Fear,hope and disappointment

Introduction

Since the 1990s the idea of reconciliation has been commonplace in political debates about how to heal wounds in deeply divided societies and move towards a less conflictual future. There are many examples of societies that have employed the concept of reconciliation in transitional processes often borrowing ideas from the process during and after South Africa’s negotiated settlement, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Canada, East Timor, Liberia and Sierra Leone (Goodman, 2009: 144–145). However, processes of reconciliation as a positive dimension of conflict transformation have also come under a more critical focus in recent years (Little, 2012a, 2014). These critiques are not opposed to the idea or process of reconciliation per se but are more concerned with the kinds of outcomes – both individually and collectively – that reconciliation processes are intended to deliver. While much of the conflict transformation literature focuses on the structural determinants of conflicts, in practice reconciliation has often tended toward a more agential and individualistic concern about victims and perpetrators. Instead, this paper analyses the emotive dimension of the advocacy of reconciliation. It concentrates on the role of human emotions in the dynamics of conflict transformation and in so doing links the structural and individualistic approaches. This alternative view focuses in particular on the temporal dimension of transforming conflict. ¹

The paper begins by outlining a few contextual examples of the ways in which reconciliation has appeared in the practice of conflict transformation. In particular, it highlights the examples of South Africa as a conflict where reconciliation was the dominant motif of the settlement and Australia as a society where reconciliation has been discursively prominent but where the promise has never been realized. These are juxtaposed with Northern Ireland as a conflict in which reconciliation never made it on to the political agenda in a serious way during the peace process, but where elements of reconciliation have been incorporated into everyday social practice (albeit without resolving the conflict). These brief examples are intended to reflect the ways in which discourses of reconciliation draw on different resources and bring forth a wide range of political responses depending on the context in which they are articulated and enacted. However, this paper also suggests that, despite their differences, there are common emotive features shared by all three examples.

Each of the three subsequent sections focuses on a different dynamic at work in the relationship between reconciliation and the transformation of conflict framed around a particular emotion. The first of these is the power of fear in driving forward transitional processes. This dynamic refers to the misdemeanours of the past or present, and the need to move beyond fractured inter-group dynamics towards a more harmonious society for fear of reproducing the pathology for future generations. The second dynamic focuses on the impetus of hope and draws from a lament about the past to articulate the prospect of a better future. In this dimension of reconciliation discourse, a normative belief in a more harmonious and consensual society is promoted. The third aspect of reconciliation – and perhaps the most significant in the argument that follows – is disappointment. If reconciliation is driven by a fear of returning to the past coupled with a narrative about a normative hope for a more harmonious future, it is argued that reconciliation processes inevitably end up in disappointment. This is because it is virtually impossible for such processes to do away with fear, or the practical impacts of the past, and the hope of a harmonious future that transcends the divided past is virtually unachievable. Thus, this temporal understanding of the complexity of reconciliation means that the inevitability of disappointment is the third common feature of divided societies.

The key challenge then is how to translate this emotive trajectory of reconciliation into the temporal politics of conflict transformation. The paper suggests that, instead of construing reconciliation as a harmonious and/or consensual accommodation of conflictual difference, it should be understood as part of a process of transformation whereby social relations change over time in negative as well as positive ways; this recognizes that disappointment is a crucial dimension of the continued pursuit of conflict transformation alongside and simultaneous to the more commonly understood emotional responses of fear and hope. This analysis of the emotions of conflict transformation is focused on the social, structural level rather than the more individualistic concentration on trauma that was such a powerful feature of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (Little and Rogers, 2015). This account also suggests that reconciliation should be understood as a processive phenomenon over time rather than a means of addressing historical transgressions in mutually agreed ways to thereby enable the development of more harmonious, ‘normal’ social relations across political divisions in the future. Such a view maintains a narrative that when reconciliation is ‘achieved’, the end of the story has been reached. Instead, this paper argues for an alternative understanding of reconciliation as an ongoing part of the process of transforming conflictual societies over the longue durée. Its central contention is that it is disappointment with attempts to address the power of fear and meet the impetus of hope that continues to drive forth reconciliatory demands.

