Mediation on the international stage is, at its best, about transforming deadlocked negotiations into sustainable settlements. Three considerations are critical to achieving that goal. The first is history: What is the mediator's role in deconstructing and demystifying the parties' historical understanding of their dispute? The second is imagination: How does a mediator help the parties find the imaginative spark in their narratives that will facilitate a future-oriented approach to resolving their dispute starting them on the road to reconciliation? Imagination is especially critical when the disputants' differences may be partly religious in nature or based on nonrational or faith differences between the parties. To help investigate these two considerations, I enlist the ambitious and challenging philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.Footnote 1 In the process, the role that a mediator can play in transforming deadlock into more sustainable solutions can be better understood.
As helpful as Ricoeur's hermeneutics will be to the first two considerations, history and imagination, a third consideration, forgiveness, remains for the parties to work through in order to truly reach a just and sustainable settlement, especially in those post-conflict situations where during the conflict the parties have made civilians the target of violence. In those situations where the parties have perpetrated atrocities, it is necessary to consider whether, through the imaginative spark that renews the understanding of a group's identity narrative, it is possible for the parties to offer forgiveness as part of a path to sustainable peace.Footnote 2 Ricoeur's philosophy helpfully highlights the essential features of forgiveness: it is outside the exchange or bargaining that typically drives peaceful settlements but nonetheless gives a future to the disputants' past dealings.Footnote 3 In this regard, we must examine the necessary implications of forgiveness: victims must be engaged directly in the peace process or immediately thereafter, in order to freely choose to forgive the perpetrators for atrocities that have been committed against them.
Forgiveness is not the only goal; rather, mediators and peacemakers must understand what impact the victim's choice to forgive may have on the justice of any ultimate settlement. These challenges to real-world peacemaking efforts in places like Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and between Israel and the Palestinians will be formidable. Because meaningful forgiveness can only be voluntarily given by individual victims (which, in turn, creates agency problems),Footnote 4 a process that provides real participation from the victims will need to be agreed to by party representatives. Such a process inserts fragility into the peace settlement. In light of such difficulties, this article examines whether a mediated peace process that relies on forgiveness can overcome the objection that forgiveness is incompatible with justice. This analysis shows that these objections can be overcome but only if the parties understand the hard trade-offs they are making in choosing to forgive, and only if those making the peace ensure processes that will involve victims in the final resolution of any lasting peace. In addition it shows that as a matter of moral philosophy such a process must involve a certain amount of fact finding about the nature of the alleged atrocities and provide meaningful protections like those used in formal legal processes to ensure that any victim or group of victims' choice to forgive will be meaningful.Footnote 5
In the first part of this article, I review Ricoeur's hermeneutic theory and analyze the challenges to its use in helping the parties understand their individual and collective histories. In the second part, I discuss the role that meaningful forgiveness might play in resolving disputes by drawing on insights from the disciplines of moral philosophy, religion, and jurisprudence. In the third part, I consider the practical procedural considerations and psychological paradoxes of mediating disputes on the international stage, asking, in particular, whether we might draw any practical lessons for either ongoing or future international dispute resolution mediation processes that are considering forgiveness as a pathway to peace. In addition, in part three I offer some important possibilities for the design of future truth and reconciliation commissions.
PAUL RICOEUR AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF HISTORY AND IMAGINATION
Paul Ricoeur is one of the giants of contemporary continental philosophy and one of the most enduring and wide-ranging thinkers in the twentieth century, publishing major works on subjects from existentialism and phenomenology to psychoanalysis, politics, religion, and the theory of language.Footnote 6 His hermeneutics concerns not only the interpretation of sacred texts but also the study and interpretation of human behavior and social institutions.Footnote 7 As such, his thought has direct applicability to resolution of disputes.
Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophy emerges from and critiques the European philosophical tradition of phenomenology.Footnote 8 Phenomenology is grounded on the premise that consciousness is always conscious of something, or that the subject cannot be conscious without being conscious of an object; this concept is often referred to as intentionality.Footnote 9 Thus, phenomenology concerns itself with an examination of experience “as it in fact immediately presents itself, that is, as a structure of meanings, of intentional relations of subject engaged in a ‘world.’”Footnote 10 For Ricoeur, however, phenomenology requires a hermeneutic turn. Whereas for Husserl meaning is “located in the subject's intuition of the ‘things themselves,’” for Ricoeur, “intuition is always a matter of interpretation.”Footnote 11
Thus, for Ricoeur, experience is both a finding and a forming, creating, and giving meaning to.Footnote 12 For Ricoeur, a hermeneutical phenomenology elucidates how humans make meaning in relation to sacred texts and to their shared history.Footnote 13 Specifically, it informs the meaning that can be given to their past behavior, their institutional actors, and to their past narratives.Footnote 14
Ricoeur interprets texts by using history in a particular way. He uses the process of historical analysis to discover the imaginative possibilities that arise anew from the search for meaning in the present of the past narrative.Footnote 15 To understand how this works, let us first look at two related ideas, history and myth, and then consider what is meant by two additional concepts, the role of language and the relationship of language to imagination.
Paul Ricoeur was taken by the role that tradition and myth play in the hermeneutic process, or the problem of understanding a dispute as both a product of the past and an imaginary projection into the future. Ricoeur subscribes to a quasi-Kantian ideal project, expressed by Ricoeur as “a civil society administering universal rights,” as a guide in human efforts to give practical shape to utopian expectations.Footnote 16 Growing out of this project, tradition should be properly understood as “an ongoing dialectic between (a) our being-affected-by-the past and (b) our imaginary projection of history yet-to-be-made (la visée de l'histoire à faire).”Footnote 17
Ricoeur distinguishes at least three categories of historical memory. The first is traditionality: formally a dialectical process by virtue of which the “past is thus opened up as a historical horizon which is at once detached from our contemporary horizon and included in it.”Footnote 18 Expressed otherwise, traditionality is a “temporalizing of history by means of the dialectic between the effects of history upon us (which we passively suffer) and our response to history (which we actively operate).”Footnote 19 Ricoeur's insight is vital to a mediator. It provides the impetus for the mediator not only to ask about what happened in the past, but also to ask what such experiences mean for the future.Footnote 20
The second is traditions. Materially, traditions are essentially linguistic transmissions of acquired meanings that precede usFootnote 21 but operate through what can be called mutual questioning: “the past interrogates and responds to us to the degree that we interrogate and respond to it.”Footnote 22 Traditions, according to Ricoeur, are involved in every proposal of meaning; they are claims to truth that are posited before one is called to respond. There is a paradox in one's understanding of one's traditions: a person's understanding of his or her traditions both makes a truth claim (the inevitability of claiming the legitimacy of authority for the meaning of the history as preceding one's existence) and recognizes that his or her traditions are subject to criticism. Practically stated, prejudice is inevitable and necessary to understand the world, but one's prejudices are subject to critical analysis as well. Prejudgment involves expectations of behavior that are subject to challenge, but without which we could not get along in the world.Footnote 23
Third, there is a tradition, a particular acquired meaning that tells us one particular way to respond to our environment. It follows that there is a relationship between traditions and an individual tradition. For example, those who seek to hear the word of God in Holy Scripture both critically examine a particular text or historical event and open themselves to call into question who they are and what they may be called to be, even as they critically examine a particular text or historical event. The same opening is potentially available to anyone attempting to describe his or her cultural identity related to any one formative part of history: a battle, a law, a case, or other formative event.Footnote 24
Ricoeur's analysis of imagination and language emerges from his unique approach to phenomenology: we know not only because of what is internal to us, but because there are phenomena that occur independent of us that impact us, or that we see, and are therefore grounded in facts outside our minds. Ricoeur's move from a descriptive phenomenology oriented to perception/vision to a hermeneutic phenomenology oriented to interpretation/understanding led him to rethink imagination in terms of language. Imagination acts as an agent in the creation of meaning in and through language.Footnote 25
To Ricoeur, images are spoken before they are seen, and, paradigmatically, they are spoken in the form of poetic metaphor through which new meaning is created by metaphorical reconciliation of preexisting opposing meanings.Footnote 26 Interpreted ontologically, a poetic imagination “creates meaning by responding to the desire of being to be expressed.”Footnote 27 Imagination works by revealing new possibilities of being in the world through semantic innovation, which points toward social transformation.Footnote 28 “Without imagination, there can be no action [or reconciliation or just peace].”Footnote 29
Ricoeur speaks in a context describing how imagination and language work to make possible the interpretation of sacred texts. The language of the text is necessarily read to contain symbols. A symbol is a sign insofar as it stands for something, but a symbol is not merely a sign; rather, a symbol can aim at two or more meanings simultaneously. In contrast to allegory, which simply relates one meaning to another without residue or ambiguity, a symbol points at more than one meaning by way of enigmatic suggestion or evocation.Footnote 30 Ricoeur's argument (and hope) is that contemporary language can be restored to its poetic and symbolic power, recovering language in its symbolic fullness. This requires demythologizing myth as a false explanation of reality and claiming myth's capacity to describe a state of affairs that is yet to be fully realized.
