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CHAPTER FORTY
RECONCILIATION BETWEEN GROUPS:
Preventing (New) Violence and Improving Lives
Ervin Staub
In this chapter I write about reconciliation both after and before significant violence between groups. Reconciliation between groups that have long been hostile to each other can prevent violence. After significant violence, whether the violence ended through a peace treaty or victory of one side, new violence is highly probable without reconciliation (Long and Brecke, 2003; Staub, 2011). The hostile attitudes toward the other that led to the violence and have intensified in the course of it are still there.
Reconciliation may be defined as mutual acceptance by two groups of each other (Staub and Pearlman, 2001), and “the societal structures and processes directly involved in the development and maintenance of such acceptance . . . Genuine acceptance means trust in and positive attitude toward the other, and sensitivity to and consideration of the other party’s needs and interests” (Staub and Bar-Tal, 2003, p. 733). “Reconciliation also means that in people’s minds the past does not define the future. It means that members of previously hostile groups can engage in actions that represent and further create positive coexistence” (Staub, 2011). Most definitions, like mine, focus on relationships, whether between individuals or groups—for example, “restoration of trust in an interpersonal relationship through mutual trustworthy behaviors” (Worthington and Drinkard, 2000, p. 93). To the extent that reconciliation addresses inequitable relations between parties, it can lead to a new moral and political framework and “mutual legitimacy” (Rouhana, 2010). The practices and institutions that foster reconciliation fulfill basic psychological needs and are likely to create a peaceful society.
Reconciliation is progressive, with likely setbacks. For example, Israeli collective narrative has increasingly acknowledged that one of the reasons that about 700,000 Palestinians left Israel during the 1948 war was expulsion, whether by force or pressure. This shift from the earlier narrative that they all left due to their leaders telling them to do so for the duration of the fighting, or because they wanted to escape danger, facilitates reconciliation. The number of Israelis who accepted this narrative or collective memory increased over time, but it then decreased in the course of the violence of the second intifada between 2000 and 2005, the second Palestinian uprising (Nets-Zehngut and Bar-Tal, 2011). There can be reversals in other elements of reconciliation as well, whether forgiveness or positive attitude toward the other.
Arie Nadler and Nurit Schnabel (2008), Israeli psychologists, differentiated between instrumental and socioemotional reconciliation. Instrumental reconciliation refers to cooperation to achieve common goals, socioemotional reconciliation to the admission of past wrongdoing and subsequent forgiveness. The practices that promote the former include contact, that is, engagement or working together, the essence of the latter is an “apology-forgiveness” cycle. This is a worthwhile distinction, although I see the two types as overlapping. After significant violence that deeply wounds people, the capacity to cooperate for shared goals is an initial step. Without emotional reconciliation, without addressing psychological woundedness, fear and anger, new threat, or changing conditions can bring an end to cooperation and lead to renewed violence. However, the practices that contribute to either type of reconciliation also contribute to the other. Significant contact in the course of cooperation can humanize the other, reduce fear of the other, and make forgiveness more likely.
Reconciliation requires that people engage with what happened during past violence. Bert Ingelaere (2008) wrote that the gacaca, the community justice process in which well over 100,000 accused perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda were tried between 2001 and 2010, broke down the amnesia that had begun to characterize Rwandan life as people settled down to “normal” everyday relations—coexistence required by circumstances. We can see such “amnesia” as psychological defense in people who have to live together and feel it is dangerous to address the past emotionally and practically in engagement with each other.
THE ORIGINS OF VIOLENCE AND BASIC PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS
The frustration of universal, basic psychological needs is a core influence in leading to violence between groups. Violence in turn deeply frustrates such basic needs. Practices and conditions that help to constructively fulfill these needs contribute to reconciliation and lasting peace.
Difficult social conditions in a society are one starting point for an evolution that can lead to genocide or mass killing or intensify conflict between groups. Such conditions include economic deterioration, political chaos, enormous social change, and especially a combination of these. These conditions often frustrate material needs but even more universally frustrate basic, universal, psychological needs for security, feelings of effectiveness and control over important goals, autonomy and choice, positive identity, connections to other people, and a comprehension of reality and of one’s place in the world (Staub, 1989, 2003, 2011).
Certain cultural characteristics that can be present in societies to different extents are another potential influence. A history of devaluation of some subgroup of society preselects this group as a likely scapegoat or ideological enemy. Past victimization of the group and psychological woundedness make the group feel vulnerable and the world seem dangerous, and it can lead to hostility and unnecessary “defensive” violence. Overly strong respect for authority makes it less likely that people speak out against destructive leaders.
