Everyday Reconciliation: Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions of Relational Repair in the Aftermath of Violence

Abstract

Reconciling across the social and relational divisions which persist in everyday life is a vital component of building sustained peace after armed conflict and mass violence. While everyday peace has received considerable attention within existing scholarship, everyday reconciliation has not been developed as a concept in its own right. In this paper I develop the idea of everyday reconciliation, which involves ordinary and routine practices that build positive, mutually respectful relations across conflict divisions at multiple levels. I propose a novel framework to study everyday reconciliation, which captures variation across two key dimensions of relational repair: the social position of the actors engaged in reconciling (elites/ordinary people) and the axis along which reconciliation takes place (horizontal/vertical). The framework differentiates between three distinct types of everyday reconciliation: (1) elite everyday reconciliation, building horizontal relationships between elite actors; (2) grassroots everyday reconciliation, building horizontal relationships between ordinary people; and (3) vertical everyday reconciliation, building relationships across divisions between elites and ordinary people. The framework allows observers to disaggregate between whom and how everyday reconciliation varies, and highlights new dimensions of everyday reconciliation. Developing a more robust conceptualization of everyday reconciliation sheds light on previously overlooked ways in which societies navigate relational divisions arising from a violent past.