Ricoeur sees two different types of symbols operating when one reads a text or seeks to interpret the past: cosmic symbols and poetic symbols.Footnote 31 Cosmic symbols read the sacred on to history. “[T]he imagination reads the things of the world as signs, and signs as things of the world.”Footnote 32 So, the rainbow is a sign of God's promise not to destroy the world with a flood. Israel's victory in the Six Day War is God's sign of approval for Jews in fighting their Arab neighbors. Assad's father's rise to power is a sign of divine approval to the Alawites to rule modern Syria. Rebel tenacity in the face of overwhelming force is a sign of divine approval for their efforts to bring down Assad.
Poetic symbols, on the other hand, are images that reveal “language in a state of emergence.”Footnote 33 To understand Ricoeur's meaning of the poetic one must understand his definitions of the related concepts of metaphor and narrative. In contrast to symbols, which operate at the level of words, metaphors operate at the level of sentences.Footnote 34 Narratives operate at the level of texts.Footnote 35 Metaphoric imagination, as defined by Ricoeur, combines elements of Aristotle's philosophy with that of Kant. The metaphoric function of imagination involves a verbal aspect by virtue of which it involves grasping identity with differences, and it does so with a sensible element or aspect which is intuitive. By intuitive, Ricoeur means “‘seeing-as’ quite precisely plays the role of the schema that unites the empty concept with the blind impression.”Footnote 36 In this combination a new meaning can be confronted. The literal confronts the figurative sense: seeing one thing as another.Footnote 37
Poetical language reveals a capacity for nondescriptive “reference to those ontological aspects of our being-in-the-world that cannot be spoken of directly. Seeing-as . . . not only implies a saying-as but also a being-as.”Footnote 38 Narrative works (both historical and fictional) function in their referential capacity as ultimately poetic symbols. The important point for our purpose is that history, thus understood, requires imagination for its reconstruction. Narratives properly understood rest on the “pre-narrative capacity of human imagination to act in the world in a symbolically significant manner.”Footnote 39 One way to express it more simply is that “human beings are continually transforming a sequence of life events into a story, creating a plot for a life.”Footnote 40
Ricoeur sees a role for poetry in moving from speculative theory to the ethical because poetry is oriented to action: “It is the function of poetry in its narrative and dramatic form, to propose to the imagination and to its mediation various figures that constitute some many thought experiments by which we learn to link together the ethical aspects of human conduct and happiness and misfortune.”Footnote 41
The implication for mediation of a dispute is quite interesting: should a mediator ask the parties to express their case in poetic narrative? As discussed in greater detail below, the parties may already do so by way of their opening statements. Perhaps the real lesson from Ricoeur is that the mediator should be highly attuned to the parties' use of the poetic in their expressions of their cases or narratives of their histories. The mediator might help identify the parties' use of themes, poetry, analogy, and metaphor to express their cases against each other. Inevitably the parties will express the evil they are suffering as a deviation from the ways things are supposed to be. The evil they experience will be expressed in terms of blame against the other party but also as part of a narrative looking to the future, where such acts are not the end of the story, but where the parties may play a part in changing the situation. In a mediation, the mediator might frame the situation for the parties in terms of a poetic narrative or guide the parties to discover the values and common suffering and shared evil and in doing so help them step outside of the currency of exchange into a future of forgiveness and new possibilities. Discussing the possible responses to such evil, which could include memorials, remembrances, and reparations, may open up the possibility of a letting go, release, and forgiveness.Footnote 42 The mediator might therefore see the role of narratives in terms of four central tasks.
First, narratives can help the parties realize their debt to the historical past. They might see the heroic role played by their predecessors, themselves often victims of oppression, who did not stand idly by but chose to try to change the situation and respond to injustice. Using narrative in this way can teach the parties the continued responsibility or debt that they owe to the dead.
Second, narratives can help parties respect the rival claims of memory and forgetfulness. Forgiveness does not require forgetting, which is anathema to the representatives of innocent victims. Narrative involves a making present what is absent by retrieving pasts and projecting futures. Oral history involves the paradoxical task of imaginatively representing the past as it really was, subject to continuing reinterpretation, both giving presence to the past by virtue of analogizing representation and respecting the otherness of the past by refusing a reduction of the other (the past) to the self (the present of the historian).Footnote 43 In other words, narrative keeps the mediator humble in making any findings involving past events. Narrative history intrinsically involves fiction: plot, composition, character, and point of view. The very uniqueness of individual historical events constitutes the anchor of reference to the real. Narration and explanation go together inasmuch as narrative's evocation of feeling with regard to singular concrete historical events provoke a striving to understand these events, which ultimately is conducive to explaining them.
Third, narratives can be used to cultivate a notion of enlightened self-identity that can help even in the face of religious differences operating on a nonrational plane. For example, certain events, such as the Holocaust call for evocation of the horror of victimization.Footnote 44 Such suffering “reveals the scandal of every theodicy” (explanation of God as acting in history) which “no cunning of reason can ever justify.”Footnote 45 Still, it reveals the same about any idea of God, in that suffering is the universal human condition. So, while suffering is individual and unique (part of an individual's identity), it is also shared.
Finally, narrative histories can be used to lead the parties to recast them in ways that help the parties identify the shared sufferings that each has encountered and evaluate actions in order to see a new possible way of being. If human identity is narrative in character, where memory and imagination are commingled such that they are necessarily reinvented and reconstructed, a couple lessons follow. First, fundamentalism is a form of forgetting: it is a literalization of a story. Second, by virtue of reimagining the other in an empathetic process (remembering oneself-as-another) the possibility of pardon (a kind of forgetting after remembering) and a different, freer future emerges. Ethical memory, as a process involving both illumination and illustration (e.g., of the horrors of the Holocaust), seeks to establish a proper balance between the dual fidelities of memory to the uniqueness and communicability of past events. In other words, narratives “are able to make sorrows bearable” and are thus part of the “work of mourning understood as the acceptance of the irreparable.”Footnote 46
Understanding the role that narrative plays in forming one's identity can help the mediator to make each individual more persuasive and, thereby, more imaginative at evoking the uniqueness of her experience that is also wrapped in the shared of human experience. While the imaginary knows no censorship, as might be suggested by a morality based on abstract rules, narratives do involve an element of ethical solicitation based on an ethics of experience (concerned with cultural paradigms of suffering and action, happiness, and dignity).Footnote 47 The mediator can turn the representative narrator to these concerns and propose a variety of ethical possibilities from which the parties are free to choose.
As a result of the forgoing a mediator can help the parties rehabilitate their notion of self, whose substantial construction as essence or ego has rightly been shattered, by basing identity on the story of a life. Identity includes mutability and change within the cohesion of one lifetime, subject to continual reinterpretation in light of new and old stories we tell about ourselves. The notion of one's identity can be clarified through critical narrative processes, which applies equally to societies and to individuals. The mediator can therefore help the parties see that for their identity to be ethically responsible self-constancy must be informed by self-questioning. It is in the moment of ethical decision that authentic self-constancy, a critical self-understanding open to the other, is manifest.Footnote 48 By acting, the actor transcends narrative through a responsiveness to the other who is irreducible to any or all narratives.Footnote 49
Ricoeur's hermeneutics provides theoretical support for the practices some facilitative mediators currently employ, which they call “problem solving,” often without knowing precisely why such practices work. Facilitative mediators get the parties to first focus on and then change the language they use to negotiate with each other. They try to break deadlock between parties by asking the parties to reframe their negotiations away from position bargaining. They suggest using a language of interest-based Footnote 50 negotiation, or of problem solving.Footnote 51 Transitioning to a language of problem solvingFootnote 52 from position bargaining by asking about underlying needs and goals helps teach Ricoeur's hermeneutics. It situates the parties view of a dispute as resting both in the past and in a story that is yet to be, helping the parties value the past, yet demythologize it, in order to reclaim a more authentic new myth that will give meaning to the group's narrative.
