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No Future Without Forgiveness
... The focus on relations is also central in work in feminist theory and the idea of an ethic of care (e.g., Gilligan, 1982;Noddings, 1984). The foundational idea of human interdependence is clear in the African social and ethical concept of Ubuntu, that is, the idea that a person becomes a person in relation to other persons (Tutu, 1999;Waghid and Smeyer, 2012). This way of thinking about the importance of relations also seems to be embedded in Japanese and Chinese thinking (e.g., Carpendale and Lewis, 2021) and is central in many indigenous worldviews (e.g., Ross, 2006). ...
Explaining how children first become active prosocial and then later moral agents requires, we argue, beginning with action and interaction with others. We take a process-relational perspective and draw on developmental systems theory in arguing that infants cannot be born knowing about prosociality or morality or anything else. Instead, they are born with emerging abilities to act and react. Their biological embodiment links them to their environment and creates the social environment in which they develop. A clear distinction between biological and social levels cannot be made in the context of ongoing development because they are thoroughly interwoven in a bidirectional system in which they mutually create each other. We focus on infants’ emerging ability to interact and develop within a human developmental system, and prosociality and morality emerge at the level of interaction. Caring is a constitutive aspect of the forms of experience in which infants are embedded in the process of becoming persons. Infants are immersed in a world of mutual responsiveness within caring relationships that are infused with concern, interest, and enjoyment. In such a developmental system, infants become persons when they are treated as persons.
... Rather, this article offers a general overview of the major tenets of Ubuntu to explore how this philosophy (mis)aligns with common (i.e., Eurocentric) components of research ethics for social work researchers. Broadly speaking, Ubuntu embraces generosity, collectivity, and communal relations (Tutu, 1999). Ubuntu suggests that life is contingent upon the quality of authentic human relationships and the responsibility to one another entailed by our connections (Chigangaidze, 2021;Eze, 2008). ...
This article uses decolonial ethics as the framework to analyze and articulate anti-Islamophobic social work praxis as an ethical imperative to confronting Islamophobia as a colonial legacy. In so doing, the article includes an examination of the following facets of decolonial ethics: global moral responsibility, context specific, situated within the epistemologies of subaltern communities, knowledge as partial and geo-political, pluriversal-ist that rejects an abstract universal approach to ethics in favor of intercultural relations and dialogue.
This article considers the notion of lived religion conceived from African religious practices and experience, social transformation, and public practical theology as practical theology praxis. These elements are influenced by the contextual understanding of religion as a shared communal phenomenon, post-colonial conversations and pressing social, economic, governance, and economic challenges, among other things. The elements and context are located within the global practical theology conversations. The article aims to answer the question: what are some aspects that can be discerned to constitute a practical theology organising centre in Africa? The article describes the practical theology emphasis on context followed by Africa's specific contextual aspects, and then suggests some practical theology organising centre elements.
This study explores the complex experiences of Black Tax in contemporary South Africa. It specifically seeks to understand whether Black Tax as a form of cultural re-interpretation of Ubuntu philosophy can be seen as a form of cultural emancipation or alienation. Black Tax is a colloquial term that describes experiences of family support in Southern Africa and thus in a highly unequal and formerly colonized context. By combining a theoretical lens of coloniality with omnivorousness, it draws out particular perspectives across the relationship between culture and power by drawing out three domains: ‘the traditional’, ‘the modern’, and ‘the navigation across’. The debate is informed by 26 essays written by South Africans on the subject matter. It highlights inequality as an internal conflict when navigating processes of emancipation and assimilation from African to Western values within the intimate space of family relationships. In that, it shows the lived reality and complexity when individuals negotiate their positionality, practice, and belonging. More broadly, it further proposes that contemporary political stances on capitalism and socialism remain colonial, thereby overlooking moral theories and philosophies from contexts of the global South.
