This article is intended as a response rather than counterpoint to Bennett's careful argument that amnesty cannot amount to an act of collective forgiveness. I agree that a state cannot forgive perpetrators of grave human rights violations. However, I am concerned that conceiving the question of amnesty strictly in terms of a choice between the Art of Compromise or the Hard Line of retribution may unduly limit our understanding of the potential relation between amnesty and forgiveness in politics. To show (...) this, I consider the question of amnesty in relation to the possibility of forgiving those ordinary citizens implicated in the perpetration of wrongs as bystanders and beneficiaries of an unjust regime. Following Arendt, I argue that political grounds for forgiveness in such circumstances are the frailty of the world and the natality of the other . On this account, forgiveness is not necessarily the final term in a process of reconciliation that restores a wrongdoer to the moral community. Rather, the disposition to forgive makes possible a politics in which members of a divided polity contest each other's understandings of the violence of the past and its significance for their political association. (shrink)

This article considers how reconciliation might be understood as a democratic undertaking. It does so by examining the implications of the debate between theorists of ‘deliberative’ and ‘agonistic’ democracy for the practice of democracy in divided societies. I argue that, in taking consensus as a regulative idea, deliberative democracy tends to conflate moral and political community thereby representing conflict as already communal. In contrast, an agonistic theory of democracy provides a critical perspective from which to discern what is at stake (...) in the politics of reconciliation since it understands community as a contingent achievement of political action. As such, an agonistic account of democracy suggests the possibility of retrieving the concept of reconciliation from a statesanctioned project of nation-building for a democratic politics centred on the possibilities of self-determination and solidarity among citizens divided by a history of state violence. Key Words: agonism • deliberation • democracy • reconciliation • transitional justice. (shrink)

In his Democratic justice and the social contract, Weale presents a distinctive contingent practice-dependent model of ‘democratic justice’ that relies heavily on a condition of just social and political relations among equals. Several issues arise from this account. Under which conditions might such just social and political relations be realised? What ideal of equality is required for ‘democratic justice’? What are its implications for the political ideal of citizenship? This paper focuses on these questions as a way to critically reconsider (...) Weale’s model. After presenting Weale’s procedural constructivism, I distinguish his model from an institutional practicedependent model, one salient example of which is Rawls’s political constructivism. This distinction allows for a formulation of the social and political equality required for justice in each case. The contingent model assumes that an equality of ‘status’ will generate just social practices, yet it fails to recognise that an equality of ‘role’ is also important to ensure citizens’ compliance. The paper ultimately seeks to show that the contingent model is insufficient to ensure that just social practices will become stable. (shrink)

For contemporary democratic theorists, democracy is largely a matter of deliberation. But the recent rise of deliberative democracy (in practice as well as theory) coincided with ever more prominent identity politics, sometimes in murderous form in deeply divided societies. This essay considers how deliberative democracy can process the toughest issues concerning mutually contradictory assertions of identity. After considering the alternative answers provided by agonists and consociational democrats, the author makes the case for a power-sharing state with attenuated sovereignty and a (...) more engaged deliberative politics in a public sphere that is semidetached from the state and situated transnationally. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is often celebrated and endorsed because of its promise to include, empower, and emancipate otherwise oppressed and excluded social groups through securing their voice and granting them impact in reasoned public deliberation. This article explores the ability of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy to accommodate the demands of historically excluded social groups in democratic plural societies. It argues that the inclusive, transformative, and empowering potential of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy falters when confronted with particular types of historical (...) injustices. It falters because it pays little attention to the historical dimension of injustices and the demands to which it gives rise. The historical dimension of longstanding injustices, it is argued, gives rise to a set of distinctive demands, such as collective memory of exclusion, acknowledgement of historical injustices, taking responsibility, and offering apology and reparations for causing these injustices, which go beyond the type of democratic inclusion that is often offered by deliberative democracy. Yet, the solution is not to abandon the model of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary, it remains a valuable basis for forward-looking political decision making. The article concludes that in order to achieve inclusive, empowering and transformative deliberation in consolidated democracies that have experienced historical injustices, the politics of reconciliation is indispensable. (shrink)

Critics of a politics of difference have misidentified these social movements as asserting an identity politics of recognition. Most of these movements are better understood as resisting unjust structural inequalities. Inclusive democratic process involves paying specific attention to group differences in order to transform preferences and maximize social knowledge.