In difficult times, members of a group often blame or scapegoat a previously devalued group for life problems. They create a vision of a hopeful future for their group, an ideology that is destructive in that it identifies enemies who stand in the way of the ideology’s fulfillment, usually the scapegoated group. These processes fulfill frustrated needs for identity, effectiveness, community, and understanding of reality. But they do so destructively because they lead to turning against and harming others (Staub, 1989, 2003, 2011). Without restraining conditions and forces (especially active bystanders), there tends to be an evolution of increasing harm doing and violence.
Another starting point for the evolution of intense violence is group conflict (Fein, 1993; Staub, 2011), especially conflict that becomes intractable—persistent, resisting resolution, and violent. Intractable conflict also frustrates basic needs. It is often maintained by ideology, as well as by people seeing their own cause and group as right and moral, and the other as responsible and immoral (Bar-Tal, 2000; Kelman and Fisher, 2003). Over time the groups often come to see each other as implacable enemies. Anything good that happens to the other group is seen as harmful to one’s own group. I have called this kind of enmity an “ideology of antagonism” (Staub, 1989, 2011).
Instigating conditions and the violence that evolves out of them have destructive effects not only on victims but also on perpetrators and members of the perpetrator group who passively stand by. In contrast the processes of reconciliation in table 40.1 help fulfill basic needs constructively. They contribute to feelings of security, the belief by people in their capacity to influence events, fulfill the need for a positive identity, create connections within and between groups, and help develop a new, positive understanding of the world.
Table 40.1 Reconciliation and the Prevention of New Violence
Source: Developed from tables and materials in Staub (2011).
Inhibitors Promoters
Lack of understanding of the roots of violence Understanding and actions guided by it
Lack of understanding of the impact of violence Understanding its impact on survivors, perpetrators, bystanders
Devaluing the other Humanizing the other and developing positive attitude toward the other through words, deep contact, worki
ng on shared goals, education
Unhealed psychological wounds of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders Healing the wounds by all parties
Lack of Truth Truth (complex: shared)
Conflicting collective memories—histories Working both toward a shared history and toward accepting that the other group has a different view of history
“Chosen” traumas Addressing the impact of the past
Lack of Justice Justice: punitive, restorative, procedural, economic
Lack of forgiveness Moving toward forgiveness (with mutuality)
Lack of acknowledgment of their responsibility by perpetrators and their group Acknowledgment, apology, regret, empathy
Lack of acceptance of the past Increasing acceptance of the past: “This is what happened, this is part of who we are.”
Destructive ideologies Constructive ideologies
Undemocratic systems and practices Developing pluralistic, democratic, values and institutions
Raising children as obedient followers Raising inclusively caring children with moral courage (positive socialization)
SECURITY AND RECONCILIATION
The question has been raised in the literature as to whether reconciliation can begin when there is still ongoing violence. In the eastern part of the Congo (DRC), starting in 1996 (Prunier, 2009; Staub, 2011), millions of people died due to violence and accompanying disease and starvation. Huge numbers of women were raped. To a lesser but still substantial degree, the violence is continuing through 2013. Fear and mistrust create a challenge for effective reconciliation processes. The ongoing violence and the insecurity it creates interfere with healing from past violence, an important element in reconciliation. Nonetheless, even in such a situation, public education in the form of educational radio programs and accompanying grassroots activities such as the training of conflict resolution agents using the principles guiding educational radio, can build underpinnings for reconciliation (Staub, 2011).
In conflicts with less chaotic conditions and less widespread violence, small groups of people from the two sides have engaged with each other. Engagement between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and contact and dialogue in many settings between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, most likely limited the level of violence and have created the basis on which further reconciliation practices can build (see Staub, 2011, for an overview).
THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF RECONCILIATION
In the following section, I discuss the principles and practices of reconciliation that I consider especially important (see also Staub, 2011, 2013). They are presented in table 40.1. In discussing the first two of these, I briefly review the work that my associates and I have been doing in Rwanda, starting in 1999, and then in Burundi and the Congo, to promote reconciliation and help prevent further or renewed violence.
Understanding the Roots of Violence and Avenues to Prevention and Reconciliation
Understanding the conditions that lead to violence and the impact of violence can provide a useful framework for people to work on both prevention and reconciliation. It can lead them to resist these influences, to respond to them in ways that makes violence less likely. It can lead them to use their critical consciousness, their own judgment in evaluating the meaning of events. It can lead to active bystandership in the service of prevention, reconciliation, and peace building. After violence, understanding how it came about can contribute to healing.
In the genocide in Rwanda, in 1994, about 700,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus—parts of the military, young men in militias (the Interehamwe), as well as neighbors and even relatives in mixed families. About 50,000 Hutus were also killed because they were politically moderate, or opposed the genocide, or, as it happens when violence becomes widespread, because of personal enmity (des Forges, 1999; Melvern, 2004; Mamdani, 2001; Staub, 2011).
