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Secession, Transitional Justice, and Reconciliation Aleksandar Jokic & Abrol Fairweather Published online: 19 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Aleksandar Jokic & Abrol Fairweather (2000) Secession, Transitional Justice, and Reconciliation, Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 12:1, 5-6, DOI: 10.1080/104026500113746 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/104026500113746
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Peace Review 12:1 (2000), 5–6
Secession, Transitional Justice, and Reconciliation
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Aleksandar Jokic and Abrol Fairweather The essays collected here come from both the international philosophy conference on “Secession, Transitional Justice, and Reconciliation” held at the University of San Francisco, on October 29–31, 1999, and from responses to Peace Review’s call for papers on the same theme. The topics of secession, transitional justice, and post-con ict reconciliation have not received much attention from philosophers, but their practical importance cannot be overestimated. They are now particularly urgent and relevant given the recent developments in former Yugoslavia, the formation of the ad hoc International War Tribunal in The Hague, and the pressures on different ethnic groups in what was once Yugoslavia to live together once again. his troubled region is hardly unique with respect to the need to analyze and understand the underlying causes of ethnic hatred and the need to discover ways of living together. Recent experiences in Corsica, Rwanda, Lebanon, South Africa, East Timor, Northern Ireland, Latin America, Spain’s Basque region, and many other places around the world demonstrate that sometimes there are real tensions between peace and justice. The goal of these essays is to examine conceptual and practical issues of secession, transitional justice, and interethnic reconciliation. Most centrally, the essays examine transitional justice. Broadly conceived, the issue is what, if anything, should nations do about past injustices. These abuses—which include rape, torture, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—may have been committed by the government, by its opponents, by combatants in an internal armed con ict, or by others involved in the situation. Some of these societies are making a transition to democracy and some are not. The challenge of transitional justice is how an incomplete and edgling democracy should respond to past evils without undermining its new democracy or jeopardizing its prospects for equitable and long-term development. In the following essays, transitional justice is accompanied by two other themes: secession and reconciliation. We have treated these issues together because secessionist movements have triggered most of the bloodiest recent con icts. Examples are the former Soviet Union and the former and current Yugoslavia. Better understanding secession may provide us techniques for avoiding future situations that would otherwise provoke the usual dilemmas of transitional justice. Similarly, we also examine reconciliation since it constitutes a singularly important goal in any post-con ict situation. The notion of reconciliation is used in discussions of transitional justice, yet it remains largely undeveloped in both
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Aleksandar Jokic and Abrol Fairweather
the empirical and the philosophical literature. One conception of reconciliation draws on certain religious traditions; but such traditions are not meaningful across a full range of cases. Intuitively, there is something to the idea of people individually reconciling themselves with each other and collectively reconciling themselves to the truth about their joint past and to the reality of what lies ahead as they recover. But a much deeper understanding of reconciliation must be achieved; it is far too important to be relegated to a mere rhetorical device. The crucial questions are these: What is reconciliation? Why is it important? What role does it play in bringing about and maintaining peace? How does reconciliation relate to forgiveness and healing? Is there a place for punishment within a policy of reconciliation? These and other questions are addressed in some of the essays that follow. Eight of the essays published here were presented at the University of San Francisco conference. These include essays by Jovan Babic, Angelo Corlett, Richard Falk, Aleksandar Pavkovic, Thomas Pogge, Alfred Rubin, Svetozar Stojanovic, and Burleigh Wilkins. This conference took place as part of the International Law and Ethics Conference Series. This unique project, now in its fourth year, has used a dialogic-comparative model consisting of a conference each June at Belgrade University and a follow-up conference in the U.S. This two-part strategy has given leading moral, legal, and political philosophers—and increasingly, scholars from other disciplines—from the U.S. and Western Europe the opportunity to meet with their Eastern European counterparts to discuss issues of global importance, many of which have been generated by events in the region.
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s conference organizers and Special Editors of this issue of Peace Review we would like to express our gratitude for the opportunity afforded us to engage in this interesting, personally rewarding, and, we hope, important project. Our thanks go to the following at the University of San Francisco: the Philosophy Department and particularly its Chair, Professor Michael Torre; the Politics Department; and the Law School and particularly its Dean, Professor Jeffrey Brand. We appreciate the opportunity to work with the Editor of Peace Review, Professor Robert Elias, and with Managing Editor Teresa Walsh, in preparing this collection of essays, which we are con dent will receive due attention from both an academic and a non-professional audience. Aleksandar Jokic is Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. He is Executive Director of the Center for Philosophical Education (at Santa Barbara Community College), founding Editor of STOA: International Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy, and co-founder of the International Law and Ethics Conference Series. He is the author of Aspects of Scientic Discovery, editor of the forthcoming From History to Justice and Reckoning with Past Wrongs: War Crimes and Collective Wrongdoing; and co-editor with Quentin Smith of Time, Tense and Reference and Consciousness and the Mind/Body Problem. Correspondence: Department of Philosophy, Portland State University, P.O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207–0751, U.S.A. E-mail:
[email protected] Abrol Fairweather is Instructor in Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. His research focuses on social and political philosophy as well as more abstract issues in metaphysics and epistemology. He is co-editor of the forthcoming Virtue, Duty and Knowledge (Oxford University Press). Correspondence: Department of Philosophy, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco CA 94117, U.S.A. E-mail:
[email protected]
