In-between war and peace: Identities, boundaries and change after violent conflict

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 3-21

  Buckley Zistel, Susanne ^a  

^a Leibniz Institut Hessische Stiftung Friedens und Konfliktforschung Peace Research Institute Frankfurt   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847078411     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060350010101     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. See for instance David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992);
2. David Campbell, Politics without Principles: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narrative of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO/London: Lynne Rienner, 1993);
3. David Campbell, 'MetaBosnia: Narratives of the Bosnian War' Review of International Studies 24, no. 2 (1998): 261-81;
4. David Campbell, National Deconstruction. Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
5. Chris Coker, 'How Wars End', Millennium Journal of International Studies 26, no. 3 (1997): 615-30;
6. Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence: Conflict Analysis Reconsidered (Manchster: Manchester University Press, 1996);
7. Eric Ringmar, Identity, Interest, Action: A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Years' War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
8. Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997);
9. Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996);
10. Franke Wilmer, The Social Construction of Man, the State and War: Identity, Conflict and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (New York/London: Routledge, 2002).
11. John A. Vasquez: 'War Endings: What Science and Constructivism Can Tell Us', Millennium 26, no. 3 (1997): 672.
12. Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, 'From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies', in: Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, ed. Krause and Williams (London: UCL Press, 1997), 51.
13. This is particularly challenging in poor, agrarian societies where cooperation is essential for survival. See, e.g., Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 'Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-genocide Rwanda', Africa 76, no. 2 (2006): 131-150.
14. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies, ix.
15. Mathias Albert, Thomas Diez and Stephan Stetter, The European Union and the Transformation of Border Conflicts: Theorising the Impact of Integration and Association (Birmingham: EUBorderConf, 2004), 11.
16. Ibid., 11.
17. Ibid., 3.
18. Jabri, Discourses on Violence, 134.
19. Ibid., 31.
20. Campbell, Writing Security, 6.
21. Here I am following Simon Critchley's discussion; Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction. Derrida and Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1999), 21-2.
22. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA;London: Harvard University Press, 1986), 123.
23. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 23.
24. Campbell, National Deconstruction, 23.
25. David Campbell: 'Why Fight. Humanitarianism, Principles, and Post-Structuralism'. Millennium'. 27, no. 3 (1998), 514.
26. Ibid., 514.
27. Campbell, Writing Security, 5.
28. Campbell, 'Why Fight', 520.
29. Understanding among people is central to Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games. According to Wittgenstein we can make sense of the world only through agreeing on shared concepts. These linguistic concepts resemble games in which the participants have agreed upon one particular meaning for one particular object, or rather its representation in the form of a word. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), section 65.
30. Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius Robbe, 'Anthropology and Ethnography of Violence and Sociopolitical Conflict: Fieldwork under Fire', in Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, ed. Nordstrom and Robbe (Berkley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1995), 14.
31. Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 190.
32. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 'Dividing and Uniting: The Use of Citizenship Discourses in Conflict and Reconciliation in Rwanda', Global Society 20, no. 1 (2006): 112.
33. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 178.
34. Vakim Volkan, 'On Chosen Trauma', Mind and Human Interaction 3, no. 13 (1991): 5.
35. For illustration see Buckley-Zistel, 'Remembering to Forge'.
36. John Paul Lederach, 'Just Peace - The Challenge of the 21st Century', in People Building Peace, ed. European Platform for Conflict Prevention (Utrecht: European Centre for Conflict Prevention, 1999), 33.
37. Ibid.
38. See also David Bloomfield, 'Reconciliation: An Introduction', in Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: A Handbook, ed. David Bloomfield, Teresa Barns and Luc Huyse (Stockholm: IDEA, 2003), 10-18.
39. For case studies see, for instance, Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (eds), My Neighbour, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
40. Bloomfield, Barns and Huyse (eds), Reconciliation after Violent Conflict.
41. Coker, 'How Wars End', 621.
42. In a similar vain, Simon Critchley argues, 'Deconstruction can certainly be employed as a powerful means of political analysis. For example, showing how a certain dominant political regime ... is based on a set of undecidable presuppositions is an important step in the subversion of the regime's legitimacy. ... But how is one to account for the move from undecidability to the political decision to combat that domination? If deconstruction is the strictest possible determination of undecidability in the limitless context of, for the lack of a better word, experience, then this entails the suspension of the moment of decisions. Yet decisions have to be taken. But how? And in virtue of what? How does one make decisions in an undecidable terrain?' Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 199.
