Bronwyn Leebaw, in her post, notes that I seek to stave off the fate of Sophie Wilder, a character in a novel who converts to Catholicism then becomes estranged from her friends and family. Mirabile dictu, unlike Sophie Wilder, my book has met with great efforts to understand it, absorb it, and engage it thoughtfully, this at the hands of six reviewers each of whose own scholarship has contributed crucially to the contemporary conversation about the justice of dealing with past injustice. I am grateful. I am heartened, too, that each reviewer fundamentally “got” the book, grasping and in many ways finding sympathy with what I strove to argue.

The disagreements, though, are more interesting in a forum like this one so herein I focus on them. Two main criticisms appear in the reviews. Both concern the application of the ethic to the real world. One has to do with the overlapping consensus I have sought to construct among four schools and traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the restorative justice movement. Leebaw, Colleen Murphy, Leslie Vinjamuri, and Alex Bellamy question whether this consensus leaves out many other traditions and perspectives in the realm of transitional justice. Mark Freeman states a different version of the criticism in asking whether I stretch the terms of the argument too widely in trying to accommodate multiple perspectives. The second has to do with the ethic’s aspiration to holism. Is it not utopian? Murphy, Leebaw, and Vinjamuri each ask this question in different ways, worrying that the ethic is unable to provide guidance, resolve dilemmas, or handle backlash, adverse effects, political manipulation, and other problems of politics as usual.

Let us begin with the question of consensus. Murphy doubts that the ethic will receive the endorsement of secularists who do not subscribe to restorative justice, while Vinjamuri believes the same is true for a range of “local traditions and customs,” “many faith traditions,” some liberals, the Burmese, and communities that have mediated human rights in locally particular ways.

Consensus, however, is not the first or most important criteria by which my ethic—or any ethic—ought to be judged. As Murphy recognizes, my ethic has two tasks, the first of which is prior to the second. This first task is to set forth and defend a concept of justice. This concept, like any other ethic, whether that of Confucius, Kant, or Averroes, should be accepted or rejected, endorsed or argued with on its merits, not on whether a given set of people agree with or disagree with it. A valid criticism of this first task would be, “this is not an adequate notion of justice because it omits, contradicts, fails to specify,” and the like, and not simply “this or that group thinks differently.” The purpose of an ethic, after all, is to judge, practices, actions, and other concepts of justice. This would not be possible if the ethic found “agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument,” to use Freeman’s phrase. Just as we would not expect advocates of racial equality to seek agreement with segregationists or religious freedom with defenders of blasphemy codes, so we should not judge an ethic of restorative justice inadequate because it fails to find agreement with, say a consequentialist or a balance retributivist (two of the competing conceptions that I outline in the book). Now, the disagreement between my ethic of political reconciliation and its interlocutors is not as sharp as in these examples; some of the reviewers remark upon my efforts to find common ground with other points of view. I make these efforts indeed. Still, disagreements there are—with liberalism, consequentialism, balance retributivism, opponents of forgiveness, “agonistic” theorists, and other points of view. Whether the zone of disagreement with these other views can be reduced depends, as with any argument about ethics, on what sort of persuasion takes place in conversation among the viewpoints, not on whether the ethic converges with positions that exist prior to the conversation.

It is only once the substance of the ethic has been developed—the job of the first task—that I am interested in trying to show that it can command widespread endorsement. Because the ethic is generated from particular religious traditions and a school of justice, and because I hope that it will have wide applicability around the globe, I am interested to show that it might achieve endorsement beyond any one of these traditions. Leebaw argues that I draw from the Christian tradition more than any other. She is right; I do. I then try to show that the core commitments of the ethic—its notions of justice, peace and mercy—find resonance in the Jewish tradition, the Islamic tradition, and the restorative justice school of thought. Restorative justice is important because it has secular articulations and thus shows that the ethic is expressible in secular terms—an important trait if the ethic is to travel to the United Nations or organizations that typically operate in secular terms.

It is not my aim, though, that the ethic will be practiced only among these traditions. For the sake of realism I choose to develop this group of traditions. The framework of overlapping consensus, though, is one in which other traditions might join. In my travels in Africa, I have discovered numerous tribal traditions whose rituals and practices of reconciliation deeply resonate with the ethic of political reconciliation. They are holistic and involve several interconnected practices, many of which are the same as those in the ethic. One of the greatest theorists of restorative justice, Australia’s John Braithwaite, argues that restorative justice is the approach to dealing with the past that resonates with the vast majority of the world’s cultures and religions over the course of history. This is a big claim whose validity I am unable to evaluate. But if Braithwaite is even close to being correct, then the potential for overlapping consensus is strong.

None of this is to deny the challenge and the likelihood of partial results in finding resonance on the ethic among traditions. Traditions themselves contain internally conflicting schools; in the book I note these in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as dimensions of the ethic in which convergence between these entire traditions will fall short. It is difficult to say ex ante, prior to the hard work of searching for mutual resonance,how much convergence between the ethic and any given tradition will be possible. No tradition will converge fully. As Murphy and Vinjamuri rightly note, many ethics will not sign on given their currently extant beliefs, prior to a conversation in which mutual persuasion is attempted. Most importantly, the pursuit of consensus, the object of the second task, is a pursuit based upon a fixed set of commitments, those developed in the first task. Given these commitments, given that they will converge and diverge with the range of views out there in the world, how wide can the zone of agreement be extended?

The real world is also the subject of the other major concern raised in the symposium. I do not account adequately, the criticism runs, for what will likely happen when the practices hit politics: backlash, backfire, manipulation, strategic use on the part of the powerful, and breakdown in moving from practice to product. The ethic’s notion of justice is too encompassing of everything to make hard choices and resolve dilemmas about anything and is unable to show in what sequence practices ought to be adopted. My response is threefold.

First it is all true! That is, politics is replete with all of these dynamics. I might add to my interlocutors’ litany the constraints imposed by the balance of power between rivals during a transition as well as the effects of time, over which possibilities for justice expand and contract. Here it is worth quoting a passage from the book:

Commending reconciliation does not deny the difficulty of reconciliation any more than advocacy of human rights or economic equality denies that both of these values are massively violated in the world today. One practice but not another will occur in one country while another combination of practices will occur in another country; any practice will occur in pieces and in parts and will remain imperfect and fragmentary. While the justifications for the practices will show how, in principle, they might be restorative, none of these rationales warrants assurance that these restorations will be successful where citizens have suffered colossal injustices. Political reconciliation will be compromised by the obstructions of the powerful, the destruction of institutions, the chaos of the aftermath of war and dictatorship, and by the simple complexity of the practices. (61)

I might add that I argue for political reconciliation, the kind that applies to citizens in the political sphere, and not comprehensive reconciliation, relevant to all of life. Political reconciliation is more circumscribed and limited and less ambitious.

I suspect, though, that my interlocutors will not be satisfied by my admission that the ethic will be partially achieved. They seem to be asking that my theory predict, explain, and provide guidance through these complexities. I am doubtful, though, that this is possible, precisely because of the utter complexity and variability of these factors. Let me add to the above litany of breakdown a further complexity: the real world is also replete with breakthroughs. Though all of the six practices in my ethic are fraught in their application, all of them have taken place abundantly all over the world in the past generation: truth commissions, reparations settlements, apologies, acts of forgiveness, trials, and so on. In my reading of the cases, I discovered that along with unintended effects and perverse incentives, there are truth commissions for which polls show victims approving, cases of victims whose demand for revenge is dampened by effective acknowledgment, acts of forgiveness that victims report as healing and that sometimes change the hearts of perpetrators, and so on.

Once the range of malfunctions and successes alike are factored in, it becomes an extremely ambitious task to account for what sort of dynamic is going to obtain in what sort of situation. I do make some limited claims about sequence. For instance, I note that practices like forgiveness and acknowledgment best take place after a war has ended or a dictatorship has fallen. This is a weak claim, though, and even it is too simple. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa espoused reconciliation even during the struggle against apartheid, a theme that would have great effects after the transition. Even the premise behind sequencing—that events are discrete phenomenon with a clear beginning and end—may prove questionable.

It is really social scientific knowledge that is needed to understand these dynamics of application, not ethical reasoning, which is the sort that I take on in the book. Perhaps social scientists will make progress in offering strong and useful generalizations about what sort of dynamics obtain under what sort of conditions. In that case, ethics and social science could be complementary. Vinjamuri, for example, has done valuable comparative case study work showing that trials undertaken during war rarely facilitate and often hinder the achievement of piece—a useful thing to know. Still, my sense of the potential of social science to yield broad generalizations—a sense that I have developed in over two decades in political science—is that even the best empirical work will not yield laws and patterns that are strong and robust enough to tame the vastly situational judgment that decisionmakers must bring to their choices. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but this is my strong sense.

Does this mean, then, that the framework is so vague, abstract, and removed from political reality that it provides no guidance? Such a conclusion would be disappointing, for one of my hopes for the book is that it would reduce the gap between theory and practice. My second response to my interlocutors is that the ethic does in fact provide significant guidance for just action. It cannot and should not supplant the zone of choice in which a decisionmaker must apply prudential judgment but it does point the way to some approaches rather than others. What the ethic does for the justice of dealing with the past is much analogous to what the just war theory does for war. Its norms definitively rule out some courses of action like the intentional killing of innocents and preventive war and offer other criteria for action like proportionality, last resort, and right intention. Even these criteria, especially the latter ones, leave substantial room for judgment as to whether they are fulfilled, while no criterion can substitute for strategy, battle plans, or the likely effects of choosing one course of action over another. Even if a given attack is just in principle, will it likely inflame the enemy population into a debilitating counterattack? Even if a plan secures a just victory, will its losses so harm the morale of the troops that the war will be lost and its just cause defeated? No ethic can answer such questions. I follow Aristotle and Aquinas in bequeathing them to the virtue of prudence. Still, though, the ethic provides criteria that will rule out some choices and narrow down others. It certainly provides far more criteria than Realism’s open-ended notion of the national interest.