Reconciliation in context

To highlight the significance of contextual factors, this section outlines briefly three key examples where reconciliation has been more or less significant in conflict transformation processes: South Africa; Australia; and Northern Ireland. While all three societies were going through transformational process in the 1990s, the differing contexts and nature of the conflicts ensured that these transitional phases looked rather different in practice. In the simplest terms, South Africa involved a strong rhetoric of reconciliation that was matched by the establishment of an extensive institutispaonal embodiment of reconciliation (in the form of the TRC) (Boraine, 2000; Goodman, 2009). In Australia, there has been a weaker but resilient narrative of reconciliation that was complemented in the 1990s by less extensive and relatively powerless institutional formations such as the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. ² In Northern Ireland, the discourse of reconciliation had early mileage in the 1990s peace process but soon came to be seen as reflective of the political agenda of one side of the ethno-national divide (catholic/nationalist/republican) rather than the other. In this scenario in which a cross-community, power-sharing agenda became the only political game in town (Taylor, 2009), reconciliation never translated directly into the new political institutions, although there is evidence to suggest that it was a significant element in civil society. ³

These examples demonstrate that processes of reconciliation can only be understood properly in their specific contexts. Normative aspirations for reconciliation cannot simply be parachuted into conflict transformation processes with insufficient attention to their nuanced circumstances. Even in cases such as South Africa in which truth and reconciliation processes were institutionalized (Doxtader, 2009; Doxtader and du Toit, 2010; du Toit, in press; Rotberg and Thompson, 2000), they remained highly contentious with many critical reactions to how the theory of reconciliation was implemented in that environment (Crocker, 2000; Wilson, 2001). Perhaps then, one of the lessons to be learned from the debate on the TRC in South Africa is that it became too focused on the institutions that the reconciliation agenda brought into existence rather than broader processes of social transformation over the course of temporal change.

In Australia, reconciliation remains an important way of framing Aboriginal inequality, not least in resisting the attempts of governments to focus solely on practical measures – ‘closing the gap’ in key indicators in health, education and so forth – rather than the symbolic significance of measures such as appropriate recognition in the constitution. ⁴ While the ‘closing the gap’ agenda is important in terms of the lived experience of many Indigenous Australians, by implication it suggests that, when the gap is eradicated or closed sufficiently (if that were actually possible in the context of ingrained structural inequality), then the reconciliation process would no longer be required. However, at the same time, part of the experience of symbolic change in Australia has been that, despite the significance of events such as the Apology to the stolen generations (Barta, 2008), hope has dissipated quickly in the face of the effects of ongoing structural inequality given its long historical trajectory.

In Northern Ireland, the bracketing of the issues of truth, justice and reconciliation in the build-up to the Belfast Agreement (1998) reflected the significance of reaching elite political agreement and the end of political violence rather than a broader process of social reconciliation (Little, 2011). In this context the process of dealing with the legacies of the 'Troubles' was considered likely to derail the project of political agreement and these issues were left on one side to be taken up later. Perhaps this was not surprising given the elite-level nature of the 1998 Agreement and the fact that comprehensive historical investigations would need to focus on transgressions that might implicate local parties, former paramilitaries, the security forces and the two governments involved in the negotiations. Thus, it is only more recently that measures that might be seen as reconciliatory have come back on the political agenda through, for example, the Eames–Bradley Report, the work of the Historical Enquiries Team, and the Haass–O’Sullivan talks in late 2013 (Guelke, 2014; Lawther, 2014; Moon, 2012).

