International records / OpenAlex research

Reconciliation as surrender: configurations of responsibility and memory

INTRODUCTION ‘Why reconcile?’ In this chapter we attempt to reclaim this foundational, if too often ignored, question and re-situate it at the heart of the theorisation of reconciliation. To ask this question anew, and insistently, is to understand reconciliation as only properly the contingent response, rather than the unconditional outcome, of a society's endeavour to do justice to a past of severe injustice. In a time characterised by what one Nigerian scholar calls the ‘fever of atonement’, where the discourse of reconciliation is deployed as regulative ideal, as corrective and even as sub…