So if my ethic of reconciliation provides concrete guidance, of what does this consist? Here are eleven illustrative resultant conclusions:

1) We should reject a “cheap reconciliation” that lacks human rights, the rule of law, accountability and other values. This stands as a sharp critique to numerous leaders who have advocate reconciliation in just these terms.

2) The ethic has an answer to the question of amnesty and the dilemma of peace vs. justice. It says that amnesty is always a sacrifice of justice but one that might be justified (though still as a second best) if necessary to secure peace or a transition to democracy and that ought to be accompanied by other restorative measures.

3) We should reject the dichotomy of punishment vs. forgiveness that has been deployed by a wide range of practitioners in the international community, usually to the detriment of forgiveness. Showing how these practices are compatible opens the door to a wider practice of forgiveness (judicial punishment already has strong support).

4) The ethic also addresses numerous other objections to forgiveness that stand in the way of its advocacy and practice.

5) Community justice forums as a mode of practicing punishment ought to be expanded and improved (while less ought to be expected from the International Criminal Court).

6) Apology and reparations are complementary. One ought not to be practiced without the other. Examples show victims rightly complaining when one appear in isolation.

7) Reparations ought to focus less on restoring victims to their status quo ante and focus more on acting as a symbolic communication. This has implications for determining reparations’ magnitude and mode of delivery.

8) Acknowledgment is at its best when it involves victims in an active, personal way. Local community forums perhaps perform this best. A commission that offers a report in which victims are little but statistics performs this worst.

9) Collective apology is ethically justifiable but ought to respect the right to dissent from it.

10) Collective forgiveness, a practice that is rare, is justifiable and might become more widespread.

11) It is entirely appropriate for religious actors and religious actors to be involved in transitional justice; the record shows that they have much to offer in terms of leadership and resources. They should not be sidelined by secular arguments for “public reason.”

Again, none of these conclusions can tell us, say, when a leader should agree to amnesty rather than continue to fight and pursue prosecution, what to do in the face of backlash and denial, and the like. The conclusions do offer judgments, though, that favor some courses of action and disfavor others and that ally with some existing paradigms and stand opposed to others.

Third and finally, we do well to remember that the purpose of ethics is not simply to prescribe specific courses of action. One of its purposes is to guide judgment and assessment, whether or not one is directly involved in the action. Again, a passage from the book, this one from the conclusion, helps to make the point:

What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive violation? I chose this as my framing question for a deliberate reason: because justice matters for its own sake, as an end in itself, even apart from whether or how often it is enacted and with what results. To hasten to results is to ignore this intrinsic importance or else to adopt, perhaps unreflectively, an ersatz consequentialism. Two friends sit in a café hotly debating the death penalty. Neither is an employee in the criminal justice system, an activist, or a friend or relative of a victim or defendant. Their country’s death penalty laws are not about to change; each of their votes matter infinitesimally. Still they argue, cajole, and rejoin, ever more heatedly. It matters to them a great deal what sort of justice their government renders, what sort of society in which they live. Conversations like this one take place continuously, ubiquitously, over innumerable issues. To the people who engage in them, justice matters. Justice matters all the more if one believes, with philosopher John Rawls, that it is the first virtue of social institutions. (286)

In countries confronting past injustices and seeking to move forward, too, thousands of ordinary people simply want to know how to think about justice. They turn to their frameworks, religious, cultural, and philosophical. So, the frameworks are important.

Even for those involved in the action, though, ethics is not simply a matter of making hard choices and confronting difficult dilemmas, though it is importantly that. It is also a matter of reconceiving the field of possibilities, of thinking creatively and expansively so as to open up pathways that might not have been conceived otherwise. Thinking of justice, peace, and mercy in a new way does not merely show us what move to make within a game but also helps to restructure the game—that is, the ends and means of politics. As Nukhet Sandal recognizes most directly, this is what I believe religious traditions can help us do.

Not without reason, then, Daniel Philpott starts from the assumption that war leaves behind wounds of injustice. These are not just physical bodily wounds—though they are paramount—but are wounds in the form of violations of human rights, wounds of ignorance about the source and circumstance of injustice, wounds derived from lack of acknowledgement, and what Philpott describes as “the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice.” Taking a somewhat Kantian line, Philpott notes that wrongdoers are also themselves wounded by their acts, a view that also finds strong resonance in the religious traditions that he examines.. Their wrongdoing creates a moral sickness that inhibits fulfilment and happiness. As Philpott reminds us, the technology of the gas chamber was first developed as a way of saving German firing squads from the trauma caused by their deeds.

When all the wounds of war and oppression are taken into account, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many peace processes—as many as half by some calculations—are doomed to fail. Sometimes, the victory of the wrongdoer is allowed to stand. Those, who like I, have visited post-war Srebrenica understand the palpable sense of injustice felt by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the more than 7,600 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were massacred when that town was “ethnically cleansed.” Today, Srebrenica is an almost 100% Serbian town. The victory of injustice was allowed to stand. Other times, victims of rights abuse may resent the absence of acknowledgement or reparation; perpetrators may be reluctant to acknowledge their wrongs or relinquish their gains. Whatever the precise nature of the tension, the social bonds and contracts that knit societies together will have been destroyed; trust broken; resentment amassed. No matter how much effort and how many resources are dedicated to the rebuilding of institutions, infrastructure and homes, peace is unlikely to be durable unless it rests on the firm foundation of genuine reconciliation. This is why Just and Unjust Peace is such a welcome, and important, read. It makes both a well-reasoned argument in favor of a politics of reconciliation in the face of war and oppression and sets out six principal methods for achieving that goal: building socially just institutions, acknowledgement of past wrongs by the perpetrators, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness.

At its heart, this book is a passionate and compelling defense of political reconciliation written in the spirit of some of the great peacemakers of our time. Desmond Tutu and some of the controversies he has aroused is a frequent point of reference, but the tenor of the book also reminds us of the logic behind Ramos Horta’s decision to privilege the normalizing of relations with Jakarta above retribution and punishment after the bloodshed in East Timor. The central points—and the tools for restoring societies to balance—will be familiar to students of peace studies. Mark Amstutz’s work on political forgiveness springs to mind. But what this book adds—brilliantly to my mind—is a deep and well-argued account of why communities, states and international organizations should pursue this path, and an account firmly rooted in political philosophy and religious tradition.

Naturally, there are points that could be quibbled with in terms of the logic of some of Philpott’s argument. As other reviewers have pointed out, reconciliation is not necessarily a prerequisite to peace—if we understand that term to mean “the absence of war.” There are plenty of cases where peace has prevailed without reconciliation. North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, and Bosnia are conflicts where there has been little evidence of reconciliation of the sort espoused by Philpott but also no resumption of armed conflict—yet. However, I am less worried than others about this possibility because whilst what Johan Galtung described as “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of war) may prevail without reconciliation, “positive peace” (i.e. the absence of fear, the fulfilment of human rights) almost never will. Without reconciliation and the forging of positive peace, communities will always be wary, always insecure, always unsatisfied and—for the utilitarians among us—will always misdirect precious resources and energies away from productive and fulfilling activities and towards their own protection from future threats. As scholars in International Relations know only too well, this can in turn create “security dilemmas” in which one group’s preparations for self-defense appear aggressive to another, sparking that group to step up its own preparations. Herein lies one of the ways in which negative peace can degenerate back into violent conflict. What is more, peace without reconciliation is much easier when the unreconciled parties have an international boundary or ocean between them. Where the lines of dispute are communal and fuzzy, as they often are in the aftermath of civil war (by far the most common kind of war today), the day-to-day necessities of engagement make reconciliation all the more pressing.

Another source of criticism has been that Philpott grounds his ethic of reconciliation in three major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—and a secular ethic he describes as the “liberal peace.” The cornerstones of the politics of reconciliation he sets out are derived from what Philpott claims to be an “overlapping consensus” across these traditions. Of course, though, this remains a decidedly partial account of justice principles, none of which originate from Africa for example. This problem worries me less than it worries others primarily because most of the ethical traditions I’m familiar with embrace most of the values that Philpott includes within his account of reconciliation and because Philpott himself acknowledges two key caveats to his argument—that reconciliation will never be complete or perfect and that the precise form that it takes should differ according to the context. Philpott is right, in my view, to recognize that religious traditions have ethical content that can be useful to reconciliation. We need to recognize, however, that the application of religious arguments and concepts may be more helpful in some circumstances than in others, and that Philpott’s own reading of the essential aspects of those traditions is itself partial and downplays elements that are antithetical to reconciliation. As Norwegian diplomats engaged in the Oslo peace process in the Middle East would attest, contested claims to ownership over sacred sites rooted in a theological epistemology that knows no compromise are one of the few utterly impenetrable obstacles to reconciliation.