However, this paper's contention is that, despite the variations in the actual processes of reconciliation in the examples above, the dynamics of the politics of reconciliation requires a combination of a set of three different emotional responses for the populace to subscribe to it at all. These emotive, motivational dimensions were primarily fear and hope but it is contended that the existence of emotions of disappointment is also pivotal to reconciliatory change. The first two emotions are not difficult to draw out from the literature as it is obvious that fear and hope are commonplace in conflictual societies. The dynamic of fear or persecution and the continuation of social divisions with serious everyday ramifications characterizes most divided societies. Moreover, most reconciliation processes proceed on the basis of hope for a better world after reconciliation processes have taken place. Indeed, in more extreme variants, this may involve a promise that a better future awaits, so the idea of this better future is a major motivational dimension for participants in reconciliatory processes.

However, the argument here is that the third dimension of the emotions of conflict transformation is neglected and is equally important in the dynamic of reconciliation. To try and put it succinctly, in what follows it is contended that disappointment is inevitable in reconciliation and conflict transformation processes and an important part of the discussion of what these processes should look like involves a realistic reflection of what they are supposed to achieve and the likelihood of them doing so. In what follows, the first two dimensions of the argument, fear and hope, are highlighted before focusing attention on the third and arguably most significant element of the discussion: disappointment.

The power of fear

The notion of fear and the political issues it engenders is gaining increasing attention in contemporary political and social theory. This emergent literature tends to focus on a generalized notion of social fear reflecting conditions of uncertainty (and risk) in socio-political conditions in the 21st century (Ahmed, 2004: 71–72). In the work of theorists such as Brown (2005: 10–11) for example, fear manifests in a societal condition akin to depressive anxiety. This, she argues, is evident in a growing lack of certainty and direction (heaviness) coupled with an increasing speed of change with the effect that people have the sense of hurtling towards an unknown outcome but without any capacity for meaningful action – ‘you can neither seize life nor escape it’ (Brown, 2005: 11). Others such as Todorov (2010: 6) point to the negative effects of fear in breeding resentment, xenophobia and violence against those who are deemed to represent the threat. Ideas such as these are reflective of a shift in the general literature in the social sciences that comes together as an emotive turn that highlights the emotions that emanate from and contribute to changing social and political practices (Bauman, 2006; Furedi, 2005).

However, when talking about the emergence of fear as a key emotive feature of conflictual societies, then the idea of a new form of fear animating contemporary social relations does not highlight specifically enough the impetus that fear provides. Instead, it might be more profitable to think of fear as an element of the passions in a Hobbesian sense (Robin, 2004); importantly, when Hobbes articulates the power of fear ‘he does not simply mean the immediate fear of another person, or other persons, but also the anticipation or foresight of those evils which may befall one at a future time. To anticipate future evil impels us to make provisions for avoiding it’ (Boucher, 1990: 216). For Hobbes, this is not necessarily a negative situation insofar as the multiple relationships between individuals and groups ‘grow from a condition of mutual fear and hostility and develop into tentative trust and temporary harmony’ (Boucher, 1990: 217). In this sense, it takes the existence of fear and the possibility of harm to drive forward political initiatives that lead to forms of accommodation and mutual agreement (albeit on a temporary basis). And, given the contingent temporality of political agreements, fear is a continuing ingredient and a necessary condition for the ongoing process of maintaining relative peace and security.

To put it another way, in his explanation of the passions, Hobbes provides an alternative to contemporary concerns about new forms of generalized social fear. He sees fear as constitutive of political relations and explains the ways in which the passions are conceived not only in terms of appetite and aversion to others but also the absence or presence of the things that are desired or rejected (Frost, 2010). Thus, this gets translated into an emotional response to that which is loved or hated, and is inflected by whether the subject of these emotions is present or not; the presence of that which there is an appetite for leads to a different emotional mindset than the absence of that which is aspired to. Likewise the presence of that to which there is an aversion has a significant emotional effect compared to the relatively blissful state of its absence. The argument here suggests that the political domain usually comprises the presence of that to which there is an aversion (Little, 2014) and this is particularly the case in societies characterized by violence and social upheaval. Therefore, the attention being paid to the emergence of a generalized emotion of fear in contemporary theories of political ontology does not adequately take account of the constitutive role that aversion plays in delineating the political realm (Norval, 2007).