43. Jabri, Discourses on Violence, 157.
44. Ibid., 146.
45. Ibid., 146.
46. Jabri refers to Anthony Giddens' structuration theory to sustain this point.
47. The term hermeneutics is derived from the name of the ancient Greek messenger Hermes who dispatched messages between the gods.
48. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975), 295.
49. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: One/Thinking (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1978), 203.
50. Although Gadamer repeatedly draws attention to the fact that his oeuvre, Truth and Method is not about truths and methods, his readers seem to be reluctant to consider his work from a different perspective, as we shall see below. For an explicit rejection of the connection between title and content see, for instance, Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'Practical Philosophy as a Model of the Human Science', Research in Phenomenology 9 (1979): 78.
51. Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'Vom Zirkel des Verstehens' in Wahrheit und Methode II: ErgŠnzungen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 57.
52. John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 61.
53. Jacob Samuel, Zwischen GesprŠch und Diskurs: Untersuchungen zur sozialhermeneutischen BegrŸndung der Agogik anhand einer GegenŸberstellung von Hans-Georg Gadamer und JŸrgen Habermas (Stuttgart: Paul Haupt, 1985), 58.
54. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode I: GrundzŸge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 9.
55. (trans. cited in Alan How, The Habermas-Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), 48.
56. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 275.
57. Ibid., 307.
58. Ibid., 309 (translated in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304).
59. Ibid., 311 (translated in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 273).
60. For example, in the context of discussing religion Gadamer suggests that although many non-Western cultures have successfully adopted a global, Western-centred market economy, which entails a very substantial element of modernity derived from Judeo-Christian religion, the non-Western cultures have simultaneously maintained their own forms of religion. They have, on the level of global economy, evaluated their traditional approaches, realised that they will benefit from adapting to Western practice, and ultimately altered their routine. Yet only in the field of economy - not in other spheres of their culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'Dialogues in Capri', in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 200-11. It is important to add, though, that other, non-Judeo-Christian banking sectors exist, such as in Islam.
61. Present author's translation. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Zukunft ist Herkunft (Jena: Universität Jena, 1997), 55.
62. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 299.
63. Campbell, 'Why Fight, 520.
64. See also fn. 18.
65. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 372.
66. Hermann Braun, 'Zum Verhältnis von Hermeneutik und Ontologie', in Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Aufsatze II, ed. Rüdiger Bubner, Konrad Cramer and Reiner Wiehl (Tübingen: JCB Mohr/Paul Siebeck), 1970), 203.
67. Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), 81.
68. Ibid., 82.
69. Ibid., Italics added.
70. Also the title of a chapter in Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation.
71. Ibid., 10.
72. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 130.
73. Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'Destruction and Deconstruction, in Dialogue and Deconstruction, ed. Diane Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: State University of New York, 1989), 113.
74. Campbell, 'Why Fight', 520
75. and fn. 18.
76. Frank Kermode, 'Places of Memory', Index on Censorship 30, no. 1 (2001): 87.
77. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 128.
78. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', in Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 61.
79. Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages', 62.
80. Ibid., 62.
81. Ibid., 63.
82. Quoted in Martha Minow, 'Breaking the Cycles of Hatred', in Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair, ed. Marhta Minow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 16.
83. I am very grateful for the discussions at the ECPR workshop on 'The Political Use of Narrative' in Mannheim from 26 to 31 March 1999 which led to the development of this argument.
84. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeship (New York: Seabury, 1995), 16.
85. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, 128
86. Again, these thoughts have been inspired by the discussions at the ESRC workshop in Mannheim. The prefix 're', however, should not suggest a return to the past status quo.
87. For case studies with reference to Rwanda see Buckley-Zistel (2006): 'Dividing and Uniting';
88. Buckley-Zistel (2006): 'Remembering to Forget';
89. Susanne Buddey-Zistel (2005): '"The Truth Heals"? Gacaca Jurisdictions and the Consolidation of Peace in Rwanda', Die Friedens Warte. 80, no. 1-2: 113-30.
90. For an overview of different mechanisms see Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Bernhard Moltmann, 'Versöhnung: Balance zwischen Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit', in Friedensgutachten, eds. Reinhard Muntz et. al. (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006), 136-145.