Yet these strike me as issues that present themselves in particular contexts. Of course—as Philpott acknowledges—the politics of reconciliation must make sense in the time and place in which it occurs; it must be rooted in the locale. Tutu’s use of religion during his time as chair as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was right in that time and place. It was right, precisely because it was Tutu. It may not be right in other settings. Whatever the configuration, however, it is clear that the politics of reconciliation should be front and center of any attempt at building peace in the aftermath of war and grave injustice.

Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.

Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.

More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.

In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.

Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.

One of Philpott’s goals in Just and Unjust Peace is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” (3). This is the question that has been at the center of ongoing debates on transitional and international justice, but Philpott goes about addressing it in a wholly original way. Instead of grounding the inquiry in a preliminary engagement with prevailing international legal standards, he begins by articulating a general theoretical approach to justice and reconciliation, and then uses it to examine contemporary institutions and practices.

The result is an impressive and rewarding discussion that addresses debates on transitional justice, as well as debates on the role of religion in international politics. Philpott’s theory of justice emerges as a grand synthesis of traditions and goals that are routinely taken to be in conflict with one another. He rejects the opposition of forward-looking and backward-looking approaches to justice, calling for practices that are “Janus-faced, peering in both directions” (6). He dismisses the persistent view that the pursuit of justice is in tension with the goal of political reconciliation, insisting that justice must encompass reconciliation and that any ethically grounded conception of political reconciliation must also entail a commitment to justice. At the same time, Philpott proposes a theoretical approach that aims to bridge the gulf between religious and secular responses to injustice.

Philpott addresses claims asserting the incompatibility of religion and rights by suggesting that such claims tend to be premised on the view that religious believers invariably identify their ethics with a kind of argument by fiat, such as, “policy X is ordained by the Lord and that is that!” (111). This kind of logic, insists Philpott, is typical of bad religious arguments, but not religious arguments per se, adding that “we do well to remember that there are secular forms of these arguments too” (111). He reminds readers that the international humanitarian legal tradition emerged out of Christian theological writings on just war theory and that religious activists have played an important role in various struggles to expand civil and human rights.

At the same time Philpott takes on the claim, prominent in liberal political thought, that political argumentation must be expressed in a secular “public” language. To exclude religious rationales from the process of public justification, he argues, implies that people should offer rationales other than the ones that actually motivate them in efforts to defend their political views. As an alternative, Philpott proposes an approach to integrating religious and secular ethics that is grounded in what he calls “rooted reason”—one that invites those motivated by religion to present their full rationales, but also insists that they remain open to alternative views and be capable of re-expressing their ethics in a secular language. The goal he envisions is a “mutual resonance, involving a reciprocal back-and-forth process of comparison and efforts at mutual understanding” (21).

From this starting point, Philpott seeks to ground his approach to justice in an “overlapping consensus” between the liberal tradition and ideas drawn from ancient texts in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. In a series of chapters dedicated to examining ideas from each tradition, Philpott relies primarily on ancient texts for guidance, with less attention to the way that living traditions and contemporary religious practices might inform responses to the specific problem of political injustice. The theoretical framework that emerges seems to be organized around a discussion of reconciliation that is drawn largely from the Christian tradition, while works from the other traditions are mined for potentially compatible ideas. It seems to me that the kind of mutual understanding Philpott calls for in his preliminary chapters would benefit from greater attention to what might be learned from unique and conflicting approaches to framing the problems that he sets out to address. Nevertheless, these chapters make for interesting and evocative reading.

Just and Unjust Peace advocates a restorative approach to justice that addresses the “wounds of political injustice,” conceived broadly as encompassing violations of human rights, harms to persons, lack of knowledge about political injustices, and the absence of acknowledgment from officials. In keeping with restorative justice principles, Philpott’s approach encompasses harms or damage experienced by the wrongdoer as well. To this list, Philpott adds the wounds inflicted by the “standing victory” of the wrongdoer’s injustice. Philpott argues, given that political injustices are associated with a particular political order or program, the failure to effectively oppose or defeat that political order will continue to be experienced as a wound by its victims.

Philpott grounds his theory of justice in ethics and principles, but articulates it as an array of practices aimed at ameliorating these various wounds. Such practices, he argues, ideally ought to include efforts to build socially just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment, and forgiveness. Philpott’s discussion of these practices offers an interesting counterpoint to scholarship that has sought to measure the impact of individual transitional justice through statistical analysis of cross-national data. “The practices complement one another, complete one another, and weave together,” he argues (174). The implied critique of a certain emphasis on isolating and measuring the impact of individual transitional justice mechanisms reminded me of Michael Pollan’s response to nutrition science. The problem with the kind of approach, Philpott suggests, is that it can blind us to the complicated and dynamic ways that various strategies work together synergistically.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is on the theme of punishment, which makes an important theoretical intervention in ongoing debates on restorative justice and legalism. These debates have tended to position restorative justice in opposition, not only to prosecution, but also to retributive rationales for punishment. Philpott rejects this opposition. He offers a compelling case that retribution is a dimension of restorative justice and one of its most important moral responses to political injustice. At the same time, he takes on those who have attempted to analyze the role of war crimes trials only in relation to their impact on goals such as improvement in human rights practices, stability, democratic change, or deterrence. The fundamental problem with this essentially consequentialist approach, Philpott observes simply, is that it “does not deal with the past” (91). Indeed, it is a strange thing to consider that the literature on transitional justice, an arena of study and practice that emerged in connection with the goal of “dealing with the past,” has increasingly identified “success” with achievements that have very little to do with the quality of their response to past wrongs. Philpott counters this trend by making the case for the integrity of retribution as a moral response to political injustice, while also rejecting the “inordinate focus on incarceration,” characteristic of Western criminal justice systems (65). He does so by situating the role of punishment in the larger context of efforts to pursue reintegration and repair.

Philpott’s theoretical approach is so holistic that one gets the feeling that many of the questions or potential criticisms that one might raise for him would likely be acknowledged and then swallowed up into his grand theoretical framework. This quality enriches the book, but is also one of its vulnerabilities. There is integrity in the way that Philpott engages his theoretical interlocutors. In presenting his own arguments, he takes care to identify and acknowledge what is most compelling in the strongest opposing view. In making the case for forgiveness as a practice of justice, for example, he begins with the voice of Francine, a victim of the Rwandan genocide, whose narrative immediately reveals how absurd—even obscene—appeals for forgiveness can appear to those who have survived atrocities. Such passages model the kind of “ethic of engagement” that he takes to be integral to the goal of establishing dialogue across lines of conflict and belief.

In addressing various critics, however, Philpott never seems to name or fully confront what is perhaps the most significant challenge animating various debates on the theme of addressing political injustice: the threat of backlash. Political injustices are defined here as violations or deviations from international norms, but they are also, importantly, crimes of obedience. Despite all of the various forms that they take, political injustices share certain features as a result. These are abuses that have been rationalized, normalized, or legalized by officials under a prior order, and actively or tacitly supported by a significant portion of a population. Efforts to acknowledge such wrongs as wrongs, let alone punish those who committed them, are invariably met with backlash and denial to varying degrees.

Most, if not all, of the positions that Philpott engages here, most theoretical debates on transitional justice, have taken shape in response to this particular challenge. The potential threat of backlash and denial is the main reason that scholars have perceived the goals of peace, or reconciliation, and justice to be in tension with one another. The “peace versus justice” debate, in all of its many forms, is premised on the view that peace requires some form of preliminary effort to address the potentially volatile forces of denial. The persistence of efforts to deny or rationalize past wrongs is one reason that so much attention is given to truth commissions as a mechanism for addressing political injustice. It is also the reason that many scholars and policymakers have suggested that forward-looking responses to the past may be in tension with backward-looking responses. Calls for retribution, acknowledgement, and apologies in response to past wrongs are blamed for stirring up conflict and destabilizing the peace precisely because they aspire to challenge persistent forms of denial.

Philpott’s assertion that these debates are positioned around false dichotomies depends on his having set such problems aside. As it is elaborated, the model seems to envision a world in which those who supported the political injustices in question have already come to appreciate that they were in the wrong. In such a world, the message of censure associated with punishment or acknowledgement should not be rejected as illegitimate “victor’s justice” as long as these responses are conducted in accordance with established norms and certain procedural guidelines. Although Philpott recognizes that any remedy for political injustice must begin with efforts to establish just institutions, the theory says little about the fact that it is due to the persistent threat of backlash that such efforts have often been associated with compromises on backward-looking responses to political injustice. The model also sidesteps the question of how transitional justice practices may be manipulated, limited, and utilized strategically by those in power, or how they have been in many of the exemplary cases that he discusses.

How, then, should the forces of denial and backlash be addressed in efforts to remedy political injustice? If Just and Unjust Peace avoids a direct response to this question, it offers three indirect responses. First, the broader logic of the argument presented in Just and Unjust Peace seems to suggest that the most promising way to resolve such conflicts, as well as conflicts regarding the role of religion in politics, is to begin by focusing on points of possible convergence rather than difference, and that from this starting point, a foundation for common understanding might be established and deepened over time. There is wisdom in this suggestion, but it raises a difficult question. When does such an approach provide a foundation for bridging differences and when does it function instead to avoid conflict or mask compromise? Second, Philpott sometimes seems to suggest that, working together synergistically, the various practices of justice that he enumerates will function to effectively neutralize those who continue to deny or rationalize past wrongs. For example, punishment conducted in the restorative mode advocated here, situated in the context of broader measures aimed at advancing reconciliation and repair, might be less likely to trigger hostile backlash than punishment conducted with the goal of stigmatizing or excluding. This is a useful suggestion, but I think it minimizes the intensity of backlash that often accompanies even minor forms of acknowledgment. Ultimately, if they are to function as he suggests they should, Philpott’s practices of justice must be accompanied by significant political struggle and transformation.