In the case of conflictual and ‘post-conflict’ societies, this aversive dimension of political relations is ever present in social life due to the perpetual presence of adversarial individuals and groups. That is, the idea of the advent of a new reconciled period characterized by the absence of emotions of fear is actually tantamount to the denial of the fundamental nature of political relations. So, in societies marked by conflict, political relations are constructed around social conditions in which aversive emotions are intrinsic to the basic constitution. In societies where the aversive relationship is a defining characteristic of social relations, the fundamental nature of aversion needs very little articulation and is generally understood as an inherent part of political life. The implication is that aversion to the ‘Other’ is written into the social relations of these contexts and the question becomes how does this aversion and fear of the 'Other' get translated into the political institutions and structures for dealing with the conflict. It seems uncontroversial that fear is an essential driver in the emotive politics of reconciliation processes. But, beyond that, the more significant question is how does fear contribute to the continuing political dynamics of societies seeking to move beyond conflict? While aversion might be aspired to as preferable to fear in the politics of divided societies, there is also need to recognize the necessity of an element of fear to achieve aversion.

Fear remains a central dynamic in societies engaged in forms of reconciliation for two key reasons. First, the extent to which reconciliation processes can actually deliver societal reconciliation in any kind of substantive fashion is open to question, and these processes will always have uncertain outcomes focused as they are on changing human emotions over the course of time. While formal institutional processes can sometimes provide forms of closure or means of coping with loss for individual victims, they can never deal with all of the ways in which conflict permeates everyday life over the course of time. This feeds into the second reason. The fact that conflict is deeply ingrained in social and cultural practices inflects social relations long after formal agreements take place or institutional processes seeking truth, justice or reconciliation are completed. This then speaks to the significance of aversion. Fear is not an emotion that can be eradicated through institutional innovation alone. While potentially aversion (rather than fear) can be encouraged through political mechanisms, fear will still characterize social relations to some extent and this will always engender an element of uncertainty about the behaviour, motives and practices of those who are on the other side of social or cultural divisions. In Hobbesian terms, fear is potent because individuals ‘do not know what frightens them. Fear both incites and inhibits’ (Blits, 1989: 426).

Memory is a key part of this dynamic of fear in transitional conflictual societies:

Fear is the displeasure felt either toward an object whose resemblance to a remembered object is taken as an indication of a noxious experience to come or toward the memory of an object whose threatened return heralds a repeat of what came before. Fear, then, entails a figurative movement from the present back toward a remembered past and then from the past toward an anticipated future. (Frost, 2010: 167)

In many respects then the kinds of generalized fear, which have been identified as a broad social phenomenon in contemporary political theory, combine with much more specific forms of fear in divided societies. The issue is less one of imagining a new ‘Other’ of whom to be fearful but instead knowing the ‘Other’ very well and understanding through memory and experience that there is something to fear even if the precise form it will take is intangible (Frost, 2010: 167). As reconciliation processes promise to create new conditions in which such fear is unfounded, there is often disappointment with their inability to deliver on their promises.

As will be seen, this element of disappointment is one that creates new fears and continuing aversion between different sectors of society regardless of reconciliation processes. There is plentiful evidence that fear will continue to contribute to physical divisions that might inhibit reconciliation as can be seen in the expansion of peacelines since 1998 in Northern Ireland (Gormley-Heenan et al., 2013) and the private security infrastructure that pervades in South Africa. Thus, the generalized fear of contemporary life is replaced by a much more specific fear in divided societies. But whereas fear is often identified as a disabling element in contemporary societies, quite often in societies involved in reconciliation processes, its existence can go hand in hand with aspirations and hopes for a better future.

The impetus of hope

While there is an established body of political theory literature surrounding the concept of fear (inspired as has been seen by Hobbes), the concept of hope has not received the same degree of critical attention. However, when looking at divided societies in processes of transition from conflict or attempting to grapple with the intricacies of reconciliation, hope is a key dynamic driving these processes of social and political change. Fear alone does not necessarily provide sufficient impetus unless there is some kind of promise of a better outcome from taking the risk to engage with those who are feared. Indeed, fear and hope seem to be intrinsically linked in the politics of reconciliation.