The language of problem solving asks the parties to state their continuing goals and needs going into the future. As a result the parties are urged to see joint problems that need to be solved, including needs for joint security and economic prosperity. They are urged to identify obstacles to resolving these joint needs, including psychological obstacles raised by the prospect of living and working side by side with individuals who are responsible for committing atrocities against innocent members of society. It follows that any ability to overcome such obstacles would require acts of forgiveness of heroic proportions. Imagining a future “utopia,” in which the parties live with each other in peace and prosperity, may be the only incentive for overcoming the existing cycle of violence and mutual destruction.
Still, troubling questions remain. Ricoeur seems to sidestep binary alternatives and suggest instead that perhaps it is in the realm of the traditional—narratives of founding events publicly commemorated—that authority is grounded.Footnote 53 In ancient times the very antiquity of authority was considered its legitimation: “Authority relied on memory.”Footnote 54 As a result, the parties may, for example, attribute their beliefs to Allah that Allah will punish them if they do not continue to try to rid the land of infidels, when the real authority is ancient nature-historical memory. Or, for example, a persistent belief that Yawheh will drive them into the sea if they do not establish a holy nation determined to follow Yawheh's laws, may be attributing a Jewish belief about God's will in the past as authority for God's will for Jews today.
For Ricoeur it is absolutely essential that traditional narratives be reviewed and renewed so that the creative imagination can rediscover the essential liberating narrative embedded in the traditional narrative.Footnote 55 For example, Israel's escape from Egypt is a narrative that resonates with the sense of freedom and liberation experienced by any group that has once been enslaved and then set free. Reviewing that founding narrative can serve religious Jews as a narrative rediscovering the human suffering experienced by other groups longing for freedom, whether they be minorities of race, religion, or gender.Footnote 56
The Process of Temporalization
The “process of temporalization which makes our present actions meaningful [operates] by interpreting them in terms of a recollected past and a projected future.”Footnote 57 Authentic tradition and genuine innovation belong together. Tradition works as the living transmission of an innovation always capable of being reactivated by a return to the most creative moments of poetic activity. Reciprocally, innovation remains a form of behavior governed by precedents for behavior derived from history and culture.
Ricoeur's hermeneutics may give mediators a philosophical approach that helps them better respond to narratives that contain descriptions of past injustices. As a starting point a mediator can inquire about what meaning the party ascribes to its interpretation of a past event. The mediator should listen to see if the party has given divine or cosmic importance to the event and should inquire into the symbolism that the description entails. Insight into these meanings can be signaled by the language used by the party to describe what has happened in the past.
Ricoeur's hermeneutics can also be used to deal with the phenomenon of evil.Footnote 58 In the face of legitimate claims by each party of the evil done to them by the other, the mediator will face a significant challenge to making peace. Each can make the case for calling the other evil. In particular the mediator will have to look at the injustice described to examine what the narrator may mean by the word evil. Two responses to evil seem possible. One is to see evil as suffering and lament the suffering. The other is to see evil and wrongdoing that needs to be blamed and punished.Footnote 59 Again Ricoeur's hermeneutics provides valuable insights. The problem with myth is that it incorporates evil into narratives of origin, linking human moral choice to cosmological cycles of fate, destiny, or predestination. The evil figure is an alienated figure determined by some force beyond itself to do what it does—the devil made him do it.
On the other hand, understanding the concept of evil will help the mediator understand the mythological character of the narrative and help the parties imagine the good that can come out of the evil. To facilitate this “seeing,” the parties need to be guided to a renewed awareness that they have a tendency to see the evil that has befallen them either as the doing of God to punish them for their failures in the past or as something brought about by the devil, in the form of the actions of their enemies, and that the logic of the latter view leads one to see one's opponents as the devil, and so to demonize them.Footnote 60
Ricoeur's practical understanding of evil can help the parties view evil as distinct from speculative theory and as oriented to action. Mediators can help the parties see evil as enigmatic, contingent, and singular. Evil ought not to be and should therefore be struggled against.Footnote 61 Evil is something suffered, but that calls for an individual and collective response. It must be “worked through” via a narrative of mourning, which turns passive lament into the possibility of active complaint or protest to make future evil resistible. As a result the parties may be led to ask, “Do we have a responsibility to try to end this evil?” Such a question is particularly appropriate in cases where the dispute involves religious identity. It is at the heart of any group identity question, whether Sunni, Shia, Christian, or Jew. One can ask: Is this continued fighting really what God/Allah intends for his people? How is it that the divine wants them to live? In other words, evil can be seen as a problem that needs solving. Options for dealing with evil will often include the need for peace, the prevention of future evil, and a response to past evil that refers the parties to concepts of justice including responses of retribution and or punishment.Footnote 62 In other words, regardless of their religious differences the parties are bound in a common history that each assumes it is living through a relationship with a God that created all that there is. Their histories share a hermeneutic circle.Footnote 63
The Power of the Possible
Ricoeur's hermeneutic circle is that of historical intersubjectivity: we enter an ongoing conversation that does not come to a totalizing end (the process is circular not linear) and to which we must familiarize ourselves by recognizing the distance we in our situation have from others we seek to encounter in their situation and thereby overcome that distance to a degree.Footnote 64 Or as Kearney would have it, “hermeneutics endeavors to render near what is far—temporally, geographically, scientifically, culturally—by reappropriating those meanings that have been ‘distantiated’ from our consciousness.”Footnote 65 Texts bring about semantic innovation through symbols, metaphors, and configurations (plots).Footnote 66 Innovation is in a dialectical relation with tradition: “Tradition needs innovation in order to sustain itself as a living transmission of meaning capable of being reactivated in its inaugural moments, while innovation needs tradition in order to make sense as a form of expression governed by rules.”Footnote 67
Ricoeur transposes his analysis of the relation between tradition and innovation to the sociopolitical sphere—the social imaginary (the body of collective stories, histories, and ideologies that inform our modes of sociopolitical action). The social imagination serves an ideological role of grounding a social identity and a utopian role of the disruptive projection of alternatives to the present.Footnote 68 For Ricoeur a poetics of creation is linked to an ethics of just action.Footnote 69 In this regard he mirrors Aristotle, who sought “a good life with and for others in just institutions.”Footnote 70
Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophy can be construed as centering on the relationship between poetics and ethics. He details how a process that focuses on demythologizing ones historical narrative and then reimagining and projecting that story into the future can lead to looking at one's life as if it were more than a zero-sum game. Such a process can use the analogy of seeing to promote a vision for the future. Such use of a narrative invites ethical judgment to submit itself to the imaginative variations proper to fiction to uncover the essential connections between our actions and their consequences as good or evil.Footnote 71 Vision promotes initiative. Ricoeur argues that through stories we learn to plot our own lives and to project possibilities for our societies, with ethical intervention in history occurring in responsible decisions occurring in the tension between the horizon of expectation (future/utopia) and the space of experience.Footnote 72 Using narrative can also develop empathy, and narratives enables us to identify imaginatively with others, thereby extending the circle of selfhood.Footnote 73
Mediators must note how the role of the poetic is more explicit in religious belief systems with a Creator God.Footnote 74 In other words, understanding how humans know that God makes God's self known as a Creator God makes for a human epistemology that is ultimately story making. Linking human imagination with a belief in a Creator God enables Ricoeur to transcend the sterile, nineteenth-century debates over whether all our behavior is self-interested as a Utilitarian would argue, or whether acts of disinterested generosity can and do occur. A Creator God's call for humanity to continually express its better nature makes such “better being” part of the human story.Footnote 75
As a result, Ricoeur's hermeneutics provides a mechanism for disputing parties to realize the shared nature of their knowing, even in those case where the disputes are in part religious. Mediators can use Ricoeur's philosophy as a practical way of getting the parties to think poetically. In thinking poetically, acting poetically, and dwelling poetically, the parties can discover that all poetic modalities create possibilities for imagining poetically. As Kearney has said of Ricoeur's poetics, “They are ways of realizing the fundamental possibilities of what we are. For as the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘possibility is the fuse lit by the spark of imagination.’”Footnote 76
In sum, Ricoeur provides for mediation a theory that informs a process. That process allows reason and faith to be in dialogue with each other. In that dialogue, important questions can be raised about the power and possibility derived from one's shared narrative with one's people to renew an understanding of who they are and where they have been and to imagine a better future as they go forward. At least one practical outcome of such a process is that it can raise the possibility of forgiving as one of the autonomous choices that frees peacemaking from being a zero-sum game with justice.