Positive organizational scholarship (POS) is the study of that which is positive, flourishing, and life-giving in organizations. It considers the processes and dynamics that occur in and through organizations, in contrast to a focus on individual attitudes and emotions. Positive organizational scholarship has rarely been investigated in institutions of higher education, and this chapter provides two case studies that illustrate its relevance in that setting. The chapter first provides a discussion of the unique characteristics of POS compared to, for example, positive psychology and other approaches to the positive, and it highlights the importance of positive organizational dynamics in accounting for high levels of performance in organizations. The chapter describes how these dynamics have been successfully applied within two institutions of higher education to benefit not only traditional markers of success such as student achievement and wellbeing, but also the collective performance of the overall institution. The specific practices that led to extraordinarily successful outcomes are discussed, and they provide evidence that, in addition to the effects of positive psychology on individuals—especially students—the outcomes of entire institutions can be substantially affected in positive directions by adopting positive practices.
The present study, a result of exploratory qualitative field research roughly made
between 2018 and 2022 is concerned with critical remembering (revisiting or revis-
ing) of the past in the indigenous philosophical traditions of Ethics of the Oromo, Amhara, and Gurage peoples of Ethiopia. Consequently, using a critical hermeneutics interpretation of the notion of ‘remembering’ found to be depicted in two
Ethiopian aphorisms: kan darbe yaadatani, issa gara fuula dura itti yaaddu (in remembering the past, the future is remembered) and/or yȅhuwǝlaw kǝlele yȁlam yȁfitu (the future cannot exist without the past), as a normative analytical guide, the present study sought to achieve two major and highly interrelated objectives. The
first objective is to make a critical rediscovery, and/or remembering of the moral and humanistic foundations and features of Ethiopian indigenous ethics by taking anecdotes from the ethical thinking and moral languages of the Oromo, Amhara,
and the Gurage people. The second objective seeks to determine whether these
living Ethiopian indigenous philosophical traditions, if examined in terms of the
“remembered future,” could reveal some emancipatory ‘surplus meanings and/or
principles’ and might in turn provide answers to some of the essential questions
of inter-cultural dialogue, peacebuilding and democracy in Ethiopia. The study
found out that, the indigenous moral values in the study areas are complex and
largely connected to humanness (the strong quality of human beings), cooperation,
a healthy sense of community, generosity, and respect for others, which are highly
meaningful in the above regards, i.e., intercultural dialogue for peacebuilding in
the country.
Keywords Indigenous · Philosophy · Humanness · Inter-cultural · Dialogue ·
Peacebuilding
Aspiring educational leaders must understand their own culture and the cultures of others to lead schools effectively and realise equitable outcomes for traditionally marginalised students. To explore the potential for professional learning to affect students’ frames of reference regarding cultural interactions, we analysed self-reflection papers from graduate students within an educational leadership preparation programme at a US public university. We investigated sociocultural distortions of race and ethnicity when students reflected on their first-hand (direct contact and conversations) and second-hand (news reports and stories) encounters with people who are phenotypically different from themselves. The course included readings, discourse, and reflective journaling about racial interactions. We utilised Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning to understand how students developed self-awareness and progressed through stages of intercultural competence and sensitivity. Most participants progressed through developmental stages of intercultural sensitivity, and many moved from ethnocentric to ethnorelative stances. Findings indicate the importance of purposely designing learning experiences that allow aspiring leaders to critically self-reflect on topics of race and equity prior to assuming formal leadership positions.
This article explores transgenerational dynamics of memory in the individual and collective contexts in contemporary South Africa. By engaging in a conversation informed by psychoanalytic theory between the archive of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and narratives of the younger generation of black South Africans, the article offers a conceptual framework for how transgenerational transmission of memory in the lives of descendants of generations of victims of prolonged traumatic subjugation might be explained. A tri-directional perspective in which memory crosses and re-crosses past, present and future temporalities is proposed, and the movement and translation of memory between and across these temporalities are explained and conceptualised as a “triadic” view of memory.