Hope does not engender specific modes of political organization but, in divided societies, it is usually articulated in terms of improvement that will bring about increased engagement across social cleavages. Braidotti characterizes hope as ‘a sort of “dreaming forward,” it is an anticipatory virtue that permeates our lives and activates them. It is a powerful motivating force grounded in our collective imaginings…’ (Braidotti, 2010: 217). Thus, hope provides an emotional strategy for the re-imagination of social and political relationships across divisions, and provides a potential antidote to the liberalism of fear in which the prevention of violence and human rights abuses is the ‘most we can hope for’ (see Ignatieff, 2001 and critical commentary from Brown, 2004; see also Shklar, 2004). Therefore, between the poles of utopia and resignation lie a range of perspectives such as the American pragmatist tradition where ‘connected critics’ demonstrate that hope is never surrendered but is reined in to accommodate the practicalities of the political issues at hand (Rorty, 1999; Westbrook, 2005: 141–142).

While hope will often be historically grounded insofar as it emanates from already established social conditions, it is a future-oriented emotion. However, the substance of hope is not universal. As Bernard Williams makes clear, what generates hope for some people will be a cause of despair for other people:

what we hope for, like what we fear, is a matter of our identifications. Our hope is that things will go well for us, and who counts as ‘us’ depends on the nature and extent of the danger or risk that things will not go well. (Williams, 2002: 266)

This allusion to the intangibility of hope suggests that what is substantiating it is shifting and thus is a matter of political contention. Moreover, as commentators such as Cornel West have pointed out, hope and despair ‘are inseparable’ as one must be grappled with to countenance the other (cited in Westbrook, 2005: 215).

In divided societies, hope can inspire both pro- and anti-reconciliation forces as, for the latter, the need to maintain levels of conflict may be the primary political objective. The hopeful aspiration in this case would be to continue to emphasize and foster division and fear. So the meaning of hope is contested and it need not be expressed in terms of good news, cheerfulness, moral edification, or idealism (Williams, 2002: 267). For Williams, the hope is that the pursuit of truth allied with liberal inclusivity will lead to better outcomes because the terms in which people make sense of the world must be sustained according to some ideals of truthfulness ‘together with institutions that both help to make those ideals effective and can themselves be sustained in knowledge of the truth’ (Williams, 2002: 268).

While the ideals of hope that Williams outlines help to differentiate between everyday uses of the idea of hope and a more philosophical understanding that does not cast it in purely positive, optimistic terms, the connection between hope and truth that he puts forward is a more contentious perspective in the politics of divided societies. Indeed, this paper suggests that transitional processes in general (pursuing justice for example) need not be imbued with a strong sense of hope but that reconciliation processes in particular do require the presence of this emotion, and this gives them a specific character in the politics of conflict transformation. That is, processes that are directed towards the discovery of ‘truth’ or the pursuit of justice can theoretically be little more than fact-finding exercises and – at their least reconciliatory – purely matters for policing, courts, corrections and the law. While victims may see hope in finding out the ‘truth’ of a particular event, that is not necessarily a forward-oriented hope of the kind identified in most of the literature (Little and Rogers, 2015). There may be an individual hope for closure or punishment and retribution against offenders but this is a far cry from the kind of general social hope embodied in reconciliation processes.