THE CHALLENGE TO MEDIATING DISPUTES: BETWEEN JUSTICE AND FORGIVENESS
Importantly for peace and reconciliation, after taking the parties through a process that shows the historical complexity of their myths and creates the space for the role of vision and the imagination, the mediator can put on the table one response that is always possible: to forgive and be reconciled to the opposing party. The parties may never have contemplated such a possibility because the conditions for forgiveness—that the other side would admit responsibility and sincerely commit to ending the atrocities—did not seem possible. Asking what a party to a conflict might need to see in order to think seriously about forgiveness might prompt a first-ever consideration of the prospects of forgiveness on behalf of both parties. So we turn next to an examination of what might be involved in mediation where forgiveness is an option for one or both of the parties.
Forgiveness can be hard to define, and Ricoeur only takes us so far in his understanding of forgiveness, but he still makes an important contribution. To Ricoeur, pardon or forgiveness is intrinsically gratuitous, surpassing the limits of rational calculation and explanation.Footnote 77 Ricoeur's important insight is that forgiveness occurs only outside a currency of exchange; it stands outside the rational and bargaining process of justice and exists, if at all, in the creative imagination of one or both of the parties.
Before being carried away by Ricoeur's hermeneutics we must look at the apparent contradiction between justice and forgiveness. Here a renewed understanding of mediation in comparison to formal legal process is particularly helpful, including, first, a definition of what forgiveness may require. In this regard, it is helpful to explore the traditional religious roots of forgiveness to determine whether a secular understanding can be developed apart from these religious roots. Second, it is useful to explore how human justice, as opposed to divine justice, seems to require a legal analysis: it requires clarity about what law has been violated but also has a fact-finding aspect (to determine if the alleged wrongdoer actually committed the illegal act). Further, before meaningful forgiveness can occur, some aspects of what justice requires will need to be provided for the actual victims of the atrocities, for, as a corollary to the legal understanding of justice, the victims need to know what they are forgiving if their forgiveness is to be truly informed and truly voluntary. The perpetrators may also need “due process” in order to receive forgiveness, since the forgiving party needs to understand that whatever confession of guilt has been made has not been the result of coercion. Finally, whether the process of forgiveness in a mediation can sufficiently replicate or make substitutions for the requirements of legal justice to bring about a moral peace and reconciliation must be examined.
First, what do we mean by forgiveness? Understanding the role that forgiveness plays in reconciliation between disputants involved in past injustices involves first seeing what it means in a religious context, as a way a person reconciles with his or her God. Then after understanding its religious history the task is to examine its meaning in a context where humans are offering forgiveness to each other, either within a religious context or to those outside their religious group.
The origin of forgiveness is commonly thought of growing out of a religious context, as between a human and his or her Savior or Creator.Footnote 78 Whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian (Catholic or Reformed), the story of a religious people is in relationship to their Creator. As Ricoeur shows, it is in an understanding of human history in relationship to a Creator that one gets meaning out of asking this question: Because of your history, tradition, or traditions, what action do you now think is required of you? In the face of human responsibility for failing to live up to the Creator's law, the religious human seeks forgiveness and reconciliation with his or her Creator.
God's forgiveness is outside of what is required of God for his creation. God can do what God wants with his creation. On the other hand, common to most religious faiths is a belief that God's forgiveness teaches something about God: that God can put aside past wrongs against God and treat his creatures as if they had not committed those wrongs. Common to the monotheistic religions is the view that God's forgiveness has two conditions: the person seeking forgiveness must truly confess his or her wrongs to God, and the seeker must commit him- or herself not to do those same acts again in the future. This narrative of forgiveness, then, leads to a common question: Once forgiven, how does God want you to live and be true to what God has created in you?
Despite the religious origins of forgiveness, moral philosophy has shown that forgiveness can be given a meaning apart from an act of God or a command of God.Footnote 79 By treating God's forgiveness as something that is required of humans to grant each other, forgiveness has meaning apart from the divine. There are five aspects of the forgiveness that might be granted to other human beings, and these must be understood to see how forgiveness and transformative justice might work.
First, there is a distinction between the conditions for forgiving and forgiveness itself. Second, forgiveness teaches us about the human condition. Third, human forgiveness does not require forgetting.Footnote 80 Fourth, forgiveness does not require that one treats the act that caused the harm as if it had never occurred, only that the victim choose to treat the wrongdoer as a person and as if that wrongdoer did not commit the act. Finally, the act of forgiving may involve the victim's agreeing to a deterrence theory of punishment, rather than a retributive theory of punishment. Let us take each of these in turn.Footnote 81
Some say forgiveness is a matter of feelings. Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton, for example, are proponents of this view. Thus I may forgive you in my heart of hearts or even after you are dead.Footnote 82 To Richard Swinburne, however, forgiveness is what you do: you choose to treat me as not being the originator or responsible for an act by which I wronged you. Feelings need not be involved.Footnote 83
The key point in either view is that real understanding of the historical context of the violence is essential to forgiveness. For someone to choose to forgive another for the harm done to that person, the perpetrator needs to have actually done the act that caused the harm or be responsible in some way for the act that caused the harm. Otherwise, how one chooses to treat someone is independent of what he or she has actually done. If the person is not to blame, then forgiveness is not the appropriate word for what a victim grants to the actor.
The law may define the blameworthy act or it may be a matter of morals. In either case, the actor must be “blameworthy” if forgiveness is to take place. The third feature of the context in which forgiveness may occur is that the victim remembers the deed and who did it, and continues to condemn it.Footnote 84 Feelings are involved, in that the victim feels both resentment and anger for what has been done to the victim, but they are not determinative.
In the light of this context then, the forgiving party chooses not to act on these feelings of anger and resentment, but instead chooses to treat the actor as if the actor is not blameworthy for the actions committed. There are a number of things to note here. First, forgiveness does not require forgetting. This is crucial for a victim to acknowledge in making any decision to forgive the actor. After all, if it were otherwise, the victim is right to say that forgiveness is impossible. The denial of the dinge-an sich—the thing in itself—that happened and its effect on one's memory is, in its essential respects, simply not possible. But as forgetting is not necessary, it then becomes a choice: whether to act in spite of the memory in order that forgetting not be a precondition for forgiveness to occur.
In addition, treating the actor as not being blameworthy does not mean that the actor condones the act itself. The deed can continue to be condemned, while the actor may not be held responsible. The law (and the state) is comfortable with such notions. For example, murder can be both justified and excused. Murder is justified if it is done for protection (self-defense or defense of others), is coerced (duress), or is done against the will of the actor. Murder is excused if the actor lacked the requisite capacity to form the specific intent to cause the harm defined by the law (insanity, incapacity, or incompetency), or was coerced by fear, or threats to their loved ones.Footnote 85 As in the domestic legal context, in the context of mediation, war and acts of violence may be justified as the defense of others or excused because the acts were coerced or lacked the requisite blameworthy intent. The victims could choose to see these mixed motives—use of violence to protect oneself and loved ones—as, at a minimum, a complicating factor that may mitigate against the blameworthiness of the act committed.
However, that may not be how the victims in a dispute see what has happened to them and their families.Footnote 86 Where the victims are truly innocent, or not even a member of the targeted group, killings may be rightfully and unconditionally understood as murder. Furthermore, victims' worth and dignity is impugned as a collateral effect of the intended act.Footnote 87 To the victims and their representatives, the actor has treated the innocent victims unjustly. They see in the actor's defense an attempt to demonize the victim, as if he or she was somehow to blame, or a refusal to recognize the dignity or human worth of the persons killed.Footnote 88 Whatever harm has been done was of lesser importance to the actor's own survival or power. The victims may see themselves as having been treated as less than human or as collateral damage in a selfish attempt to maintain or gain power.
