After mass atrocity, most victims, perpetrators and bystanders must find a way to live together again, at least as fellow citizens. The term that describes this process: ‘reconciliation,’ is one of the most promising and contested words in post-war peacebuilding, yet it has been used so loosely that it has been rendered almost meaningless. Because of this ambiguity, practices designed to achieve reconciliation too oft en bear little relation to peacebuilding goals.

Broadly defined, reconciliation is a process in which individuals or groups that have had a serious conflict or abusive relations attempt to create or restore a “minimally acceptable” relationship (Kriesberg, 2001, p. 48). It implies some kind of ‘coming together’ of conflicting parties but what this actually looks like is heavily debated.

There are limits to the universal conclusions that we can draw about conciliatory processes. Atrocities and war dynamics may look strikingly similar but if we are really to reconcile the tensions that spawned the conflict and recognize paths to peace, we need to step deeply into the politics and culture that preceded the violence itself. We need to merge the skills of the comparative political and social analyst with those of the anthropologist who carefully observes ideologically-bound processes of integration and marginalization in peacetime and is sensitive to the feelings and views of ordinary people. And then, perhaps unlike the anthropologist, we need to return with these insights to the big picture and judge how to move forward.

The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report (2004) recognizes the centrality of local contexts when it states, “There is no universal model of reconciliation that can apply to all countries. Reconciliation is not a concept that can be imported to a country from abroad. It has to emerge from within the society and be owned by the society” (vol. 3b, chap. 7, §6).

Before we focus exclusively on Sierra Leone in parts two to five of this book, the language and concepts surrounding reconciliation need to be clarified. This language should be appropriate for analyzing multiple contexts even as reconciliation needs within those contexts diff er.

Part one draws from the literature on post-conflict transitions to suggest a concrete way of discussing reconciliation that can be applied in many transitional contexts.