One of the elements that characterizes processes that evoke reconciliation is a sense of hope that by engaging in processes of engagement, atonement, apology, reconnection and so forth, new and improved social relationships will emerge. This enhanced society may still have divisions but they will be less harmful and violent than in the past. The key to reconciliation then is that it embodies forms of hope and invokes processes whereby more harmonious social relations will emerge. There is little other reason to create new institutions and engage with an individual's adversaries under the auspices of reconciliation unless there is a view that some shared understandings will emerge from the engagement. Other options could include leaving things as they are with the ensuing conflict, reaching a settlement akin to the ‘liberalism of fear’ where at least violence is vastly reduced but without raking over the coals of the past, or pursuing institutional models that promise truth or justice alone. So reconciliation is not an inevitable part of conflict transformation. Instead, it is a specific choice that is made within certain societies and it is contended here that that choice is one that is imbued with the hope that a more harmonious future can be fashioned out of a divided past. However, this hope also raises expectations about political processes and this gives rise to the third key emotive dimension of reconciliation dynamics: disappointment.

The inevitability of failure and the possibilities of disappointment

The emotion of disappointment is not one that has a high profile in the political theory literature or indeed in much of the academic debate on reconciliation (Sleat, 2013). Perhaps it lacks the more primal edge of fear (and the urgency it invokes) or the forward-looking optimism of hope for a better future, but it is contended here that disappointment is a characteristic of many societies that have undertaken processes of reconciliation with people within those societies feeling that reconciliation has ‘failed’. This perception of failure is often accompanied by a sense of disappointment that the good that was pursued through a commitment to reconciliation processes has not been realized. While, of course, the notion of failure could be a driver towards the return of fear as a dominant passion (and undoubtedly examples where this is the case could be found), this paper argues that frequently the emotion that has emerged is disappointment. Moreover, it suggests that this ‘failure’ and the feeling of disappointment that emerges from it is not necessarily a negative phenomenon (Little, 2012b).

Therefore, this section will outline why disappointment is actually a key dimension of ongoing reconciliation processes and that the purported ‘failure’ of reconciliation is not a wholly negative phenomenon. After all, it is quite possible to make some progress through a process while failing to meet ultimate objectives (especially those where the bar has been set high as is potentially the case in many, if not most, reconciliation processes). This means that when objectives are only partially achieved, it is the failure to attain more comprehensive, more ambitious goals that actually continues to drive reconciliation processes forward. Working from the literature on the inevitability and political potential of failure (Freeden, 2009; Little, 2012b), the argument here suggests that it is learning from failure rather than success that is the key dynamic in the development of reconciliation policy. This approach sees failure as an inevitable, intrinsic part of the process of political action and contends that this failure highlights the need to continue to pursue unachieved objectives. This pertains to the pursuit of reconciliation as much as any other broad policy objective.

The notion of political failure is predicated on a number of theoretical arguments but two key features are relevant here. Firstly, the idea of epistemological uncertainty has gained traction in recent years with increased focus on the inability of political actors and decision makers to understand all of the relevant issues to a decision in complex environments. This means that decisions need to be taken on the basis of incomplete knowledge about the issue at hand and therefore that there is a likelihood of unknown outcomes that accrue from any decision. Secondly, the sense of failure also emanates from assumptions about the motivations of political actors. While policy processes are imagined as matters that consist of specific issues and a clear agenda on the part of participants, usually those participants will have a range of issues to deal with some of which relate to one another. This means that a depiction of a process based on actors behaving rationally derived from an uncomplicated picture of their perspective on the issue, and how that perspective will be best served by a particular decision, is deeply flawed. This is because it neglects the fact that issues overlap with and relate to one another in complex ways. In these circumstances merely reading off the motivations of actors and therefore their likely behaviour is highly problematic. This is all the more the case in the absence of epistemological certainty about the issues at hand (Little 2012b, 2015a, 2015b).

On the basis that participants in discussions of the possibilities of reconciliation do so in good faith (i.e. if they did not believe reconciliation was important, they could pursue other means to settle conflictual issues) ⁵ , then the epistemological and motivational issues outlined above that generate inevitable failure also breed disappointment. However, it is not surprising that reconciliation processes never start with the caveat that the process is going to fail (let alone failure being seen as a positive contribution to the ongoing process of dealing with the relevant issues at hand). In this scenario, it is almost inevitable that reconciliation processes will disappoint some if not most of their participants. However, the inability to recognize disappointment and failure is a political problem especially when the tone of some more ‘official’ statements about the progress of reconciliation such as the Reconciliation Australia Reconciliation Barometer Reports leans towards the promotion of hope at the expense of disappointment (Reconciliation Australia, 2012). Disappointments may be acknowledged (such as the perception that relationships were not necessarily improving in the 2012 Report) but there is little sense of the inevitability of this failure, with the effect that failure and disappointment are not regarded as central to the temporal dynamic of reconciliation processes.