The harm done by a decision to put others at risk may not be blameworthy as a matter of law yet be blameworthy as a matter of morality. International law may not be sufficiently formed to make specific acts of war illegal, yet general principles of just war theory predominate the law of nations.Footnote 89 Decisions to use deadly force may be made without regard to the exact proportionality of the harm they cause or mistakes resulting in “collateral” damage to innocent civilians during the use of that force.Footnote 90 A certain indeterminacy results where the law of nations commingles intentional acts with negligent acts. Indeterminacy results when acts during war involve mistaken understandings of the extent of the threat the actor was facing or of the dangers that were involved.Footnote 91
Other complications that mediators will have to manage involve whether the moral law forbids acts of violence in the name of self-defense where too large a number of innocent victims are caused harm in the process. What victims may experience as an act of evil and lack of respect for fundamental human dignity—the indiscriminate killing of civilians—is experienced by the actors as part of a narrative where they are the heroes: they are justified; their acts protected their wives and children; their very identity as a people was threatened, so their acts were motivated by self-defense or survival. In addition an actor may be “justified” because his or her acts were necessary to deter future acts of terrorism: not to respond with sufficient force and brutality would encourage others to commit acts of terror. The actors, for example, may believe that no negotiations with terrorists are necessary because such negotiation only encourages other terrorists. While victims of previous acts of violence may perceive callousness towards innocent victims, the actors may contend that allegations of personal vengeance or grabs for personal power ignore the actual tortured nature of the decision to use violence to prevent future acts of violence.
Regardless of whether the violation is a matter of moral or international law, it is important to see how human forgiveness tries to make up for the lack of omniscience about who, why, and how harm was committed. Human forgiveness recognizes a moral hazard in granting amnesty before a clear understanding of the circumstances has taken place. Otherwise the forgiveness will be granted too easily, with insufficient reparations, sincerity, or honesty. True forgiveness that freely makes the trade between what might be required in payment and the nature of the harm done seems to involve at least a “finding” of facts and a judgment of relative blameworthiness of the actors. One does not, for example, ask a governor for a pardon without the governor's first getting a careful and clear understanding of what was done and why it was done.
Yet even in these situations it is common for an adjudicative process to see these matters as involving the framing of narratives and a certain deconstruction of these narratives in a choice between a winner and a loser. Forgiveness is an option, but only after these findings have been made. In a mediation, forgiveness is imagined first, and then a process is created to work out whether forgiveness will be granted by the victims. It is done before the individual perpetrator's motives have been adjudicated. It is done in the hope that the individual victims will be led into a process where they, too, can see that the conditions for forgiveness are possible: (1) their act of forgiving is voluntary, (2) it does not involve forgetting, (3) their forgiveness involves some judgment that the actor has indeed committed the blameworthy act, (4) the perpetrators have sincerely asked for forgiveness and expressed contrition through the payment that is exacted, and (5) the victims will choose to treat the perpetrator as not having been responsible.
In other words, mediation must help the parties see what forgiveness will involve on the part of the forgiver. At a minimum it will require a reframing of the narrative they tell about the harm that has been caused, treating the actor as not being responsible or blameworthy even if the actor is causally responsible for the harm done.Footnote 92 But to reach that point, another process needs to be provided for. Processes are needed for determining the truth about what happened and for judging the contrition on the part of the actors commensurate with the act committed and the harm done.
In adjudication of these matters, the distinction between levels of blameworthiness are extensively examined so that findings can be made about what happened and punishment that truly fits the crime can be determined. The decision is not left to the parties themselves to sort out because they are likely to get it wrong. A person's own perspectives and experience are thought to inevitably bias any fair determination of what has happened in the past.Footnote 93 Mediators are said to be involved in a different sort of process: they are trying to facilitate the parties to make the tricky trade-offs between not knowing the exact nature of the actors' responsibility or blameworthiness for the harm that has been caused and deciding whether they want truth in trade for justice or will grant forgiveness before knowing the level of blameworthiness that can be attributed to the actors.
While Ricoeur's hermeneutics points to a process other than adjudication, to be useful in mediation it must deal finally and transparently with its nonrational limitations.Footnote 94 After all, a formal legal framework is based on a rational decision-making system agreed to either explicitly, through theories of universal rights, or through fictions derived from consent in a state of nature. When the victim chooses to forgive, the victim does so outside the logic of the law: when one commits certain acts he or she “agrees” to be made to take responsibility for his or her actions. Appeals to forgiveness, especially because it is one's duty to forgive, are nonrational, religious arguments based on faith. As such they are choices that are made “off the table” of rationality.Footnote 95 Claims based in the nonrationality of faith share in a certain human humility: humans are not God. This gives each human a certain moral equivalence with the other. That equivalence is a humility that comes from a recognition that their knowledge is based in part on faith, or a nonrational basis.
I am not claiming here that we will be able to find in pluralism a common belief in the dignity of humans, but there is enough in Ricoeur to support the argument that humans will always be dealing with each other out of this dual aspect of their natures—that they are not God, and so their knowing occurs through a combination of logic and reasoning that is based on both rational arguments and nonrational arguments, or faith statements. This common understanding of our being and knowing gives impetus for the creation of law—or rules to live by. Since much of what we say we know is ultimately nonrational, we must deal with each other according to universal principles: to do unto others as we would have them do to us. In other words, we deal with each other in humility and create processes that will try to factor out the most extreme forces of irrationality, hate, anger, and fear.
As a result, there is a word of caution here for mediators. Societies have evolved legal processes to try to contain these nonrational forces when managing disputes. The law prescribes what a crime is and what will be recognized as a defense. Some societies give to juries the job of “finding” the facts. Ranges of punishments are prescribed that are pre-set in order that they be based on theories of consent and notice. These pre-agreed systems of finding facts and making law help ensure equal treatment of each other in the light of that law, both substantive and procedural in nature. By choosing to empower different bodies with these powers we hide the nonrational nature of fact finding. We set up politically authorized processes for determining facts in order to mitigate the nonrational bases of our knowing and ensure some measure of equal treatment under the law.
When parties engage in a mediation process they are choosing to deal with each other without the protections otherwise provided by the legal process. The question remains whether parties to mediation can then deal with each other without providing the guarantees of moral equality that can be better maintained by a formal legal environment. Yet they may share the nonrational belief that they can collectively rise above the cycle of hate and violence that has enveloped the two sides of this dispute. They may not agree on the common dignity of all humans, but they may believe that they have the freedom to rise above their circumstances and choose a better future. In the shared humility with which they approach the nonrational nature of their gamble to choose to forgive, they may share a common vulnerability. In their common vulnerability they may then choose to forgive rather than destroy, choose to cooperate rather than conquer, and choose to make peace rather than perpetuate violence.
Still, based on what Ricoeur has shown, while mediation may facilitate a discussion of forgiveness, ultimately the mediator will only be able to raise it as a possibility for the parties to choose as a means to peace. This is because the forgiveness stands outside of the logic of exchange, and forgiveness can seldom be implemented on behalf of other victims. Moreover, even that forgiveness is not meaningful because a mediation process also stands outside the rationality of the law. As a result, forgiveness chosen in a mediative process will always be contingent and, at the very least, fragile. While it is tempting then to prescribe a truth and reconciliation process as a matter of moral philosophy, the final forgiveness stage will be left unresolved.
Can these Ricoeurian tools be applied in the real world of disputes? We turn next to present-day international conflicts to see what the implication of Ricoeur's theory may be for an international dispute where atrocities have occurred on both sides.
RICOEUR'S THEORY OF MEDIATING MEETS REALITY ON AN INTERNATIONAL STAGE
As we have seen, Ricoeur's poetic imagining of a utopia can spark the imagination to consider the possibilities of forgiveness. Yet Ricoeur's theory alone cannot overcome the very real psychological and practical inhibitors the disputants have during mediation.Footnote 96 For while Ricoeur's theory can inform the work of helping the parties to empathize with the “other's” perspectives and can inspire the energy necessary to imaginative problem solving,Footnote 97 woven throughout this discussion has been the interplay between Ricoeur's philosophy and the psychology of victim forgiveness. For a mediation process to help the parties generate empathy and then inspire energy to be creative, it must be teamed with practical techniques drawn from social psychology.Footnote 98 These will be important to employ for maximizing the benefits that can be gained from problem-solving mediations.
