No one can deny how September 11, 2001, has altered our understandings of "Peace" and "Justice" and "Civil Conflict." Those have become words with startling new life in our vocabularies. Yet "making" peace and "doing" justice must remain challenges that are among the highest callings of humanity-especially in a terror-heightened world. Nigel Biggar, Christian ethicist and editor of this now more than ever "must read" (Choice) volume, newly expanded and updated, addresses head-on the concept of a redemptive burying of the past, urging that the events of that infamous date be approached as a transnational model of conflict-and suggesting, wisely and calmly, that justice can be even the better understood if we should undertake the very important task of locating the sources of hostility, valid or not, toward the West. Burying the Past asks these important questions: How do newly democratic nations put to rest the conflicts of the past? Is granting forgiveness a politically viable choice for those in power? Should justice be restorative or retributive? Beginning with a conceptual approach to justice and forgiveness and moving to an examination of reconciliation on the political and on the psychological level, the collection examines the quality of peace as it has been forged in the civil conflicts in Rwanda, South Africa, Chile, Guatemala and Northern Ireland. There are times in history when "making peace" and "doing justice" seem almost impossible in the face of horrendous events. Those responses are understandably human. But it is in times just like these when humanity can-and must-rise to its possibilities and to its higher purposes in order to continue considering itself just and humane.
Introduction Part One: Concepts 1. Making Peace or Doing Justice: Must We Choose?Nigel Biggar 2. Where and When in Political Life Is Justice Served by Forgiveness?Donald W. Shriver 3. Politics and ForgivenessJean Bethke Elshtain 4. The Philosophy and Practice of Dealing with the Past: Some Conceptual and Normative IssuesTuomas ForsbergPart Two: Dimensions 5. Innovating Responses to the Past: Human Rights InstitutionsMartha Minow 6. National and Community Reconciliation: Competing Agendas in the South African Truth and Reconciliation CommissionHugo van der Merwe 7. Putting the Past in Its Place: Issues of Victimhood and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland's Peace ProcessMarie Smyth 8. Does the Truth Heal? A Psychological Perspective on Political Strategies for Dealing with the Legacy of Political ViolenceBrandon Hamber Part Three: Cases 9. Passion, Constraint, Law and Fortuna: The Human Rights Challenge to Chilean DemocracyAlexandra Barahona de Brito 10. War, Peace, and the Politics of Memory in GuatemalaRachel Sieder 11. Restorative Justice in Social Context: The South African Truth and Reconciliation CommissionCharles Villa-Vicencio 12. Rwanda: Dealing with Genocide and Crimes against Humanity in the Contextof Armed Conflict and Failed Political TransitionStef Vandeginste 13. Northern Ireland: Burying the Hatchet, Not the PastTerence McCaughey Part Four: Conclusion ConclusionNigel Biggar Epilogue: Burying the Past after September 11Nigel Biggar