Many popular artificial intelligence (AI) ethics frameworks center the principle of autonomy as necessary in order to mitigate the harms that might result from the use of AI within society. These harms often disproportionately affect the most marginalized within society. In this paper, we argue that the principle of autonomy, as currently formalized in AI ethics, is itself flawed, as it expresses only a mainstream mainly liberal notion of autonomy as rational self-determination, derived from Western traditional philosophy. In particular, we claim that the adherence to such principle, as currently formalized, does not only fail to address many ways in which people’s autonomy can be violated, but also to grasp a broader range of AI-empowered harms profoundly tied to the legacy of colonization, and which particularly affect the already marginalized and most vulnerable on a global scale. To counter such a phenomenon, we advocate for the need of a relational turn in AI ethics, starting from a relational rethinking of the AI ethics principle of autonomy that we propose by drawing on theories on relational autonomy developed both in moral philosophy and Ubuntu ethics.
Killean considers the applicability of Environmental Restorative Justice (ERJ) in transitional settings. Bringing critical transitional justice scholarship into dialogue with the emerging body of environmental restorative justice literature, this chapter argues that ERJ offers a challenge to two of the transitional justice field’s limitations. First, an ERJ approach offers a challenge to transitional justice’s anthropocentrism, by creating space for the recognition and representation of other-than-human victims of conflict. Second, ERJ offers a challenge to the field’s neo-colonial tendencies, by facilitating the design of mechanisms that are more inclusive of Indigenous harms and understandings of justice. By entrenching an ERJ ethos, the chapter argues that transitional justice may present one effective vehicle for rethinking relationships between diverse human communities and the natural world.
Focusing on English Studies in South Africa, this article considers adaptations to university teaching in a time of Covid-19 and the potential and limitations of such adaptations post Covid-19. The argument is divided into sections, “English Studies, Yesterday and Today” and “English Studies, Today and Tomorrow”, together with a coda, “English, the Language of the Modern World”. An African folktale, “Elephant, Chameleon, and Lizard”, offers a metaphor of before, in, and beyond Covid-19.
The Sustainable Development Report 2019 points out that the Sustainable Development Goals ( SDG ) might not be achieved, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (sic). This paper tries to investigate alternatives to the hegemonic “development” discourse and ideas of “development”: what would be the notion of “development” in Ubuntu? The paper proposes a contextual understanding of “development” rooted in tradition, religion and culture by using Michel Foucault and Ferdinand de Saussure as a theoretical basis. The heterogenous understanding of Ubuntu and its diverse understanding definition of “development” are an argument against universalising “development” ideas, but for tailor-made solutions. The paper follows the hypothesis that the SDG s rely on premises of epistemologies of the Global North which are (post)colonial. It also proposes that failing “development” strategies rely on epistemologies from the Global North which are excluding, imperial, Eurocentric and rely on abyssal – extractive and postcolonial – productions of knowledge (Sousa Santos 2018). The paper is a contribution to the decolonisation of knowledge in the Global North, to challenge hegemonic northern epistemologies and to bring them into contact with knowledge from epistemologies of the Global South.
This paper discusses the challenges involved in developing solidarity during pandemics. We draw from the field of economics, social psychology, political psychology and organisational theory to understand and explain how decision-makers and actors think and behave during pandemics. We argue that the rational action theory (RAT) and identity politics are the ‘rationalities’ that underpin global efforts used to establish solidarity. We see these mindsets as obstacles to addressing pandemics, which show no respect for geographical or genealogical borders. As an alternative, we explore how African philosophy of Ubuntu can offer another rationality in developing solidarity during pandemics. We propose an analytical tool to assess how nation-states might react when called to display solidarity during pandemics and how the international community can bring them on board.
