If reconciliation is the answer, are we asking the right questions?

Abstract

This article critically examines the normative, liberal assumptions that most frequently underlie scholarly, activist, and policy calls for reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rather than measuring how reconciliation is progressing, I suggest we ask ourselves whose reconciliation is being desired here: by whom, for whom, and for what? Which important alternative questions remain unasked and which latent answers are ignored or downplayed in the process? Particular attention is paid to the ways in which liberal reconciliation discourse tends to depoliticize questions of justice.