Starting in 1998 and ongoing, my associates and I have conducted two types of interventions in Rwanda to promote reconciliation and help prevent new violence, and we have conducted research to evaluate their impact (for a detailed description, see Staub, 2011). We first conducted workshops and trainings, lasting from two days to two weeks, with varied groups. The first training was with the staff of local organizations that worked with groups in the community. A central element in all trainings was information about how genocide originates (based primarily on Staub, 1989). We described the influences that lead to genocide and other intense violence between groups and provided examples of these from varied instances except Rwanda. In the course of extensive discussion, the participants applied these concepts to Rwanda. Other elements of the trainings included information about the impact of violence on people and about the role of basic human needs in the origins of genocide, in woundedness, and in healing.
We evaluated the effects of the approach primarily not on the participants but on people once removed from the training, members of newly created community groups (Staub, Pearlman, Gubin and Hagengimana, 2005). Training participants and these groups included both Tutsis and Hutus. The community groups were led in twice-a-week meetings, for two hours, over a two-month period, either by facilitators we trained (integrated groups) or by facilitators we did not train (traditional groups), or without a facilitator (control groups). There were many groups, controlled for various characteristics, in each of these three conditions.
Treatment group members showed positive changes from before the training to two months after the end of the training and greater changes than the changes in the traditional and control groups from before the training to two month afterward. These changes included increased understanding of the complex origins of genocide, more positive attitudes by Hutus and Tutsis toward each other, “conditional forgiveness”—expressing the willingness to forgive if perpetrators acknowledge what they did and/or ask forgiveness—and reduction in trauma symptoms (Staub et al., 2005).
Knowledge of the influences that lead to group violence seemed to become experiential understanding, deeply held, as people applied the information they received to the genocide in Rwanda, and thereby to their own experience. Such understanding can be an avenue to healing. In addition to the reduction of trauma symptoms by members of community groups, when the participants in our training were exposed to examples of group violence around the world, seeing that others had experiences similar to their own, they seemed to feel reincluded in the human realm (“so God did not select us for such punishment”) (Staub et al., 2005).
Understanding the influences that lead to mass violence also seemed to humanize Hutus, members of the group that perpetrated the genocide, in both the eyes of Tutsis and their own eyes. Seeing that understandable human processes can lead to terrible acts made it less likely that members of either group viewed perpetrators as simply evil. By reducing defensiveness, this makes it more likely that members of the perpetrator group accept responsibility for their group’s actions, an important contributor to forgiveness and reconciliation. In all of these ways, understanding can initiate and contribute to reconciliation. It can also increase people’s ability to foresee the long-term consequences of events, including destructive leadership, and increase their resistance to them emotionally and as active bystanders, thereby preventing violence (Staub, 2011).
In subsequent years, we conducted separate trainings with national leaders, journalists, and community leaders, and we also trained trainers in our approach (Staub, 2011; Staub and Pearlman, 2006; Staub, Pearlman, and Bilali, 2010). In these trainings, we also introduced information about avenues to prevention and reconciliation. In the training with national leaders we used separate tables of origins and prevention that are partly summarized in table 40.1. One column in the table shows the influences that lead to violence (or inhibit reconciliation), the other side those that prevent violence (or promote reconciliation). At the end of the training, we had leaders in groups of three evaluate whether the policies they were just introducing in the country would make violence more likely or help prevent violence.
Within the training, they did this highly effectively.
To expand the reach of this approach, we developed educational radio programs, in collaboration with a Dutch nongovernmental organization, LaBenevolencija, which produces the programs. The central aims again were to help listeners understand the influences that lead to violence between groups; how extreme violence such as genocide evolves; psychological woundedness; and avenues to healing, reconciliation, and prevention. Our first program, a radio drama, Musekeweya (New Dawn), that began to broadcast in Rwanda in 2004 and is still continuing, has become extremely popular. It is a story of two villages in conflict, with attacks, counterattacks, destructive leaders and followers, positive bystanders, a love story between two young people from the two villages in conflict, a village fool who is also a wise man and a truth teller, and more. The educational content is embedded in the story and in the actions of the characters (Staub, 2011; Staub et al., 2010). For example, the story aims to promote community healing as people empathically listen to each other’s painful stories and support each other. Over time in the radio drama, the people in the two villages move toward reconciliation.
An evaluation at the end of the first year (with a complex design due to the fact that the program aired nationally) showed a variety of significant effects. In comparison to a control group in which people listened to a radio program about health, treatment group members expressed more empathy with everyone—survivors, perpetrators, and leaders. They expressed, and showed in behavior, greater willingness to speak what they believe. They also showed greater independence of authority and a willingness to discuss issues and make decisions for themselves (Paluck, 2009; Staub, 2011; Staub and Pearlman, 2009).
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