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Reconciliation may refer to:

What is Reconciliation Reconciliation is a rather new concept in the new field of conflict resolution. It is not mentioned once in a book I wrote in 1995. In the one I published in 2001, it was the most frequently cited concept.

As is the case with any new concept, there is no standard definition that all scholars and practitioners rely on. However, almost everyone acknowledges that it includes at least four critical components identified by John Paul Lederach -- truth, justice, mercy, and peace.

Lederach's use of the term "mercy" suggests that the ideas behind reconciliation have religious roots. It is a critical theological notion in all the Abrahamic faiths and is particularly important to Evangelical Christians as part of their building a personal relationship with God. For those who ask "what would Jesus do," reconciliation is often not just an important issue, but the most critical one in any conflict.

In recent years, reconciliation has also become an important matter for people who approach conflict resolution from a secular perspective. For them, the need for reconciliation grows out of the pragmatic, political realities of any conflict resolution process (see the next section).

Conflict resolution professionals use a number of techniques to try to foster reconciliation. By far the most famous of them is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that held hearings into the human rights abuses during the apartheid era and held out the possibility of amnesty to people who showed genuine remorse for their actions. Since the TRC was created in 1995, as many as 20 other such commissions have been created in other countries, which experienced intense domestic strife. These projects bring people on both sides of a conflict together to explore their mutual fear and anger and, more importantly, to begin building bridges of trust between them. Despite the violence in the region since 2000, some of the most promising examples of this kind of reconciliation have occurred between Israelis and Palestinians. For more than a decade, Oases of Peace (Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salaam) have been bringing together students and teachers from both sides of the divide. Similarly, the Seeds of Peace summer camp in Otisfield, Maine (U.S.) has served as a "safe place" for Israeli and Palestinian teenagers to spend extended periods of time together. Yet others have tried more unusual strategies. At Search for Common Ground, we make soap operas with conflict resolution themes for teenagers aired on radio in Africa and on television in Macedonia. Similarly, Benetton sponsored a summer camp for teenage basketball players from the former Yugoslavia, one of many examples in which people have tried to use sports to build bridges, ironically, in part through competition. Last but by no means least, it should be obvious from the above that many people have used religion as a vehicle to help forge reconciliation. Thus, the Rev. John Dawson has made reconciliation between blacks and whites the heart of his 20-year ministry in South Central Los Angeles. Similarly, Corrymeela is an interfaith religious retreat center, which has spent the last 25 years facilitating meetings between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

There is at least one common denominator to all these approaches to reconciliation. They all are designed to lead individual men and women to change the way they think about their historical adversaries. As a result, reconciliation occurs one person at a time and is normally a long and laborious process.

History

• Truth and reconciliation commission
• Vergangenheitsbewältigung, processes of dealing with the past

Relationships

• Reconciliation (ethnic relations), restoring mutual respect between individuals from different cultural backgrounds
• Reconciliation (United States Congress), a legislative procedure in the United States Senate
• Conflict resolution, re-establishing normal relations between belligerents
• Corrymeela Community, an ecumenical group dedicated to reconciliation in Northern Ireland

Religion

• Reconciliation (theology), returning to faith or harmony after a conflict
• Sacrament of Penance (Catholic Church), also known as Reconciliation

Other

• Reconciliation (Josefina de Vasconcellos), a sculpture in Coventry Cathedral
• Reconcile (rapper) (born 1989), American rapper

See also

• Conciliation
• Institute for Justice and Reconciliation

• Disambiguation pages