These practical difficulties include the psychological and moral capacities of the individuals involved; the difficulty in finding representatives with the gravitas to negotiate on behalf of disputants; agency problem that arise from both a multiplicity of atrocities and the multi-party nature of most disputes over the dispute's history; the time that a hermeneutical process can take to develop the poetic imagination in the exigent circumstances of violence; and finally, the ability of the post-conflict peace process to match the alleged perpetrators of violence with their victims and victims' families.Footnote 99
Can Ricoeur's Theory Overcome Victim Incapacities and Agency Problems?
To be effective, the mediator must be fully cognizant of the therapeutic nature of the mediator's efforts and must also understand the limitations inherent in the therapeutic model, which depends, finally, not only on the individual autonomous choices of the disputing parties but also on the autonomous choices of the parties' representatives. If either the victims or their representatives feel coerced or tricked into their choice to forgive, then the moral conditions for actual forgiveness are likely to be sorely lacking.Footnote 100 To some extent, then, any sustainable peace will depend not only on the strength of character of the actual representatives to the settlement talks and the representatives' moral courage to withstand the political fallout that is bound to occur in their agreeing to use forgiveness as part of any dispute settlement, but also, finally, on the moral courage of the actual victims to choose to forgive and live as if those responsible were not responsible for the harm that was done to them. Only in very rare circumstances can any agreements reached by these representatives offer forgiveness on behalf of victims of past atrocities—perhaps only in those cases where the representative themselves have suffered great harm and are willing to forgive. Otherwise, the ultimate reconciliation will arrive only if and when the victims themselves choose forgiveness in and through a process designed for that forgiveness to truly occur.Footnote 101
Who counts as victims and how to reconcile the different psychological factors, both between victims and victim types, will also be crucial to the outcome of any mediation process.Footnote 102 Victims can be categorized as those who were physically harmed; those who were forced to leave their homes; those whose immediate family members were killed, “disappeared,” raped, or suffered other physical harm; those whose extended family were harmed; and those who suffered the insult and humiliation of being subjected to demeaning conduct or suffered more vicariously from the knowledge of physical harm or humiliation suffered by a group, tribe, or sect to which they belong. Their particular age and life experiences preceding the trauma can also affect the choice of intervention type most likely to lead to healing and reconciliation.
Psychologists will be quick to point out the special hazards of mediation involving victims who personally suffered harm. Post-traumatic stress can be caused from a reliving of initial trauma. With children this can be particularly damaging to their psyche. It is almost better that the memory remain repressed or dormant than for it to be relived.Footnote 103 For older, more experienced adults a group mediation that has some of the components of a Ricoeurian hermeneutical process (ability to focus the mediation on the common ground—humanity or vulnerability—of disputants, to rationalize the conflict, to manage disputants anger, to expand disputants egocentric view, to spend the time to acknowledge the history and complexity of the conflict and to empathize with the others feelings, to treat all views with respect, to air grief without dominating the process, to accept some responsibility at a local level for how to live together in the future)Footnote 104 has a greater chance to be effective.
In addition the agency problems are likely to be great. The agents at any mediation are likely themselves part of the decision-making team tasked with negotiating amnesty for those who have been engaged in the violence. Their principals will demand that any peace be contingent on an understanding that they, the principals, will not be tried for past wrongdoing. The problem is that such amnesty is not something the representatives of the other side can give, except in a representative capacity.Footnote 105 Yet the demands of peace placed on the parties create strategies that delay determining the exact nature of the forum in which an individual's justice and the opportunity for forgiveness will be decided.Footnote 106 At a minimum the parties are given mixed messages about the justice constraints that will likely arise after the conflict has ended if these issues are not attended to. The representatives are placed in the untenable position of either blocking an agreement that would make peace with justice or facing the wrath of their principals for agreeing to peace without getting adequate assurances about the end game of the agreement.Footnote 107
Will Parties Representatives Agree to Take the Risks of a Just, Forgiving Process?
As this discussion has shown, the paradigm of forgiveness requires peacemakers to take a fresh look at the distinctions between adjudication and mediation as methods of dispute resolution.Footnote 108 Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been employed to help peacemakers understand how attempts to design hybrid dispute resolution processes, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, will often fail if they do not involve the parties to a peace process in a clear understanding of their agreement. Party representatives will often lack either the moral capacity or the moral standing to effectuate meaningful forgiveness. Again, let us take the conflict in Syria as an example: Will Assad choose to act more like Peter Botha, the president of South Africa who refused to negotiate an end to apartheid, or F. W. de Klerk, the Nobel Laureate who eventually agreed to share power with Nelson Mandela? De Klerk had the virtue to compromise, born out of an understanding that apartheid could not survive, and opened up the negotiation process with Mandela that led to the end of apartheid.Footnote 109 Will a person or persons in the Syrian opposition communities be willing and able to put aside the desire for vengeance born of personal and tribal animosities and speak like Mandela or Desmond Tutu, to open the way for truth and forgiveness as a trade-off for retribution? While history teaches us that these figures were “made” of their circumstances, not born into these roles,Footnote 110 whether a person of such character will emerge in an individual conflict is always an open question. Such a role cannot be forced on the leadership of any party. While Ricoeur's hermeneutics opens up the possibility that a De Klerk or Mandela will emerge, it does not necessarily produce a leader on one or both sides who will see it in their capacity to create the circumstances where forgiveness can take place.
In addition both sides will often have conflicting interests in trying to avoid responsibility they may have for their own actions. The best result for ending the conflict that might be possible in the immediate situation may be necessarily limited to the mediation of an end to hostilities, prisoner exchanges, and an agreement to later work out the conditions of a meaningful reconciliation.
Finding the Time for a Ricoeurian Hermeneutical Mediation
As Ricoeur himself discusses, the ability for any victim to reach the conclusion to grant forgiveness will take time and reflection; will require a process of understanding the nature of narrative and of their individual and collective story; and then will require the energy to imagine a new course that may include forgiveness.Footnote 111 One frustration of the international community watching cycles of violence unfold again and again—whether in Israel and Gaza, Syria, Sudan, or Ukraine—is the seemingly mediable, and therefore preventable, nature of such violence if the various parties could have been brought together.Footnote 112 One particularly fruitful time for the use of Ricoeurian mediation is before the violence starts and before the atrocities occur. Making the space and time for leaders to meet and discuss the dispute before it happens provides the best chance at reaching a peaceful and just result. Yet history shows that the need for leaders to appear responsive and strong in the face of threats often overwhelms the decision-making process. Once the atrocities occur and their number and extent grow, the time that it will take to mediate will grow commensurate with the number of victims and the number of atrocities. Post-conflict complications come from the fact that in many conflicts the rebels refuse to mediate on the broader issues because they demand justice for multiple past atrocities.Footnote 113
Matching Victims and Perpetrators?
The practical difficulties of setting up a mediation, either by the United Nations or with the help of a nongovernmental organization such as The Carter Center, are familiar to mediators, whether they are involved in an international or a domestic mediation process. Yet while familiar, these difficulties must be carefully considered and dealt with strategically. Ideally, the parties have agreed to send representatives to talk together. The more legitimate these representatives—either because of the selection process that identified them or because they have earned the respect of their parties—the more likely the process will achieve lasting agreements.
These representatives need to be assured that whatever agreement is reached would be subject to their individual consent and would be subjected (ideally) to a process that will ensure its legitimacy and transparency (to guard against being bribed or bought off by outside influences). During the mediation itself, the representatives would be urged to be respectful to each other and listen to each side's positions. The mediation would allow each of the parties to make its case against the other, and it then would see if there was room for the parties to find a process for resolving their dispute and taking steps toward making peace.Footnote 114
In many cases there would be a number of challenges, not only from a clash of both religions and historical perspectives but also from the psychological forces at work when enemies sit down to make peace. Heads of state demand the continued right to protect the state (and the elites in their group) and to rule. These demands are often made preconditions to any agreement. One side might insist that the settlement ensures that the state will be secular and that guarantees need to be provided in the constitution that no religious group impose its religious views on the others. Another group might insist that the state be constituted as a religious state, for example, a Jewish state or an Islamist state subject to Sharia. From the outset there might be a clash that involves questions of religion and fundamental democratic principles.