In A Relational Moral Theory: African ethics in and beyond the continent (2022), Thaddeus Metz proposes an African moral theory according to which we ought to respect and honour the capacity of individuals to be party to harmonious relationship. He aims to present a moral theory that should ‘be weighed up against at least contemporary Western moral theories’ (p. 2). As Metz intends his theory to be a serious contender with other moral theories, I assess how his moral theory can be applied and contribute to contemporary moral discussions ‘beyond the continent’ , as the subtitle of the book puts it. In particular, as Metz’s relational moral theory is grounded on the value of harmony, an important question is how well his theory handles disharmony especially if his theory is to have application in our non-ideal world in which disharmony is rife. And here, I hold up Metz’s account to one area of disharmony, disruptive emotions and affective injustice. By first establishing how disruptive emotions and affective injustice pose a challenge to similar relational moral theories grounded in harmony, I argue that Metz’s theory has distinct advantages in the way in which it can indeed engage with such phenomena. I close the paper by considering the objection that Metz’s account is limited in making sense of a common form of disruptive emotion in response to structural injustices where affective injustice can arise, but ultimately conclude that such a limitation is superficial.
In this article, we posit that love is the force that fosters peace and reconciliation. We argue we cannot hope to build up a culture of peace and reconciliation without the education for love, and to love. Love is what education should aim for. In the essay, we mainly focus on establishing an ontology of love, then we explore contemplative and holistic pathways to help love to emerge, and finally we discuss educational changes that could help facilitate peace and reconciliation through love.
In this article written in honour of Desmond Tutu, I raise inclination as put forward by Cavarero, together with disorientation/reorientation, as per Ahmed and Honig, to think differently about law, rule of law, and legal culture. Drawing on Ndebele, Klare and Van der Walt, I consider inclination as being also about abandoning those vertical and upright certitudes acquired by habit and culture. An ethics and ontology of inclination could, by way of refusal, disclose alternative understandings of law and rule of law. It could challenge those assumptions of certainty and truth that are so central to formalist and black-letter takes on law and current legal culture. I raise inclination also in the vein of a minor jurisprudence and joining McVeigh and Barr's writing on minor jurisprudence to engage with the question of how to take responsibility for a lawful life, how to respond to the legacy of the past.
The Strategic Approach to Girls’ Education (STAGE) project developed and implemented an intervention that helped marginalized out-of-school girls in the northern regions of Ghana enter and be successful in primary school. STAGE builds on the Government of Ghana’s Complementary Basic Education policy, which supports an accelerated learning program that provides literacy and numeracy classes in mother tongue to out-of-school girls between 8 and 14 years of age. This article reviews the literature that informed the design of STAGE, describes the intervention, reports on the impact on its participants, and suggests a model for replicating this intervention in Ghana and adapting it for implementation in other countries.
This is a primarily normative paper that draws on the thinking about friendliness grounded in an Afro-communitarian (Ubuntu) philosophy to argue for measles vaccine mandates for children below 6 years old under the assumptions that measles vaccines are safe for children in this age group, are widely available, and that children in this age-group experiences two-tiered vulnerability. Suppose the ethics of friendliness grounded in this Afro-communitarian philosophy requires us to be friendly to those who are friendly and unfriendly to a proportional degree to those who fail to be friendly. In that case, we are justified in mandating parents and guardians to vaccinate their children. Studies must research the concrete forms that measles vaccine mandates can take in African contexts.
A central notion of Ubuntu depicts it as a philosophy unique to African affinity and views Africans as communalistic and Westerners as individualistic. Given the reality of xenophobic practices, this paper advances arguments that question this thesis, arguing that the basis for such peculiarity does not inhere in Ubuntu as a distinctive African philosophy; rather it is reflective of the stage of development on each side of the divide. Pursuant of this argument, the paper distinguishes between ontological and axiological Ubuntu. While ontological Ubuntu (OU) refers to, among other constructs, the 'authentic mode of being African', axiological Ubuntu (AU) is a prescriptive moral ideal to which all humanity ought to aspire in an era of modernity. Using the method of critical analysis, the paper submits that xenophobia and other forms of socio-political exclusions greatly contradict the central tenets or humanism of OU and render it untenable in modern times. Conversely, AU is reflective of modernity with its emphasis on individualistic modes of production. Modernity has come to stay and Africa must approach it, not by OU or a 'narrative of return' to a philosophy uniquely African, but by AU, an ethical theory that must guide our pursuit of a humane society not just as Africans, but as human beings. To this end, and contrary to the argument that Ubuntu has 'reached its end' in its entirety, the paper concludes that something is left of it, though not uniquely African.