This point is particularly significant if the individual and social dimensions of reconciliation are considered separately. If a process helps to enable some victims to come to terms with things that have befallen them during a conflict, then that process has clearly had value on that individual level. However, it is a rather different thing to suggest that this individual reconciliation can be mapped on to society as a whole. For example, even where an individual relative of an individual victim may be prepared to accept truth or apology, the event that created victims may have wider social significance such that, even if individual victims were satisfied with reconciliation processes, the event’s importance in the social imaginary ensures that it remains pivotal to the dynamics of conflict. Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972 provides a very good example of this dynamic (Conway, 2003). The Saville Inquiry and the subsequent apology from the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, may have been welcome and could have been a means of closure for some individuals, but they cannot suture the social imaginary of Bloody Sunday in the history of Northern Ireland and the effect that it had on the dynamics of the conflict (Lundy and McGovern, 2008). Everyone need not be cast as a victim in order to understand how events create the social and structural conditions in which individuals beyond those directly affected live. And, if reconciliation is construed in terms of a broad social process rather than a relationship between individual perpetrators and individual victims, then it is very hard to create any kind of unitary social response to acknowledgements of blame or responsibility for events in the past.

It is also important to avoid the trap of falling into an all or nothing approach to reconciliation processes in terms of judging them as successes or failures. On the contrary, it is quite possible for a process of reconciliation to fail on either an individual or social basis, but for reconciliation as a whole – understood as ambiguous and inconclusive – to have been advanced through the process. That is, while people may often not find reconciliation through formal reconciliation processes, this is not to say that they have not emerged from them more reconciled than they otherwise would have been had they not engaged in these processes at all. ⁶ Or, alternatively, individual victims may not find closure through engaging in reconciliation processes, but wider social relations may have improved (probably intangibly) through the processes of disclosure involved. In this vein, perceptions of failure and the disappointment it engenders are not necessarily a death knell for the process of reconciliation. On the contrary, it might be seen as a vital ingredient in the continuing struggle to create reconciliation out of the ashes of violent conflicts. It is through trial and error that processes of reconciliation might be continued with error being fundamental to the continuity of the objective of reconciliation, albeit through different institutional mechanisms and practices (Little, 2012b).

So, while perceptions of failure may permeate discourses around reconciliation in some conflictual or post-conflict societies, perhaps it is this element of failure (and the emotive response of disappointment that is attached to it) that provides the impetus for ongoing processes of reconciliation. If it were ever feasible to sign off on the fact of reconciliation – that it had been definitively achieved – then there would be no need to continue its pursuit. But that would be a scenario whereby socio-economic inequalities no longer would be disproportionately experienced by black South Africans, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, and the underclasses of both sides of the ethno-national divide in Northern Ireland. For if reconciliation is understood as more than a process of atonement for historical wrongdoing but a vibrant and future-oriented motif for the development of means of addressing inequalities that have at least partially emanated from historical transgressions, then a means of continuing reconciliation after institutional processes of historical investigation and subsequent apologies and so forth have taken place is needed.

