Alice MacLachlan & Allen Speight 
Justice, Responsibility and Reconciliation in the Wake of Conflict 

What are the moral obligations of participants and bystanders during—and in the wake of –a conflict? How have theoretical understandings of justice, peace and responsibility changed in the face of contemporary realities of war? Drawing on the work of leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, political theory, international law, religious studies and peace studies, the collection significantly advances current literature on war, justice and post-conflict reconciliation. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues of international and civil conflict, including the tension between attributing individual and collective responsibility for the wrongs of war, the trade-offs made between the search for truth and demands for justice, and the conceptual intricacies of coming to understand just what is meant by ‘peace’ and ‘conflict.’ Individual essays also address concrete topics including the international criminal court, reparations, truces, political apologies, truth commissions and criminal trials, with an eye to contemporary examples from conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and North and South America.​

Table of Content

Introduction, C.A. Speight and A. Mac Lachlan.- Part I: What is War? What is Peace?.- Truce! N. Eisikovits.- Peace-less Reconciliation, A. Biletzki.- Heidegger and Gandhi on Conflict, G. Fried.- Basic Challenges for Governance in Emergencies, F. Tanguay-Renaud.- Part II: Framing Responsibilities, At War’s End: Clashing Visions and the Need for Reform, B. Orend.- Is there an obligation to rebuild? P. Robinson.- Political Reconciliation, Responsibility and Grudge-Informers, C. Murphy.- Part III: The Shape of Reconciliation.- Freedom in the Grounding of Transitional Justice, A. Wingo.- President Clinton’s Apology for Rwanda, L.Tirrell.- Government Apologies to Indigenous Peoples, A. Mac Lachlan.- The Expressive Burden of Reparations: Putting Meaning into Words, Money, and Things, M.U. Walker.​

About the author

Allen Speight is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University. His work has ranged over a number of issues at the intersection of philosophy and religion, from the concept of forgiveness to the relation between art and religion in post-Kantian thought. A recipient of Fulbright, DAAD, NEH and Berlin Prize fellowships, his research has largely focused on the German philosophical tradition, especially Hegel and German Idealism. He is the author of Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (Mc Gill-Queen’s University Press/Acumen, 2008) and the editor, with Brady Bowman, of Hegel: Heidelberg Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Alice Mac Lachlan is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University and president of the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy. Her teaching and research interests lie in theoretical ethics, feminist philosophy, and social and political philosophy. Recent publications include The Philosophical Controversy over Political Forgiveness (forthcoming in Public Forgiveness in Post-Conflict Contexts, Intersentia 2012) The State of Sorry: Official Apologies and their Absence in the Journal of Human Rights (2010), Unreasonable Resentments in the Journal of Social Philosophy (2009), and Practicing Imperfect Forgiveness in Feminist Ethics and Social Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal (ed. Lisa Tessman, Springer 2009). She is currently completing a manuscript on forgiveness, as well as beginning a new project titled Sorry Stories: Theorizing Apologies in Personal and Political Contexts funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2011, she was awarded a President’s University-Wide Teaching Award by York University.