The third way that Just and Unjust Peace addresses the problem of backlash is the most interesting to me. In a larger sense, the book may be read as insisting upon the value of articulating an ethic of justice and reconciliation that is held at a remove from calculations regarding backlash, power dynamics, or ongoing rationalizations of abuse and violence. Like Socrates in his response to Thrasymachus, the book insists on the importance of disentangling our discussions of what justice might mean from the manner in which it has been institutionalized, and hold such discussions at something of a remove from our assessments of what is possible or practical at a given time. For all of its attention to empirical studies and professed pragmatism, Just and Unjust Peace is, in that sense, a visionary exercise. It outlines an ethic that is “not so much a solution to evil as it is a response…that in the political realm will always be partially achieved” (5).

At first glance, this answer seems odd. Intense debates among scholars and within communities transitioning from conflict or repression to democracy often pit justice against reconciliation. Some within these debates argue that criminal trials may achieve justice but threaten reconciliation. Others argue that communities may choose to pursue reconciliation rather than justice as a second-best strategy justified in light of pragmatic and moral constraints.  For many the pursuit of justice and reconciliation are complementary but not identical; they argue that the justice of punishment may be pursued alongside efforts at truth-telling which promote reconciliation. All of these positions take reconciliation and justice to be distinct; what is at issue is the relationship between these two values and the implications of that relationship for the moral justifiability of various kinds of responses to injustice, such as criminal trials, truth commissions, reparations, and memorials.

Philpott departs from these views by essentially collapsing the distinction between these two ideas: justice is reconciliation. Philpott’s analysis is powerful. It is the product of meticulous research on philosophical theories and religious understandings of central moral concepts that structure political life. Philpott also considers and responds to almost every major objection that could be raised at each stage of his argument. As a result, a view that initially seems odd becomes plausible, indeed compelling. Anyone interested in the question of how communities should deal with past wrongs must take Philpott’s account of justice as political reconciliation into consideration. It is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of justice in the aftermath of wrongdoing and the nature of political reconciliation. And yet I am hesitant to endorse Philpott’s conclusions. Below I first describe Philpott’s account of justice as reconciliation and then discuss two reasons for my hesitation.

Political reconciliation, Philpott begins, refers to the process of restoring right relationships. This process is political when it focuses on individuals relating to one another in their role as citizens. Restoration is needed in political relationships, according to Philpott, when systematic violations of human rights occur; such violations constitute injustices and breaches of the standards of right relationships. The human rights that are mutually respected in right relationships are codified in international law, and reflected in the laws and constitutions of states as well as the actions of those who act in the state’s name. Violations wound individuals and relationships. Primary wounds include the violation itself, which constitutes a form of disrespect; harm to persons; ignorance of the cause of the injustice; failure to acknowledge the suffering injustices bring; the standing victory of the wrongdoer whose action constitutes a denial of the rights claim of the victim; and harm to the wrongdoer. Secondary wounds, Philpott argues, arise from primary wounds. Such wounds often cause memories of violence and suffering and loss, which lead to negative emotions such as humiliation and hatred. Such emotions can prompt judgments among victims about the appropriate vengeful actions to take, and actions that are based on these judgments, such as massacre and aggression. Thus, the cycle of violence persists.

In Philpott’s view, processes of restoration rectify these wounds. Primary restorations directly repair individuals and relationships and are, in virtue of this, intrinsically just. Secondary restorations, transformations in emotions and judgments which lead to altered action, include trust and a sense of the legitimacy of a new regime. Though not the primary aim of processes of reconciliation, these secondary restorations can be a consequence of them. Philpott considers six restorative practices: building just institutions and relations between states; acknowledgement (e.g., by truth commissions or through memorials); reparations; punishment; forgiveness; and apology.

Why think of this account of reconciliation as an account of justice? Philpott suggests that one important reason for making this move stems from the substantive argument given for viewing reconciliation in this way. A second important reason is that his view articulates a conception of justice already present in secular and religious traditions. Thus, this view can be the subject of an overlapping consensus among those who hold fundamentally different comprehensive conceptions of the good. To demonstrate this claim, Philpott considers Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the restorative justice movement, showing how the way that justice is conceptualized in these traditions resonates with the conception of justice articulated above. In each case, justice is conceptualized in terms of right conduct given a certain relationship and right responses to wrong conduct, where right responses are such that they restore the relationship that wrongdoing upset.

There is reason to be skeptical about the degree to which the conception of justice as reconciliation that Philpott advances really can become the subject of an overlapping consensus. I want to note in passing that it is far from obvious that this conception can be rooted in non-Abrahamic faith traditions (e.g., Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism). However, I want here to focus on secularists and whether we should think that they will be part of the overlapping consensus too. Philpott’s conception of justice in the aftermath of wrongdoing differs in important ways from the common conceptions of justice among, for example, Western liberal humanists. Philpott himself notes how strange the idea of reconciliation as justice will seem to many liberals “for whom justice means individual rights, a just distribution of wealth, just punishment, and other matters of desert, entitlement, and rights” (4). The justice of reconciliation is not primarily the justice of desert (as in retributive justice or what Philpott calls balance retributivism) or justice as fairness (as in Rawls’s theory of distributive justice). The justice of political reconciliation prioritizes the repairing of relationships and evaluates the justice of an action on the basis of what will achieve the repair that injustice creates; it is not fundamentally about responding to individuals and their actions in a manner that is in some sense fitting or due. Indeed, rather than resonating with the justice of retributivism and distributive justice articulated and defended by secularists and prevalent within liberal democratic communities, part of Philpott’s task is to problematize and challenge these notions. Of course all traditions, including secular liberal traditions, have their critics. Restorative justice is a secular movement, and it is to this understanding of justice that Philpott appeals when demonstrating that justice as reconciliation can become the subject of an overlapping consensus that includes secularists. However, restorative justice remains a somewhat minority view, and thus only a minority of secularists are likely to be included in the consensus Philpott envisions.

Demonstrating that the conception of justice as reconciliation can become the subject of an overlapping consensus is only the second of the justificatory tasks. It is also important, Philpott writes, to provide substantive reasons for thinking that his view is correct. I urge caution on this front as well. My main concern is that this framework has limited resources for identifying and articulating the hard choices and moral dilemmas that communities face in grappling with past injustice in the midst of rebuilding just institutions. It is important to recognize just how comprehensive the justice of reconciliation is. It includes mercy (“the cardinal virtue of reconciliation is mercy,” 62), it includes peace (“peace is the state that corresponds to being reconciled,” 63), and it includes the reconstruction of just institutions (this is one of the six practices that repair relations). All morally important aims and goals for communities grappling with past wrongdoing in the midst of transitioning to peace and democracy seem to be incorporated into this theoretical framework.

In a sense, then, almost anything a community does could qualify as just. Efforts to rebuild socially just institutions, the prosecution and punishment of wrongdoers, the offering of apology and the fostering of forgiveness: each constitutes a kind of reparative process aimed at rectifying some of the primary wounds injustice leaves behind. Given this, in a sense there are no hard choices; only choices about which dimension of justice will be a priority. Moreover, the dilemmas that practitioners responding to and theorists thinking about wrongdoing in the midst of a transition discuss seem to be illusory. That is, there does not seem to be conceptual space for allowing that the pursuit of one goal (such as punishment) may put other goals in jeopardy (such as restoring the rule of law); on Philpott’s view each attends to different needs of the same goal, that is, justice. The neatness of the theory makes me uneasy about the relevance and accuracy of its guidance for practitioners and members of transitional communities, in that instead of accounting for and providing guidance about their dilemmas, it may tend to make those dilemmas disappear.

The meaning of political reconciliation for Philpott centers on what he calls the “restoration of right relationship.” When a society emerges out of war or dictatorship, it is full of wounded relationships: among citizens, among communities, and between the state and its citizens and communities. These wounds are created by political injustices, the particular sort of injustices that transitional justice, at its best, seeks to address. Philpott argues that an effective conception of political reconciliation must address such injustices, and he roots his conception in a mix of religious and legal doctrines and traditions: human rights, restorative justice, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He offers a conception of transitional justice that goes well beyond the liberal peace.

Philpott’s project is to find the points of commonality between these traditions. Some scholars see Islamic notions of punishment as antithetical to human rights, or Christian notions of forgiveness as antithetical to punishment, or restorative justice as antithetical to the prevailing penalistic account of transitional justice. Philpott offers a different point of view, one that acknowledges the tensions within and between these traditions, but that ultimately highlights how—in relation to political injustices—each of them is geared toward righting relationships that have been wounded. He also shows how the liberal and religious transitional-justice vocabularies are fundamentally convergent. The former uses terms like civic trust and social capital, and the latter terms like harmony and reconciliation, but for all intents and purposes they focus on the common end-game that Philpott calls “right relationship.”