Moreover, there would be conflicting stories to tell. Innocent victims of past violence will want justice. From rebel perspectives, innocent victims of a state's security forces will have grievances that will need to be addressed. A state's failure to protect the minority groups, failure to provide for religious freedom, and failure to institute democratic changes causes a loss of legitimacy. Heads of state will want recognition that they have a right of self-defense, to protect the government in power from acts of violence by insurgent groups who have not been acting through the structures provided in the government. Furthermore, the fear that religious rulers will institute greater religious oppression on dissident groups left in the state will need to be addressed.Footnote 115
It should not be surprising in this context if a party ascribes motives to the actors and characterizes or demonizes the actors and their actions as evil.Footnote 116 At a minimum, the parties interpret their experience as being perpetrated by an unjust evil opponent. Of course, the rebels will point to the government's indiscriminate use of violence against the minority group as justification for its own use of violence in opposition. The various groups will likely import a collective righteous motive to justify their conduct. This motive will soon become part of the myth of origin that explains the history of their movement's identity.
Issues of justice become intertwined with the psychology of the mediation processes for addressing the dispute. Whose story is “right?” Who has more rights violated and more victims that need redress? Does retelling the disputing party's story lead to empathy or only to stronger commitment to redress the harms done to and by the opposing party? These are some of the practical challenges any mediator would face.Footnote 117
Many mediators remain uncertain about what role they are expected to play during the presentation of these case statements.Footnote 118 The mediator may be troubled that past atrocities committed against innocents show a level of hate and lack of respect that will not bode well for the groups living side by side in the future. Also, on an international stage the mediator may be expected to play a role in helping the parties break out of tired cycles of making demands on each other and setting up preconditions to moving forward that then mean loss of face should any party back away from such demands.Footnote 119 In the real world however, international mediators report that there are times, perhaps in most cases, when the case statements seem to result in a different effect.Footnote 120 Instead of building trust, the parties seem to become more passionate about describing the wrongs they experienced in the past. Their demands for justice seem to become more hardened. Instead of moving easily into a conversation about creative problem solving, they stay fixed on their demands and positions. Instead of talking in terms of shared needs and goals, each party seems interested only in getting the maximum they can from the mediation process.
Diplomacy teaches that making peace is hard work. Mediators are often tempted to try to get the parties to forgo opening statements altogether and move straight to bargaining, especially where they see identity issues in play.Footnote 121 Identity mediations often end in deadlock because the parties believe that in compromising they will deny who they are. In other words, to compromise without redress will not only dishonor and disrespect the value of the person previously harmed but also cause the party representative to lose identity. In addition, if the opponents' history is left unexamined, it will be only that much harder for the parties to discuss forgiveness and reconciliation.
How can the rebels make peace with a head of state after he is seen to have starved or gassed his own citizens? A mediator's suggestion to forgo opening statements may present the parties with a difficult choice. They may feel that the mediator is not sufficiently cognizant of the harm that has been done to the victims on each side. On the other hand, each side may be unwilling to hear and confront its own wrongdoing and want to move to problem solving, hoping they will not have to admit their responsibilities. They may feel either coerced into giving up on the rights of victims or relieved that the process of mediation will help them avoid their own wrongdoing. The mediator is caught in a desire to put the past aside to focus on making peace but is unsure whether in doing so the parties will only be delaying the inevitable discussion of the atrocities that each side has committed against each other.
Mediation of international conflict provides examples of the problems in this regard. In any dispute, it does not take long to develop opposing narratives about who is responsible for starting the dispute, who was the wrongdoer, and why the parties continue in conflict. It is tempting for mediators to see that the parties are not now ready nor will they ever be ready to put such grievances behind them. The disputes are labeled intractable. The parties are said not to be ready to make peace; or the time is said not to be ripe for them to make peace.Footnote 122
Is there nothing to do but wait for one party to “win” or for the parties to wear themselves out in the killing game, at the cost of the lives of future innocent victims? Whether long-standing disputes like those between the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Israel and Palestine, or more recent disputes like Syria, rehashing who was at fault seems an exercise in futility. Often, even disputes seen as recent may have roots in history. Yet by seeing the disputes as being rooted in history, Ricoeur finds a key to a transformative process.
For example, Syria's recent civil war might be seen as arising out of the Arab Spring. Or it could be seen as a result of the long simmering animosity between the ruling Ba'ath Party, and various Sunni tribes. Or it could be seen as the result of the artificial Sikes-Picot division of the Middle East between the French and the British after World War I, whereby tribes were split up into different states, secular ruling governments were formed, and these ruling groups stole the countries' resources and repressed the various tribes now trapped in the states' borders. In any case, it takes little time for the different sides to develop very different versions of the dispute's history. Such narratives become part of their traditions or myths that are said to define who they are. And even recent disputes have narratives that are subject to many different formulations and demystifications. A trip through these different potential stories and causes can help demythologize each party's view of the dispute.Footnote 123 Again, such a demythologizing process will take time.
In any event, the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur can help the mediator use the parties' histories in a way that can both make peace and provide a path toward a settlement that, because it will more likely address the justice issues that still remain, will be more sustainable. The shift is subtle but nonetheless transformative. In the right hands, it should be possible to lead the parties to a deeper understanding of the complexity of their histories by examining what may be myth, what may be tradition, and what traditions they may be relying on in the retelling of their stories. Only then will there be a chance that they will be brought to the question of whether the way things are is the way things need to be, and whether the parties themselves bear any responsibility to end suffering and live into a better future. Again, nonetheless, the need for forgiveness and the requirements of forgiveness will likely present significant challenges for the parties to reach a lasting peace.Footnote 124
What is clear is that Ricoeur's hermeneutics calls the mediator to play a more active role in examining each side's narrative. The neutrality, moral character, and international standing of the mediator are also critical. It is important to note that Ricoeur's hermeneutics was developed in religious communities where disputes had arisen over the interpretation of sacred texts.Footnote 125 Perhaps implicit in its efficacy was the moral standing of the mediator in this religious community. Perhaps peaceful resolution of such disputes often resulted after the mediator demonstrated the requisite empathy, respect, and staying power with the disputants, in order that everyone could develop the safe spaces needed to engage their poetic imaginations.
What emerges is a renewed understanding of the dialogic nature of narrative. As discussed earlier, to Ricoeur, the crisis of modernity is the movement toward a schism between a calcified tradition and an ahistorical utopia.Footnote 126 It is a mediator's ethical duty to engage in the strategic praxis sensitive to the concrete steps that need to be taken toward realizing what is “desirable and reasonable.”Footnote 127 Most importantly, it is a mediator's ethical duty to seek to liberate the untapped potentialities of inherited meaning.Footnote 128 As a practical matter, how might the mediator help facilitate this effect?
We can see how developments in modern mediation theory correspond to Ricoeur's emphasis on language and imagination. Ever since Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes Footnote 129 and Menkel-Meadow's description of problem solving,Footnote 130 or interest-based bargaining,Footnote 131 alternatives to position bargaining have been widely seen as a theory for negotiations and mediation that can help break deadlocks in intractable disputes. Yet little care has been taken to understand why or how shifts in the language that bargainers use transforms the negotiations from one of adversarial bargaining between opponents into a creative and trusting relationship between partners set on problem solving. By describing the relationship between language and imagination, Ricoeur provides the philosophical support for this theory.
Problem solvers want the parties to instead see that they have interests that could be served by taking a different approach to the language they use to negotiate with each other. They ask parties to consider what obstacles may prevent them from reaching a lasting peace. They identify threats—to their security, to their freedom of religion, to their economic well-being, to their rights to develop their human potential. Guided to see conflict as a problem that needs solving, they will see themselves, first, in history, but also in the present with responsibilities towards the future. By expressing these obstacles they necessarily will learn that each side is seeking the same thing for itself. Their interests can be reframed as common interests, interests that any human being has a right to pursue, or “shared interests.”Footnote 132 They see the security concerns also as shared rights and correlative duties to protect each other from common vulnerabilities. As Ricoeur might have predicted, in putting their stories forward their language provides for insight into that which is common, essential, shared, and fundamental to the human identity. Yet that recognition of the common or shared interests they might have, or the common or shared vulnerabilities, can occur only if they listen to—and are open to hearing—each other's narratives.
