Post-Conflict Reconciliation: in Search of a Typology

Rather than limiting ourselves to the traditional distinction between international and civil conflicts, this contribution offers four scenarios to test the suitability of a call for reconciliation: international conflicts, civil wars, colonial wars, and genocides. While these scenarios share common characteristics, they fundamentally differ when it comes to the issue of otherness. This study attempts to show that the diverse processes used to deconstruct the other determine the modalities, and sometimes even the possibility of a rapprochement between the parties present. The proposed typology is based on the analysis of four cases: the Franco-German case (post-international conflict), the South African case (post-internal conflict), the Franco-Algerian case (post-colonial war), and the Rwandan case (post-genocide). In each of these cases, three questions are systematically taken into consideration to structure the analysis. Who are the protagonists invited to be reconciled? Where do the calls for reconciliation come from? When do they emerge? On a methodological level, each case was treated using three types of corpuses: one gathering all of the official speeches given since the end of the conflicts, one gathering the accounts of individual witnesses, and a corpus of interviews.