Volume 25, Issue 2, 2015
George N. Fourlas
Pages 29-55
A Politics of Reconciliation
Trust, Legitimacy, and the Need For Truth Commissions
In this essay I defend a politics of reconciliation as a means of addressing conflict in the hopes of realizing a legitimate ethical-political reality, which is one based in a common and explicit trust. The ideal guiding this model of reconciliation is the affordance of peaceful and reciprocal meaning making or dialogical relations; that is, I understand reconciliation to be both the formation of the conditions of the possibility of cooperative meaning making, insofar as it involves the creation of the secure conditions needed to reestablish basic forms of trust between conflicting persons, and eventually the cooperative meaning making itself that leads to deeper forms of trust such as friendship or solidarity. Insofar as trust is crucial to the health of a democratic political system, a politics of reconciliation is needed in realizing this fundamental relationship, and this politic requires the enactment of a permanent reconciliatory apparatus.