I believe that Philpott gets it right by viewing transitions out of war and dictatorship as being simultaneously, and fundamentally, about the treatment of wounds and the restoration of relationships. Societies in transition require fixes that go far beyond the technical or individual levels. They are societies broken on moral, legal, and political levels, perhaps even on spiritual levels. Whole new relationships need to be reimagined, reconstructed, and reconfigured. This is the most important priority in achieving the kind of beyond-liberal “just peace” that Philpott refers to in the title of his book. And it is clear that Philpott sees transitional justice as an integral part of the exercise because of its capacity to transform the human and institutional relationships that are the basis for any stable society. As he states in the book: “One of the most important goals of practices of political reconciliation is to change the judgments that people form in response to political injustices….” (46).

In addition to offering a coherent framework for his ideas, Philpott introduces a number of memorable terms, such as “overlapping consensus,” “rooted reason,” “personalism,” and the “standing victory of the perpetrator’s injustice.” The latter is of particular interest. Philpott uses this to express the idea that right relationship (i.e., political reconciliation) cannot be achieved as long as there is a perception of political injustice. This leads him to embrace rather than reject punishment and atrocity trials as part of his overall theory. But his embrace is not a maximalist one: he favors a “presumption of punishment” but contests the assertion that punishment and atrocity trials can never give way to competing priorities. I share this view, which is a rational one if you start from the premise that successful transitions may in some cases require principled suspensions of criminal justice.

However, while I am in broad agreement with Philpott’s argument, let me also express some reservations.

First, I believe that the book may hold limited value for the transitional justice practitioner. The debates that it summarizes, and the case studies and examples cited, are not sufficiently new or original. They will be familiar, with the smallest of exceptions, to anyone knowledgeable about the core transitional justice literature of the last fifteen years. For example, Philpott makes reference throughout the book to major experiences of the field in the 1990s, such as those of Germany, Chile, South Africa, and Rwanda. Yet there is hardly any reference to the more complicated and well-covered cases that dominated the last decade of transitional justice discourse and practice, such as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia. This gap leaves the book feeling somewhat dated and, however unintentionally, cherry-picked. It is even a greater shame that the book, despite being published in 2012, makes no reference to the Arab world’s revolutions and transitions, which have special relevance for a theoretical framework that seeks to reconcile Islam with a universalist rights-based account of political reconciliation.

Another reservation I have about Philpott’s book has to do with a feeling of “overreach.” In advancing an all-encompassing theory of political reconciliation that seeks to synergize traditions as diverse as human rights, restorative justice, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Philpott sometimes needs to stretch the ordinary meaning of certain terms in order to make them fit his theory—for example, by arguing that justice and political reconciliation, following his philosophical dissection, are one and the same. This kind of stretching of terms and traditions feels overwrought at times, giving the occasional sense that the book is as much a work of word-smithing as one of ideas. This is an understandable consequence of trying to advance a theory that will find agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument.

Finally, as much as I agree with the book’s substantive content, there are a few points with which I disagree. For example, Philpott boldly argues toward the end of his treatise that forgiveness of the perpetrator by the victim is necessary in order to fully overcome the standing victory of a perpetrator’s injustice. This is one of the only unconvincing, and arguably unnecessary, parts of his otherwise compelling treatise. He simply does not make the case convincingly enough that political reconciliation is incomplete without forgiveness. Other minor quibbles I could note are of less consequence to his overall thesis. For example, there is very little discussion about vetting—a crucial tool for righting the state-society relationship—and what little discussion he includes is oddly located under the section on punishment rather than the one on “building socially just institutions.” Similarly, Philpott’s treatment of apology as an entirely separate section from the one on reparations is surprising, as is his treatment of amnesty, which he mistakenly describes as a subcategory of pardon rather than the reverse and which he oddly locates within the section on punishment rather than on forgiveness.

Ultimately, though, I cannot but admire the ambition of Philpott’s book and the sheer breadth of topics it covers. His formulation of “political reconciliation” is generally convincing and in time may come to influence transitional justice theory and terminology. His more integrated approach to the issues is one that ought to be widely endorsed, especially in a time when the theory and practice of transitional justice have become counter-productively and illogically synonymous with the fight against impunity.

Before we come back to the epistemic status of religious interpretation and diverse public theologies, we should highlight the current status of peacebuilding and post-conflict justice initiatives. For years, we have followed the failure of an understanding that solely focuses on finding the culprits and punishing them for the past injustices. The operational successes of the international courts do not usually translate into positive peace, stable governance, and sound economic development. Conflicts erupt again or at the very least, structural violence continues. We can even say that we are in a state of crisis and the recipes developed in the offices of international organizations are not of much help. Philpott’s book emphasizes these gaps in our understanding. His concept of “restorative justice” and review of six practices of political reconciliation (namely, building just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment and forgiveness) remind the ideals one should pursue in peacebuilding. However, such a holistic approach to complicated processes requires us to overcome our biases in the field and one of the biggest steps towards this goal is taking religion seriously.

One widespread bias in the field is manifested through dismissing religion as an emotional, irrational and arbitrary element. Liberal skeptics dismiss the role of religious “knowledge” and the significance of reconciliation in attaining a long term peace. I have argued elsewhere that religious leaders and networks constitute epistemic communities with their expertise, competence and policy relevant knowledge in theology. Religious traditions offer insights in multiple fields ranging from development to human rights. In that sense, religious knowledge follows Weberian “value rationality” and it is part of the Foucauldian post-modern episteme that champions the spiritual dimension while acknowledging the scientific advances. The mere existence of conferences, conventions, and peer-reviewed publications in theology shows the presence of a structured expert community, criticisable, and refutable knowledge in text analysis, interpretation, and application. One can even claim that theology comes close to following a Weberian “formal rationality” when it comes to hermeneutics and exegesis.

Religious epistemic communities of peacebuilding and reconciliation have become much more prominent in the last couple of decades. These networks are familiar not only with the sources their respective traditions provide, but also with the local conditions, sensitivities and expectations. Given that a significant portion of the peacebuilding terminology is borrowed from scriptural sources, religious leaders should be seen as natural contributors to debates surrounding healing of wounds. Unfortunately, religious roots of reconciliation and forgiveness are often conveniently forgotten. Philpott brings these roots back to the scene and he traces the development and transformation of some vital concepts of restorative justice within theological frameworks. Examples in the book include the concept of “solidarity”, and how Jurgen Moltman, among others, contributed to the concept as a theologian; the meanings of shalom (peace) and teshuva (repentance) in Judaic tradition and how they are manifested in different writings; and the possibilities sulh, the concept of conciliation in Islam, provides in post-conflict settings. Beyond this epistemological dimension, reconciliation means addressing traumas and recovery of what has been lost both materially and spiritually. It means restoring trust and hope. Such a sensitive process requires a wide array of methods, tools and dimensions, including practices associated with religion. Philpott’s conceptualization of restorative justice shows that such an integrated approach is possible and each practice of political reconciliation can not only easily be located in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, but also sometimes directly emerge from religious traditions.

One common misjudgment in conflict transformation is that religion is illogical and irrational, and it cannot be part of policy debates due to its arbitrary nature. However, religious actors and secular ones can converse using similar standards. As Philpott notes, arguments solely from fiat or private revelation “typify bad religious arguments, not religious arguments per se” (111) and religious arguments are “amenable to examination, understanding, consideration, criticism, partial agreement, contradiction and argument…” In many official settings, religious language is ruled out from the very beginning. This is unfortunately a loss for those of us who work towards peace—those who initiate violence are more willing to tap into religious justifications than those who want to bring justice and stability.

The second important contribution I mentioned in the beginning—and an important distinction—that the book makes is the recognition of the changing nature of public theologies, or in Scott Appleby’s words, the “ambivalence of the sacred” in peace processes. In his work on religion and comparative politics, Philpott has already elaborated on political theologies and differentiation of political structures. This work is significant as it tackles religious manifestations on an institutional level and does not assume that a given tradition has fixed traits. In settings ranging from Argentina to Rwanda, religious institutions have supported dictatorial regimes or did nothing to intervene in the human rights violations. Once again though, this is more of an institutional deficit rather than a norm that can be attributed to a religious tradition. To put it bluntly, discarding religious resources due to bad institutional practices and narrow ideologies is as meaningless as doing away with the field of economics altogether because some banks contributed to a financial crisis.

Unfortunately, many academics and peacebuilders still leave out religion in conversations about justice and stability. Once again, this is mostly due to frustration with institutions. I observed this lack of confidence in religious institutions when I was conducting research on the role of religious actors in conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. There were courageous and quite influential religious leaders like Fr. Alex Reid, Cardinal Cahal Daly, Rev. Harold Good, Rev. John Dunlop and Archbishop Robin Eames who played roles in realizing a stable Northern Irish society. However, members of the civil society working on the peace process expressed their disappointment with the churches as institutions while acknowledging the contributions of individual religious leaders and their theologies of co-existence and peace. Another observation I made as an outsider was that elite members of the civil society, political parties and academia were much more resistant to exploring the full potential of religious discourse in reconciliation than people on the street. I also experienced such an instance of resistance on a panel about Israeli-Palestinian peace process I once chaired. I asked the participants (prominent Israeli and Palestinian civil society representatives) about the potential role of religious actors in conciliation and building alternative communication channels. In one voice, five panelists turned to me and said that “there is no place for religion; whenever religion comes into picture, things get worse.” It was a bit ironic that the panel was organized by a Judaic Studies department—the religion dimension was there even if the participants had not thought about it.