In the past two decades, peace negotiators around the world have increasingly accepted that granting amnesties for human rights violations is no longer an acceptable bargaining tool or incentive, even when the signing of a peace agreement is at stake. While many states that previously saw sweeping amnesties as integral to their peace processes now avoid amnesties for human rights violations, this anti-amnesty turn has been conspicuously absent in Asia. In Negotiating Peace: Amnesties, Justice and Human Rights Renée Jeffery examines why peace negotiators in Asia have resisted global anti-impunity measures more fervently and successfully than their counterparts around the world. Drawing on a new global dataset of 146 peace agreements (1980–2015) and with in-depth analysis of four key cases - Timor-Leste, Aceh Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines - Jeffery uncovers the legal, political, economic and cultural reasons for the persistent popularity of amnesties in Asian peace processes.
Zakiyah’s first trip to South Africa was 2006. She has been my assistant officially and unofficially since that time. I have now known her for over 15 years, and she has become one of the main reasons for the success of the Pedagogy Of Action. I could not have continued a project as intense and exhausting as the Pedagogy Of Action without her commitment and passion for the transformative work of this project. She was present for every POA study abroad since 2006. It was her spirit and her radical love for the communities with whom we worked and the many students who never traveled or went to another country that made everyone feel connected that they were not alone and that we were a family. With Zakiyah, we were able to live the principles that we espoused.
The authors see the African as an open system that easily connects with others, and they believe that this natural inclination is the foundation for a collaborative, sustainable ecosystem. The chapter examines the cultural proclivity of Africans to seek collaboration on both individual and firm levels thus promoting the notion of the multiple bottom line commonly referred to as collaborative enterprises. The multiple bottom-line approach is viewed as a collaborative endeavour that fosters mutually beneficial partnerships with stakeholders. The chapter suggests that, based on stakeholder collaboration and communal values, African enterprises can receive strong support from responsible leadership resulting in sustainable development; hence an understanding of the function of African community life requires a naturalistic approach. It concludes by suggesting that communalism enhances collaborative enterprises and this in turn promotes sustainability in Africa.
Countries undergoing or recovering from conflict and authoritarianism often face profound rule of law challenges. The law on the statute books may be repressive, judicial independence may be compromised, and criminal justice agencies may be captured by powerful interests. How do lawyers working within such settings imagine the law? How do they understand their ethical obligations towards their clients and the rule of law? What factors motivate them to use their legal practice and social capital to challenge repressive power? What challenges and risks can they face if they do so? And when do lawyers facilitate or acquiesce to illegality and injustice? Drawing on over 130 interviews from Cambodia, Chile, Israel, Palestine, South Africa, and Tunisia, this book explores the extent to which theoretical understandings within law and society research on the motivations, strategies, tactics, and experiences of lawyers within democratic states apply to these more challenging environments.
