Roads to Repair : Extraordinary and Everyday Pathways to Reconciliation after Civil War

Sammanfattning: How do societies emerging from civil war envision micro-level reconciliation across enduring relational divisions and conflict-related harms? This is a pressing question after civil war, which reshapes social processes and further entrenches societal divisions. Previous research seeks to address this question by documenting grassroots perspectives on reconciliation and highlighting the ways in which macro- and micro-level visions differ. This dissertation contributes to the literature by advancing an understanding of reconciliation as occurring both through extraordinary moments of repair between former adversaries and through everyday practices of relational repair embedded within daily life. The five essays which comprise this dissertation each investigate a different aspect of extraordinary and everyday reconciliation across multiple levels of analysis and in different empirical contexts. Essay I evaluates the impact of a time-limited contact-based reconciliation intervention in Sri Lanka, finding that participants’ already reconciled attitudes remain stable even as they become more aware of potential ingroup tensions arising from intergroup reconciliation. Essay II draws on in-depth interviews with participants in a truth and reconciliation commission in Sierra Leone to identify the specific process through which patrimonial modes of mobilization set unrealistic expectations of what the commission would provide. Essay III introduces an analytical framework to identify between whom and in what direction everyday reconciliation can occur. Essay IV applies the analytical framework to a novel dataset of everyday indicators of reconciliation collected in war-affected communities in Sri Lanka and finds that localities diverge in how they envision reconciliation within daily life. Essay V draws on in-depth interviews with Tamil citizens to understand how they envision everyday reconciliation with the state and the extent to which differing experiences of wartime order shape expectations of reconciliation. The dissertation reaches three broader conclusions of relevance to scholarship on postwar reconciliation. First, it demonstrates that greater conceptual attention to everyday reconciliation reveals a more dynamic understanding of the ways in which relational divisions can be bridged, including ways in which elite and grassroots actors and extraordinary and everyday processes interact. Second, the dissertation demonstrates that perspectives on reconciliation vary across grassroots actors within a country, highlighting the need for more comparative micro-level analysis. Finally, by attending to multi-level engagement in different empirical contexts the dissertation emphasizes the need to consider macro-level context in our understanding of micro-level reconciliation. Taken together, the essays in this dissertation shed light on the complex challenges of reconciliation and social repair after civil war.