To conclude, Philpott opens the way for a healthy discussion of the role of religious traditions and actors by introducing an ethic of political reconciliation. Just and Unjust Peace is a fascinating piece of work that is in the intersection of religious studies, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. It takes religious knowledge as well as experience of reconciliation and peacebuilding seriously; it reveals many possibilities religious traditions contain within themselves towards achieving restorative justice. Most importantly, the book does not bring in religion at the expense of the secular approaches but as a necessary complement to them. That is why it is a required reading for social scientists, religious studies/theology scholars who are interested in reconciliation as well as NGO officials who are in search of inclusive ways of attaining a long lasting peace.

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on Religion and International Affairs.—ed.

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NS: I’d like to start with your experience with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. What prepared you for that experience? What kinds of skills did you find yourself using?

CVV: Prior to going to the commission, I taught in a religious studies department at the University of Cape Town. My interest was the impact of religion on secular society and of secular society on religion. I had already worked fairly extensively in the social sciences and political analysis, so the transition was not a very difficult one. It was, in a sense, continuous with what I had done. But it’s interesting that you ask that question. There was a journalist who interviewed me at the conclusion of the commission, and he asked me essentially the same thing. I realized that, though trained as a theologian, I’d hardly used a theological concept for the past three years—but, nevertheless, it may have been the most theological job I’d ever had in my life.

NS: How exactly is that?

CVV: The theology that I was teaching and practicing in the church was always related to building a decent human society, and that’s what we were trying to do in the commission. My feet were deep in liberation theology, contextual theology, and black theology. The jargon of the day was that you don’t write theology or teach theology or read theology—you do theology. The commission’s essentially pragmatic task seemed to me to be also essentially theological.

NS: Since then, have you found yourself drawing again on explicitly theological language and resources? Or do you find that you’re still able to do theology in this more implicit way?

CVV: When my time in the commission ended, I went back to the University of Cape Town, back to the department of religious studies, and realized that my concerns had moved on—whether it was forwards, backwards, sideways, upwards, downwards, I’m not sure. I resigned from the university and set up the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Since then, I’ve moved more and more into the area of transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights, political conflict, and negotiation theory. But, very recently, I have found myself tending to reach into the theological pot again. In the last year or so, probably, I have become more and more conscious of the importance of religion and theology—above all, the importance of spirituality, if one can make that distinction, which I think one can.

NS: Can you say more about that spirituality? What does it mean for you?

CVV: For me, spirituality has to do with having an openness towards life and towards truth. It means wanting to move beyond any closed ideological, dogmatic system. It also means a willingness—and, in fact, a desire—to discover what lies beyond the material. I’ve often said to myself that the question of God and the question of the divine are more important than the answers. It’s a very, very arrogant thing to begin to describe who God is or what the divine is. Yet these questions range from the relationship between religion and the sciences to ethical inquiry, and certainly to political justice, reconciliation, and coexistence. In that sense I regard myself as a very spiritual person. But I find myself resisting institutional forms of religion that try to impose upon me and everyone else a definition of the divine. It’s openness that I think is really important.

NS: Do you think this kind of openness has become more common in South African culture since the end of apartheid?

CVV: It is stronger today than it was five years ago, and different from what it was in the bad old days. During apartheid, the constitution said that South Africa was a Christian country. At the time of our transition, there was a lot of discussion about interreligious dialogue. In the negotiations, we quite easily agreed that South Africa ought to be a secular state—secular in the sense that no religion is prioritized and all religious traditions may come to expression. People’s interest began to turn away from religion, towards politics. The Christian churches are not nearly the social and political force that they were. But now I think we are beginning to see a new openness to the spiritual. If we’re going to learn to live together in this place, we need something else. We need a little fire in the belly. We need something to drive us, to call us, and to persuade us, and that’s what spirituality can do. I’ve even come across fairly serious atheists and agnostics in South Africa who think we need it as well: that openness to transcendence, to the poetic dimension of existence.

NS: Did the institutional Christian churches become identified with the old regime, so that throwing out apartheid meant throwing them out too?

CVV: The answer to that is nuanced. The dominant position of the church—not only the white Dutch Reformed Church, but English-speaking churches as well—was to submit to government. But there was also a church-within-a-church, a group of people who followed the gospel that was calling us out of apartheid. In the old days, you could clearly define that group in terms of initiatives like the Kairos Document and the Balhar Confession. Now, that church-within-a-church—and mosque, and synagogue, and temple—is more difficult to define, but it is there. Just as we sought to be the catalyst for change in the old regime, people now are working for a new society that is accountable and legitimate in terms of the constitution, which is a very fine constitution. How do we get there? It’s going to take more than politics.

NS: You mean it’s going to take spirituality? Is that where the church-within-a-church is heading today?

CVV: Yes.

NS: What about you? Do you continue to consider yourself Christian?

CVV: I think of spirituality as the realization of our identity as true human beings, through the traditions in which we find ourselves. I can’t get out of my skin. I am a Christian in terms of baptism, training, and milieu. In my head, if not in my mouth, I instinctively tend to use theological terms and concepts. Muslims do that in terms of their traditions, and Jews, in theirs. We have to dip into our own wells in order to be inspired and equipped for this quest after true humanity.

NS: Is there something about South African spirituality that is distinct from other forms emerging in other places?

CVV: To begin with, the African worldview—for lack of a better word—is already very spiritual, in that it discerns the presence of the divine in material things, sacred space, ritual, and the ancestors. This spirituality contributed in a very significant way to the South African willingness to accept a negotiated settlement and a truth and reconciliation commission, rather than merely resorting to prosecutions. At its core is the notion of ubuntu—that I am a person through others. I am a person through you, and you are a person through me. If there is enmity between us, you are a lesser person and I am a lesser person. The African tradition rests on that collectivity, that sense of belonging, that sense of community.

NS: What challenges does this kind of spirituality face in the process of reconciliation?

CVV: The good Archbishop Tutu—and I’ve never worked with a more spiritual and decent man in my life—keeps reminding us, forgiveness! He and I differed there a little bit. I think it’s too big a demand to make on anybody, to ask them to forgive—especially people who have suffered, who have been abused, or who have abused. That’s a very deep, personal thing between people, and between people and God. I see reconciliation as far more modest: learning to live together and respect one another. That’s the necessary groundwork, and I think it’s all one can ask for. We’ve got to learn to be reconciled before we can forgive. We don’t have to forgive in order to have peace. We don’t have to forgive in order to have political decency. But we’ve got to reconcile. Though I hope for much more, this is enough. Still, the archbishop insists on forgiveness, and perhaps the definition of reconciliation I use is an inadequate one. Perhaps it’s going to take more. But in the meantime, I’m prepared to settle for that.

NS: What you say makes me wonder whether, perhaps, as a white South African, you may not be in a position to talk about forgiveness in the way Archbishop Tutu can. Do you think your identity has anything to do with your position?

CVV: You make a very good point. One of the most difficult questions that I have continually asked myself in my life, and that I have been haunted by, is what can I, as a white South African, do in what is essentially a black struggle? We say that this is a non-racial struggle, and blacks will often tell us things like, “Who said you’re white?” But I have to be more modest. It’s not for us to forgive, it’s for black folks to forgive. I suppose that has shaped my thinking to an extent.

NS: Earlier you mentioned the 1985 Kairos Document, which got you involved in extended conversations about the role of violence in social transformation. How has your thinking about violence evolved since then?

CVV: I was—and, I think, still am—essentially a believer in just war. The time comes when there seems to be no other way, when nothing else has worked, and you’re dealing with a violent aggressor. I think the resort to arms in South Africa by liberation movements around 1960 was probably correct. They tried everything else. I’m not a pacifist. But as I’ve become more and more involved in working in the African Great Lakes region, and in the Horn, it has made me question any justification that I may ever have given for violence.

NS: Why?

CVV: Because violence runs away with itself. Fighters get caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment and become excessive. I am prepared to grant that there may be a just cause for a war. But as you engage in it, almost by definition, you’re drifting into a situation where the means that you employ are very, very difficult to justify. In the truth commission, for instance, we said that the African National Congress’s resort to arms was a just one. But the means that they employed in certain situations were not just. Can you have a just war that does not degenerate into unjust means? I don’t know. A lot of people will say that you can’t, that it forces you to do some terrible damn things, and that you’ve just got to accept this and move on. But it’s a tough call.

NS: Can you explain the title of your recent book, Walk with Us and Listen?

CVV: The title emerged from my visit to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, just after the massacre in the early 1980s, which was executed by the North Koreans, at the command of Robert Mugabe. The devastation was just horrible. I was there with a small group of people, and we kept apologizing because we didn’t want to seem like tourists or something. We met a very decent old man man there, and he said, “No. Please come. Walk with us, but don’t tell us what to do. Walk with us—please walk with us—but try and understand. Walk in our shoes for a while before you make suggestions.” It was a conversation that I will carry with me until my dying day. The complexity of Africa! Such terrible, terrible things have happened. Africans are trying so hard to steer a new path. I don’t think the rest of the world ought to go in there with the International Criminal Court, like a cowboy on a horse, intending to sort it out for the natives. We’ve been there before. Just go and stand next to them. Try to show solidarity, and try to understand.

NS: Was watching how the ICC operates in Africa what compelled you to write this book?