As seen through Ricoeur's lens, the parties are not tricked by the language shift into seeing the game as win-win but are rationally drawn to a consideration of the benefits of cooperation and problem solving as they review each side's poetic narratives as moving from oppression to seeking liberation. They will not only explore with more care their common history and demystify their own history but also see in their traditions the heroic character of past actors and the imagination to renew and reimagine a better future.
Bearing witness to the oppression each has experienced leads one to ask whether their stories would have been different had the oppression not taken place. What if the parties choose not to repeat oppressive conduct and cycles of violence but choose, instead, to cooperate with each other to ensure that each group was liberated in its essential aspects and that the vulnerabilities—lack of shelter, contaminated food, disease, polluted water and air—each experienced either were protected against or the parties cooperated to ensure each had the goods they needed to survive and flourish?
The hope that strategies of cooperation provide greater benefits than strategies of totalitarian rule by one party over anotherFootnote 133 can take on a new reality through a Ricoeur-inspired mediation process. What free will and courage raise as a possibility makes the possibility poetically thinkable, and in being in the world, it makes the poetic imaginable and then makes it the ethical thing to do. It becomes not only more rational to cooperate, but the time for peace is made ripe in the consciousness of the negotiators.
Distinguishing between Adjudication and Mediation
But what about the rationality lost by the lack of deterrence that occurs if the parties let each other “off” for the harms done to others. For example, will the fact of a political actor who “gets away with” his acts of murder or use of chemical weapons on his own citizens inspire others to do the same? If he gets away with such acts and survives in power, what will deter other national leaders from using chemical weapons to weaken their opponents and stay in power? Does not the rationality of justice overwhelm any possible choice to forgive?
As discussed earlier, the meaning of forgiveness requires that the choices made by the parties be made with an understanding of their consequences as far as they can be determined. In short, forgiveness can be given only voluntarily and only with an understanding of its consequences. Even though it is outside the bargaining process, to work, it still needs to be explored through a transparent process. Forgiveness for the harm done seems irrational, or, at least nonrational,Footnote 134 when such forgiveness is granted without redressing those violations of basic human rights and thereby possibly encouraging future actors to commit similar atrocities.
At first blush, a UN mediator like Brahimi has an advantage over the adjudicator. After all, peaceful resolution of disputes is often reached through a formal court process that can take a long time: The parties first gather evidence to make their case. Then they carefully advocate through public telling of their stories. They challenge and question the intent and motivation of the actors, through cross examination, and then submit to a judge or jury who will render a judgment. They also submit to the judge for a determination of the appropriate punishment. Adjudication provides the due process for the redress of grievances and for justice.
Perhaps the parties know going in that the main purpose of mediation is to explore with the parties the options raised by their ability to do something extrajudicial, even not necessarily rational, and forgive each other and become reconciled to each other. But how, exactly, is this possible? We must look, finally, more closely at the relationship between justice and forgiveness. Only then can we see how the mediator might facilitate this exploration with the parties and help them see the possibilities and limitations raised by considerations of forgiveness and reconciliation.
It might be tempting to try to rely on social science for answers about what types of truth and reconciliation processes will work in what types of circumstances.Footnote 135 Preliminary findings suggest that forgiveness may be possible in some settings.Footnote 136 Yet the studies do not control for a number of important variables. For example, two conditions seem predictive of the success of truth and reconciliation commissions. The first is whether the dispute is internal to a nation, usually between the ruling class and the oppressed minority. This seems to be one characterization of the conflicts that occur with a state—like in South Africa, Syria, or Israel. The second is the representative moral standing of those deciding to adopt a truth and reconciliation process. In particular, especially when the forgiveness is from an individual like a Nelson Mandela—someone who has experienced the atrocities him or herself and can reflect on the complex motivations of the parties committing the act—who chooses to forgive the perpetrators in the face of their individual stories, does forgiveness then seem to be something that can be adopted on behalf of other victims similarly situated. Where such conditions do not pertain, as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Kenya, experience suggests a very uncertain outcome. In other words, representative forgiveness requires a very unique forgiveness. It will usually lack the conditions of justice that will be required for true forgiveness to occur.
Again Ricoeur's hermeneutics might suggest an additional process for truth and reconciliation commissions in conflicts that involve parties with religious differences. Ricoeur has shown how the religious perspectives of the victims might be enlisted in order to raise the possibilities of forgiveness. The implication of this theory is that the fact-finding powers of the International Criminal Court or some other watchdog nongovernmental organization that has mapped the conflict might be employed to help match victims with perpetrators in order that potential justice objections ultimately can be overcome. Ricoeur's hermeneutics has then raised a moral critique that should serve to enlighten and provide necessary preconditions to the use of truth and reconciliation commissions and other community dispute resolution processes that attempt to serve as a pathway to a lasting peace.
In the case of conflicts in Syria, or Israel/Palestine/Gaza, or Kenya, while the first criteria seems to be in play, the question will be whether a representative like Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu will arise—someone who can speak with any moral authority about his or her willingness to forgive and be persuasive to others about the need to forgive and reconcile. Yet perhaps such figures can arise during the peacemaking process and step forward to express the deep longings of those struggling in the midst of violence to bring about its end. Perhaps such heroic individuals are not born with the requisite character of a Mandela or a Tutu but are created out of the great need for someone or group to step forward and exercise the leadership and courage it takes to make peace on behalf of the victims with those very ones who committed the acts of violence, in exchange for saving the lives of future victims.Footnote 137
Even then Ricoeur's hermeneutics will caution against reliance on such a process for a meaningful and sustainable peace. Ricoeur's hermeneutics will instead argue for the need for a more formal fact-finding process. Meaningful forgiveness, in the end, can come about only with the input of victims and their families. As discussed earlier, for victims to grant forgiveness they will need to know what they are forgiving. Their choice to forgive will need to be made in light of an understanding of the level of “evil” committed by the perpetrators of these atrocities. While self-defense will likely be a part of the narrative of these actors, the proportionality of the use of force and the level of knowledge that innocents were the likely target of their actions will need to be considered and the legal punishment contemplated before forgiveness can be granted. Without these moral conditions in place, any reliance on a truth and reconciliation commission will likely be seen as manipulations by outside political actors.
In the case of many present-day conflicts, all is not lost, for a hybrid truth and reconciliation process can yet create the conditions whereby meaningful forgiveness can occur. This is because modern investigative technologies can be enlisted to match victims with the alleged perpetrators of atrocities. Where the United Nations is involved it can enlist the investigative arm of the International Criminal Court, or other authorized investigative group (like those UN officials investigating the use of chemical weapons) to gather the necessary information that can eventually match the perpetrators of war crimes with their victims. In the case of Syria, this is not a farfetched proposition.Footnote 138 As a result one can yet imagine a process that will provide for meaningful forgiveness to take place. Yet, again, the party representatives will need to understand that such a process will follow the making of peace. They will need to understand that if they are to have true peace and justice, they will need the courage to submit to the choices of victims as to how they are to be judged.
CONCLUSION
Ricoeur's hermeneutics has provided a number of useful lessons for international peace makers. It reaffirms what hard work making peace will be for the parties. Yet it provides important direction to the mediator as to what role the mediator should play in helping the parties present their cases to each other. Using Ricoeur's hermeneutics will require of the meditator careful listening and an understanding of the role that history, tradition, traditions, and myth play in each party's narrative. It will require a gentle dialogic process that will seek to place each party as a responsible agent in his or her history. It will seek to draw the parties into rediscovering the religious narrative as one that sees God the Creator as requiring that they seek to live in peace and shalom with their neighbor.
In addition, mediators must show the parties that while they may share the fundamental insight of the nonrational nature of their humanity and their common vulnerability, whether in the uncertainty about their past narratives or the unknowability of what their God wills for them, they are taking very real risks. Yet they are called to live imaginatively into the future by seeing the role that courageous forgiveness might play. Finally the mediator will lead the parties in a deeper understanding about what a just forgiveness might look like and will help those making peace to design meaningful process to provide for victims to forgive.Footnote 139 To that end, the mediator will be better able to describe the important conditions under which reconciliation can take place. The mediator can finally involve the peacemakers in an informed discussion of the role of a truth and reconciliation commission and the important place that victim forgiveness will play in the process.
