Outgroup trust
• Empathy
• Identity (communal/religious/political)

12
Forgiveness

-

Outgroup trust
-
-
Competitive victimhood

-
Empathy
-
-

Ingroup identity
-


Biased evaluation of past violence
13
Forgiveness
Catholic sample (N 181)

-

Outgroup trust
-
-
Competitive victimhood

-
Empathy
-
-

Ingroup identity
-


Biased evaluation of past violence
14
Forgiveness
Protestant sample (N137)

-

Outgroup trust
-
-
Competitive victimhood

-
Empathy
-
-

Ingroup identity
-


Biased evaluation of past violence
15
Supporting data from Chile
16
Discussion

• The challenge of reconciliation
• Learning new approaches to conflict
• All of above has to go in tandem with community
  empowerment!

17
An incidence of reconciliation

• had we all lived each others lives we could
  all have done what the other did. (Jo Berry,
  2004)
• (Jo Berrys father was murdered by the IRA
  and for the last 4 years
• she has been in dialogue with Patrick Magee
  who was responsible for her fathers death).