CVV: Yes, to a large extent. The only indictments that the ICC has had to date are of Africans. Look around the world. Look at Latin America. Look at Colombia. Look at Palestine/Israel. Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Chechnya, et cetera. There is something wrong. For me, the last straw was in relation to Sudan. The African Union went to the UN Security Council and asked for twelve more months of negotiations before issuing the warrant. The Security Council said no. I understand the desperation of the West regarding Darfur. I also realize that the international community was haunted by its failure to act in Rwanda. I think it was, however, the worst-timed political decision in Africa in recent memory. Just at the point when it was trying to negotiate, the African Union gets told by the ICC to keep out of it, and that the time for talking is over. Yet, as the Sudanese referendum draws nearer, the West now realizes the importance of negotiation to ensure the peaceful implementation of its outcome. You can’t persuade anyone if at the same time you’re holding a gun to their head. There is an African ethic, an ubuntu ethic, that says let’s sit down and talk. I don’t want to romanticize this, because it’s true that some people don’t want to talk, and you can’t talk to someone who doesn’t want to talk. But if someone says that they’re prepared to sit down and negotiate, you don’t put a gun to their head. The decision about Sudan is going to come back to haunt us. Africans perceived it as a new form of colonialism: first came the missionaries, then came the soldiers, and now come the moralists, telling us what to do.

NS: What in particular can the international community learn from traditional African modes of problem-solving, law, and accountability?

CVV: First, bear in mind that what we call “international law” is very often Western law, isn’t it? It’s not a very cosmopolitan or inclusive form of law. It’s not universal. It’s a certain kind of law. I hope this doesn’t sound simplistic, but the West and Africa have got to talk. Whereas Western law has an individualistic ethic—it goes after the individual offender—the African approach emphasizes the communal. I’m not one of those people who says that there must be no prosecutions in Sudan, and if I were to draw up a short list, my guess is that Bashir’s name would have to be on it. But at the same time, we’ve got to recognize that if there’s going to be peace in Sudan, it’s going to take more than prosecutions—and that’s what the African tradition can teach. Besides, the West has got to understand, as it says in the United Nations Charter, the need to work through local agencies to the extent that is possible at a given time.

NS: Say more about what an African response looks like. What kind of practices does it involve?

CVV: It begins with coming together; perpetrators and victims have to look one another in the eye. We’ve got to ask, “Why did we do this? What went wrong?” When we handed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report to Mr. Mandela in October, 1998—all five volumes—he said there was one chapter that may be more important than any other. It’s only about ten pages. It has to do with the causes, motives, and perspectives of perpetrators. He said that if we don’t understand why people committed these terrible crimes, and if we don’t do something to ensure that what motivated them is addressed, it could happen again. We may call it something different. The color of people may even be different—he said that—but if we don’t go through the long, slow, process of listening, understanding, and trying to put right that which caused these wrongs in the first place, we’re not going to make peace. That’s the African way of doing things. I know it’s messy. I know it’s slow, and it doesn’t have a quick outcome. Some would say it doesn’t have an outcome at all. That is Africa. I’d argue that it’s also Christian.

NS: In that case, to what extent are we talking about two diverging kinds of approach—African and Western—and to what extent a convergence between them?

CVV: I’m talking about that convergence. People in the ICC like to use the word “complementarity.” Can international law complement national law? And can national law complement international law? If we’re going to ensure that international law, the ICC, the Rome Statute, and all that good stuff—and it is good stuff—acquires legitimacy, we’ve got to ensure that Africans, and others in the world who see things differently, are drawn in and allowed to enrich that tradition and ensure that their own traditions are also enriched. That’s where the debate on international law needs to go at the moment, as I understand it. It will take patience. It will take decency. And it will take spirituality.

Ubuntu, the Zulu term for an ethic of interdependence, which informs social structures and ethical practices throughout southern Africa, has been called the motivating principle, or zeitgeist, of communitarian village life for Bantu-speaking peoples, for whom muntu, or mutu, is a common word for person. The connotations of ubuntu are commonly expressed by invoking a Zulu maxim in which its cognates predominate: “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” or, to use the proverb of Tutu’s Xhosa heritage, “ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu,” (“a person is a person through other persons”). Ubuntu’s untranslatability is central to both theoretical and popular articulations: nearly all writing on the subject takes this claim as axiomatic, and nearly all such texts (my own included) cite the transliterated Zulu maxim. Untranslatability asserts cultural difference; the lack of an equivalent concept in European languages and cultures, where the concepts of individuality are more deeply sedimented, is thus marshaled as evidence of otherness. In the 1960s and ‘70s, ubuntu was claimed by négritude thinkers, like Senegalese president Léopold Senghor and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, as the unique cultural inheritance of Black Africa. The term anchored both the norms of an idealized precolonial condition and rehabilitated cultural forms that had been marginalized by colonial domination. If for Senghor, Biko, and others fighting against colonialism and apartheid, ubuntu symbolized opposition to Western practices of domination and served as their dialectical antithesis, its status as a guiding principle of the new South Africa and its strategic use by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu catapulted ubuntu into national and global circulation as a rival normative framework to Western ideas about sovereignty, utility, and individual autonomy. At the same time, ubuntu was called upon to translate these very norms—and the attendant discourses of human rights and civil society—into African vernaculars. Ubuntu can thus be seen as a threshold, or site of intensity, in global networks of cultural exchange.

The clearest example of the way ubuntu served as a site of mediation can be found in the “National Unity and Reconciliation” chapter of South Africa’s 1994 Interim Constitution (the section cited as the mandate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which dominated media and politics in South Africa from 1996 to 1998). Proleptically affirming the possibility of reconciliation on the basis of a community yet to come, the constitution asserts that apartheid’s “gross violations of human rights . . . can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.”  In its very enunciation, the term ubuntu begins the process of reparation that it both embodies and desires, in this case by making the argument, both pragmatically and philosophically, for moral and linguistic reeducation. By asserting the importance of an untranslated Zulu word, the interim constitution makes good on a principle that would be formalized in Article 6.2 of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution: “Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages.”

Part of my point, however, is that ubuntu can be meaningfully described as “indigenous” to southern Africa only in a historical sense relating to its origins. Indeed, YouTube videos featuring Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu pitch ubuntu as a platform for public claim-making that rejects subject-centered models of citizenship and agency. While Jimmy Klausen, in his recent post on the subject of indigenous religions, uses the category of indigeneity to shed light on Taylor’s “politics of recognition,” the assumptions about cultural purity that freight indigeneity reflect neither the global iterations of ubuntu as a product in the global marketplace of ideas nor its history of mediating colonial and missionary encounters.  Instead, various claims to ubuntu’s indigenousness—its status as an “indigenous African philosophy,” as it has been described both by members of the Black Consciousness movement and by academic anthropologists—is an obvious part of its cultural currency. It would be more accurate to read the discourse of ubuntu as a part of the phenomenon of religious pluralization that Taylor calls the “nova effect,” in which the “malaise of modernity” and a deep history of religious improvisation combine to power our “spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane.” This image helps to make sense of the rampant commercialization of ubuntu showcased by phenomena as diverse as the Ubuntu computer programming language, the 2009 “Ubuntu Diplomacy” initiative of the U.S. Department of State, and the Cape Town “Ubuntu Festival.” Much of this is merely multiculturalist kitsch, and indeed it is on the very basis of ubuntu’s status as “an African product” that it is marketed as a valuable cultural resource and has become a buzzword in corporate management discourse. There, ubuntu management symbolizes leveraging less hierarchical business models to attain greater employee satisfaction and corporate profit in an explicit bid to bridge global capitalism and local folkways.

In No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu, the most systematic and cogent advocate of ubuntu in recent decades, puts it this way:

[Ubuntu] speaks to the very essence of being human [. . .] it is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’  We belong to a bundle of life. We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ It is not, ‘I think therefore I am.’  It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong. I participate, I share [. . .] Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum—the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague.

If for Taylor, Christianity is all about reconciliation, for Tutu, Christianity is all about ubuntu. As Michael Battle, a scholar of what he calls Tutu’s “ubuntu theology,” argues, ubuntu inflects Tutu’s deepest sense of Christianity, affecting his understanding of agape, the imago dei, and the church as a community. Several caveats are in order: I am bracketing questions about whether descriptions of ubuntu should be taken as empirical claims about actually existing social norms or are, rather, better seen as utopian longings. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of sub-Saharan Africa—not to mention the differences between precolonial village life and, for instance, life in the slums of Soweto—renders suspect any claims about a singular African culture. I am also not, for the purposes of this discussion, concerned with whether ubuntu’s communalism underwrites the suppression of dissent, though Tutu’s claim that anything detrimental to social harmony should be “avoided like the plague” has a chilling tone.

Instead, I want to linger on the ways that ubuntu, in all of its guises, challenges the basic assumptions about selfhood that subtend Taylor’s work, from Sources of the Self through A Secular Age, while its contemporary mediation and global circulation—as well as its status as a translation zone between Christian missionaries and African converts—confound attempts to see ubuntu as wholly other to Latin Christianity. The evidence of European influences are particularly conspicuous: from the centrality of Christianity to the echo of Kant’s categorical imperative, Tutu’s rhetoric seamlessly integrates the Christian imagery of brotherhood and the dignity shared by all those made in God’s image with ubuntu’s communalism. Indeed, at least since Christian missionaries from Anglican denominations began evangelical work among Zulu and Xhosa communities in the early nineteenth century, both missionaries and converts have come to see ubuntu as the particular language through which the Gospel would most successfully reach its target audience.

