Reconciliation requires rebuilding of trust and respect

Since the post-election violence of 2007/8, many have talked of the need for, and have sought to promote, “reconciliation”.

This is understandable given the horrors of those months and a widespread desire for peace. However, there has been little debate about what reconciliation might require, and what it would look like. Instead, there has been a tendency for people to assert that Kenyans should be, or that they are, reconciled.

More worrying still, some have equated reconciliation with unity in ways that delegitimise critical voices and political opposition.

So how is reconciliation commonly defined?

Reconciliation is usually understood to consist of the building or rebuilding of good relations. Which begs the question: what constitutes good relations?

There are at least two approaches to answering this question; namely good relations as trust and as respect. In my opinion, one cannot insist on reconciliation, since trust and respect are both conditional and subjective.

It is also infeasible to insist that people fully trust others in the political arena. Instead, people should aim for respect and to minimise mistrust.

ESTABLISHMENT OF TRUST

According to Trudy Govier and Wilhelm Verwoerd (two academics who have written substantively on this subject), reconciliation requires the (re)establishment of trust, where to “trust others is to believe, in the absence of certainty about the matter, that they are likely to act well, or decently, toward us and be reliable with respect to the issues at hand”. According to this definition, the kind of trust that people place in others can vary from a high point of substantive friendship to meaningful cooperation to a mere expectation of non-violent co-existence.

Critically, most academics that define reconciliation as trust recognise that this is a process and goal, rather than an achievable endpoint.

First, trust is generally deemed more likely when the offender or relevant authority has apologised; those adversely affected have forgiven; some form of justice has been provided; and both sides recognise that they have mutual obligations and a level of interdependence.

However, these are all extremely difficult conditions to achieve in practice. Second, trust is a dynamic relationship that can be bolstered or undermined by new developments and interpretations. For example, a husband or wife may come to trust an unfaithful partner, but the trust is undermined by suspicions or evidence of further infidelity. Trust is thus always difficult to achieve even between family members, friends or neighbours, and is always subjective and dynamic.

VESTED INTERESTS

However, while academics speak of the re-establishment of trust as a difficult and ongoing process, rather than as a discrete endpoint, it is often presented in politics as something that does or should exist. This is problematic since people are always motivated by different values and vested interests. As a result, full reconciliation as a state of social harmony and cohesion, where people fully trust others to always act decently towards them, is not only impractical, but also infeasible and dangerous. The reason is two-fold.

First, in life, genuinely good things conflict. Moreover, given different understandings and goals, disagreement and debate should be regarded as a normal and healthy part of democratic politics. The implication is that, in practice, an invocation of unity behind the “common good” inevitably stifles debate and privileges the interests of some over others.

Second, efforts to gag criticism in this way tend to drive strongly held views underground and to encourage alternative political activities. 

Thus, instead of insisting, as politicians around the world sometimes do, that all reasonable or patriotic people should trust the government to act in their interests, and that those who disagree are wrong and dangerous, one should aim for reconciliation as respect and to minimise mistrust.

According to this second approach, reconciliation is still about restoring or establishing good relations, but in a world where this is understood not as cohesion and harmony per se, but as lively disagreement and debate between mutually respectful, but potentially incompatible political outlooks.

Or in other words, people should aim for what Leigh Payne has called “contentious co-existence (which) emphasises the reality and importance of competition over ideas and conflict over values and goals” as part of a robust democratic system. Since, it is in such a system, that levels of trust are also likely to grow organically, since people can have confidence that their concerns are both being listened to and heard.

Gabrielle Lynch is an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Warwick ([email protected]; @GabrielleLynch6)