If disappointment is the inevitable counterpoint to processes driven by combinations of fear and hope, then how does it operate as a potentially positive dimension of conflict transformation and the politics of post-conflict societies? Here, the promise of aversion as an emotional counterpoint to the dark burden of fear and the unobtainable aspirations of hope can begin to be seen. This suggests that rather than pursuing the unobtainable and intangible outcome of reconciliation through institutions of historical atonement alone, a more pragmatic approach to transformation in conflictual societies may be the pursuit of aversive political relations. That is, in agonistic terms, attempts are made to constitute political relations in post-conflict societies such that they become aversive rather than imagining reconciliation through pursuing models of consensus, agreement or political harmony. It is in this space that the pursuit of aversion alongside emotions of hope and fear opens up the possibility of a realistic post-conflict politics rather than the models of consensus and harmony that tend to emanate from less critical interpretations of reconciliation. In this sense disappointment can be imagined as a key contributor to the dynamics of conflictual societies and the attempted creation of meaningful political processes that can help to deal with the present and the future, while simultaneously recognizing the impossibility of reconciliation construed as using historical investigation into past wrongs to create the conditions of collective forms of harmony in the future.

Conclusion: the temporal challenge in conflict transformation

The identification of an emotional turn in the social sciences and its application to processes of conflict transformation brings to light two particular problems for the politics of reconciliation: first, the challenge of temporality and the differing political dynamics of dealing with the past, present and future; and, second, the scale of reconciliation across individual, collective/group, societal and potentially international–transnational–postnational dimensions. This paper has focused on the first of these dimensions. When viewed in non-emotive terms, it is perhaps easier to gloss over the temporal issues that make reconciliation processes so difficult. In short, if reconciliation is translated into an approach where emotions are reduced to specific feelings ascribed to particular subject positions – perpetrator, innocent victim, bystander, etc. – it becomes easier to reduce these subject positions to what people in these roles should feel at a given point of time in relation to specific political processes. However, when fuller account is taken of the effects of conflict beyond pre-ascribed roles, that is, a sufficiently complex account of the ontologies generated by the temporal dimensions of conflict scenarios, it is much harder to comprehend reconciliation in such a one-dimensional light. The argument here for a greater awareness of the constitutive role that fear, hope and disappointment play in reconciliation processes helps cast further light on the contingencies of conflict transformation which are not always accorded sufficient attention in more functional or institutional accounts of what reconciliation entails.

The temporal challenge of reconciliation is how to link the transgressions of the past and policies of atonement/rectification in the present with the conditions of the future. In particular, it is a challenge to ‘sell’ reconciliation processes in the present alongside recognition of the inevitable continuation of conflictual politics (albeit potentially ameliorated) in the future. This challenge highlights the difficulties of moving reconciliation from a backward looking account of historical transgressions to a model that explains contemporary manifestations of the problem (linked to the past), and a mode of finding a different form of social and political organization for the future. In short, too much of the temporal focus of reconciliation discourse has been focused on the past.

While historical material helps to explain contemporary conditions, very little attention is given in the reconciliation literature to political relations beyond the present (save for an ill-defined hope for a better future). Much less attention is given to the imagination of a future which has to continue to manage the social inequalities and political discordances generated by the past. That is, reconciliation is usually construed as a process with a conclusive endpoint, and this makes it a hostage to fortune when that endpoint is not reached or when it becomes clear that reconciliation is not the appropriate rhetorical device to help bring about conflict transformation in a given society (Doxtader, 2009; Little, 2012a). On the contrary, the perspective articulated here is predicated upon a future orientation in which there is no discernible endpoint for reconciliation processes. Such a perspective also leaves open the possibility that particular conflicts in which reconciliation is invoked as a form of progress may seek alternative modes of conflict transformation in the future if the rhetoric of reconciliation is exhausted. The development of this future orientation is a major challenge for the politics of conflict transformation.

To conclude, a focus on the particular emotions that are involved in reconciliation processes – particularly fear, hope and disappointment – brings to light the strengths and weaknesses of reconciliation as a mode of conflict transformation. They suggest that reconciliation needs to be construed as a persistent and enduring feature of divided societies precisely because of the deep, resilient and continuing nature of conflict. Reconciliation can play a central role in conflict transformation processes but only if these temporal limitations are better understood. The contention here is that these limitations are likely to ensure that emotions of fear, hope and disappointment remain central to divided societies, therefore necessitating the continuation of processes designed to ameliorate conflict and create more aversive rather than violent social relations.