For Taylor, the modern self begins with the inward gaze of Cartesian reason; it is no accident that Tutu stages ubuntu as an explicit critique of the Enlightenment in his deft juxtaposition of ubuntu with Cartesian subjectivity, Humean utility, and Smith’s market economics. Developed as an ideology that locates human flourishing in the enrichment of connections between people, ubuntu offers an ontological antidote to apartheid’s logic of separation. As a political theology, ubuntu radicalizes familiar Christian injunctions toward forgiveness, hospitality, reconciliation, and social justice with the aim of drastically reconfiguring the political and cultural landscape of South Africa and, ultimately, the world. In Taylor’s terms, ubuntu insists that we are not buffered selves; the remediation of ubuntu in South African jurisprudence and in its global circulation suggests a normative indictment of firm boundaries between self and other.

It would be easy—and profoundly misleading—to argue that people who inhabit communities governed by a sense of the self as porous, interconnected, and vulnerable to the world are “outside” Taylor’s immanent frame and the history he expertly tells. Ubuntu articulates a strong sense of immanence that manifests itself in its very lexicon: there is a profound horizontality—and a striking absence of vertical appeals to transcendence and the higher power of divinity—in the repetition of cognates for “person” in the proverbs umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu and ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu. In his discussion of the mundane, Simon During questions Taylor’s assertion that spiritual hunger is integral to human nature; in a different way, the notions of fullness implicit in ubuntu allow us to see the verticality of Taylor’s argument as distinctly contingent; from another angle, ubuntu’s concept of personhood suggests that the buffered self is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of immanence. At the same time, ubuntu is not immanent in a materialist sense: the network of personhood implicit in ubuntu includes ancestors and spiritual energies, for which ancestors serve as mediators. Ubuntu operates in an enchanted world—one sees this vividly in the phantasmagoric realism of Nigerian-British novelist Ben Okri’s Famished Road trilogy, in which the spirit world is coterminous with the megacity of Lagos—but not necessarily in one governed by a transcendent/immanent dialectic.

What does Taylor mean when he claims, apropos of Christianity, “It’s all about reconciliation”?  While rhetorically straightforward, Taylor’s choice of terms invokes, only to complicate, common theological contexts in which the term implies a specific predicate: reconciliation is transacted between individuals and God (or the Church). The term bears witness to this history etymologically: “reconciliation, from reconsiliaciun, the Anglo-Norman term for reunion with the Church” (OED). In Taylor’s hands, reconciliation is overdetermined by its counterintuitive roles as at once a properly Christian concept internal to Christian self-fashioning and the threshold upon which Christianity opens toward difference as such. There is something similar going on with ubuntu, which is at once uniquely African and universally human. Taylor’s closing turns of phrase are either arrestingly direct or oddly multilayered, particularly given the divergence between his normative embrace of reconciliation as a project and the descriptive account of the reformist energies within Christianity that he elaborates in A Secular Age. As Taylor tells it there, reform and reconciliation are by no means parallel trajectories.

Taylor’s sympathies with Tutu’s vision of Christianity are especially apparent in his references to South African theology and politics at two important moments in A Secular Age. Taylor cites the dismantling of apartheid as an example of the kind of conflicts and ethical dilemmas facing the world today, and of their possible transcendence. For Taylor, apartheid is not an ethical dilemma; rather, the dilemma inheres in the enacting of solutions to apartheid’s obvious injustice in which the difficulty of adjudicating victimhood, communicative justice, reparation, and a plurality of competing goods exposes the inadequacy of modern ethical theory’s fetish for norm and rule. On the one hand, the spectacular failure of neoliberal globalization to translate economic growth into worldwide peace and harmony suggests that “we need a stronger ethic, a firmer identification with the common good,” and on the other, Taylor is convinced that legal and ethical codes can never provide for the ethical energy necessary to sustain flourishing societies. Instead, Taylor looks to recent cases of transitional justice, like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as examples of the way reconciliatory frameworks can shatter the zero-sum nature of award and judgment by enabling a “vertical” shift to ethical planes that permit “a win-win move.” Taylor writes:

The basic idea behind this kind of procedure was to get the ex-victims to accept that they could have a maximum of one kind of closure (the truth about what happened) at the cost of renouncing a lot that they could quite legitimately claim of another kind: punishment of the perpetrators, an eye for an eye. The aim was to find an ‘award’ which allowed also for a reconciliation, and therefore living together on a new footing.

While very different sets of practical and discursive demands come to bear on the term reconciliation when it is uttered by Desmond Tutu and Charles Taylor, it is no surprise that one can hear echoes of Mandela and Tutu in Taylor’s “It’s all about reconciliation.” Tracking the relationship between ubuntu and Christian concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness is a potent reminder of how intertwined Christianity is with geographies, histories, and cultures distant from Taylor’s focal point, and it is with this goal in mind that I take inspiration from the essays in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age by Nilüfer Göle, José Casanova, and Saba Mahmood, who each seek to pluralize and decenter Taylor’s account of Latin Christianity in the North Atlantic world. It is a testament to the strength of Taylor’s work that his project fosters a framework for comparative analysis despite his focus on the internal history of Latin Christianity. By examining the way that ubuntu has altered—through theology, corporate management culture, ethical theory, and state politics—what Taylor might call the “South African social imaginary,” we begin to see intimations that the self is not as buffered as Taylor might take it to be.

Hidden from most of the electorate, Obama’s theological inclinations are well known to scholars of American religion. Heralding a “civil religious revival,” sociologist R. Stephen Warner cites Obama’s belief in the power of ideals to draw Americans “toward their better natures” and the “awesome God that he knows is worshiped in both blue and red states.” Philip Gorski articulates a similar argument on The Immanent Frame, pointing to the prominence of racial reconciliation in Obama’s religious speech.

Warner and Gorski are right to focus on the motif of reconciliation. From Obama’s address at the 2004 Democratic convention to Tuesday’s victory speech in Grant Park, he has sought to heal the divisions between right and left, religious and secular, Red and Blue. Like the “Rednecks for Obama” bumper stickers in the Missouri Ozarks, Obama’s claim to “worship an awesome God in the blue states,” transcends the polarizations of American culture.

In the classic typology of literary genres, Obama’s vision of reconciliation could be described as comic.  As Northrop Frye writes in Anatomy of Criticism, “the theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it.” In Barack Obama’s case, the central character is often Barack Obama. In his landmark speech on race, Obama called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” Rather than disowning the Reverend Wright and his white grandmother, he portrayed them as integral to his sense of self.  As he told the audience in Philadelphia, “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Comic rhetoric also saturates The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s bestselling chronicle on remaking America.  Proposing “a new kind of politics,” he suggests “how we might move beyond our divisions,” praising those who have been able to “make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.”  At its heart, such rhetoric is implicitly theological.  According to Hayden White, the trope of comedy “suggests the possibility of liberation” from the effects of the Fall.  In Obama’s case, such comic sensibilities are rooted in the theological virtue of hope.

Filled with comic hope, Obama’s public theology is also self-consciously ironic, drawing on the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.  Part of a “Niebuhr revival” in American politics, Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.”  In an interview with David Brooks, Obama summarized Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History, accepting “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world,” and that “we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things.”

Most of the time, politicians apply Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought to foreign policy, where it is associated with the realist school of international relations. This is certainly true for Obama, who believes in the judicious use of American power.

Yet Niebuhr’s Christian realism may be even more useful on the domestic front.  In his quest to unify Americans, Obama should remember that even virtuous crusades can have unintended consequences. Though he entered presidential politics to heal the nation’s political divisions, it is possible that his election may exacerbate them.

While Barack Obama has high approval ratings, a minority of Americans continue to fear and loathe him. According to Wednesday’s USA Today/Gallup poll, 27 percent of the country is afraid of an Obama presidency.  Pre-election polls in Kentucky and Texas found that between 14 and 23 percent of the public believes he is a Muslim (and many of those people associate Islam with evil).

Before and after the election, the religious right has been unrelentingly hostile to an Obama candidacy.  In particular, recent statements by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson reveal an unbridgeable chasm between Obama and some conservatives. In October 2008, Dobson released what he called a “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America.” A fictional letter from the future, it begins with the author lamenting the fact that he “can hardly sing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ any more.” Downright apocalyptic, it warns that an Obama administration will result in the outlawing of campus ministries, a rise in pornography, the banning of evangelical books, and the outlawing of the Pledge of Allegiance. Along the same lines, Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery compares Barack Obama to “pagan rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, and Cyrus.” Such polarizing rhetoric suggests Obama may have trouble transcending the politics of Red States and Blue States.

And yet it appears that Obama knows exactly what he is up against.  Consistent with his Niebuhrian sensibilities, he has not portrayed the quest for reconciliation as an easy journey. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama believes that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that a new kind of politics requires us “to account for the darker aspects of our past.”

On Tuesday night, Obama looked back to a dark time in American history, quoting Abraham Lincoln’s words “to a nation far more divided than ours”:  We are not enemies but friends.

James Dobson notwithstanding, there are signs that religious conservatives are beginning to get the message. Though more evangelicals voted for Barack Obama than for John Kerry, an overwhelming majority supported John McCain.  Knowing this about his flock, Assemblies of God General Superintendent George Wood issued a post-election statement.  Noting that “we are to show respect for those who hold office,” he said that “the recent campaign at all levels and all parties was often filled with bitter rancor, distortions, smears and lies.” According to Wood, we must “set a better tone for the national discussion.” Though such words are all too rare, they suggest that Barack Obama may yet achieve his dream of a new kind of politics.