The medieval age in Africa relates to communal beliefs or values commonly referred to as Ubuntu in South African parlance. This age-long practice has been passed from one generation to the other. Apartheid was depicted by acute and obvious racism where blacks were denigrated and relegated to the background in society. This era was characterized by camaraderie from sister states who vehemently resisted white minority rule. The attainment of true democracy in 1994 further heralded the need for more labour, because of the presence of a sophisticated and largely industrialized economy. This culminated into mass migrations from the SADC and elsewhere due to political instabilities and other allied challenges and the prospects of a brighter hope in South Africa. The resultant effect was a saturated labour market; unhealthy competition for scarce economic resources by locals and African foreign nationals; supposed astronomical increase in crime rates; proliferation of drug and human trafficking just to mention a few. These narratives have been responsible for the sequence of xenophobic attacks especially against fellow Africans and a few Asians residing in the country. Democracy has not brought justice to both locals and non-nationals in South Africa. What could be responsible for these ugly trends? Could it be hate speech, lack of political will, denialism, and insensitivity on the part of the government? This paper seeks to unravel these facts and make necessary policy recommendations to the state and relevant stakeholders.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions look to the past to envision a better future. After years (1991–2002) of brutal conflict in Sierra Leone, there existed a need to confront a war that was characterized by widespread atrocities. The nation wanted to know what precipitated the war, but also how did it engulf its most precious resource, children, and youth?. At the start of the conflict, Sierra Leone was a nation of the young, with nearly half of its population composed of children and young adults. How can their energy and aspirations help the nation chart a new way forward? These questions gave birth to this chapter and to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report for the Children of Sierra Leone. No truth commission in the past had ever produced such a report making it a relatively new and understudied phenomenon. Children are increasingly becoming a focus of truth commissions as societies with large youth populations seek more sustainable solutions to peace and development. This chapter describes how the child-friendly version of Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report came about and how it gave special attention to the experiences of children and youth within the armed conflict. The second section examined how large marginalized youth populations can become key participants in the peace and reconciliation process. The third section examines how centering the needs and aspirations of young people are critical to societies with youth majorities.KeywordsSierra LeoneTruth and Reconciliation CommissionsYouth bulgeChildren
This article draws on reflections about humanness, friendliness and partiality, in the writings of Afro-communitarians to develop principles for thinking critically about why benefit sharing, what may count as benefits within the context of human research in Africa and the limits of the obligation of benefit sharing. Suppose the thinking about humanness, friendliness, and partiality in Afro-communitarianism were the foundation of human genetic research in Africa, then, individuals who have contributed to research or borne its burden would benefit from its rewards. This is even more important if participants have pressing needs that researchers and/or research institutions can help ease. A failure to aid sample contributors and data providers in need when researchers and research institutions can—as well as an indifference to the serious needs of contributors—are failures to exhibit friendliness in the relevant ways. Finally, though providing benefits to contributors can be an important way of showing humanity to them, nonetheless, this obligation is not absolute and may be limited by the stronger obligation of shared experience—to advance science. Studies are still required to inquire how well these norms will work in practice and inform regulatory and legal frameworks
The article provides a philosophical explication of an African religious moral philosophy. Often philosophers repudiate the view that African Traditional Religions (ATR) can embody a religious moral philosophy. Theologians, on the other hand, tend to believe that ATR can, but they often do not provide a systematic account of such an ethical system. The article demonstrates that ATR can embody an under-explored moral philosophy. ATR refers to indigenous religious ideas, beliefs, and practices of the indigenous people below the Sahara. The article will invoke the metaphysical and moral concept of vitality as the basis to construct an African religious moral philosophy. (It is worth noting that this article merely constructs, but it does not defend, this ethical system.) Vitality is the spiritual energy that originates, maximally inheres and defines God, and God has since distributed it to all that exists, albeit in varying degrees. By 'moral philosophy', the article focuses on (1) meta-ethics (it proffers a vitality-based account of the moral terms right and wrong); (2) normative theory (it expounds on the perfectionist and deontological principles of right action); and (3) applied ethics (it invokes a vitality-based conception of moral status to explore environmental ethics and select bioethical themes).
Education in Mali is constrained by a multi-dimensional crisis that restricts education and makes life difficult. Young people are particularly affected. In this article, we use the preliminary findings of the Participatory Research on Education and Agency in Mali (PREAM) project that was implemented in the conflict-affected regions of Mopti and Segou, to discuss youth agency in situations of crisis and how participatory visual methods can be used both as a way of ascertaining adolescents’ perception of their agency and also to contribute to the development of youth agency. More specifically, we use data from six workshops using participatory visual methods (PVMs) to illustrate that young people have something valuable to say about education, agency, and conflict and that PVMs can be an effective way of engaging adolescents in dealing with such topics. Preliminary findings from the research suggest that although participating young people are in an asymmetrical position in relation to power with the adults around them, they nonetheless have a good understanding of their situation and demonstrate agentic behavior that is both adaptative and projective. Girls illustrated how generational order from child to grandmother and gender social norms can constrain agency. At the same time, they used their agency to expose and contest, in the cellphilms they produced, the unfair division of labor in their society. During the workshops, young people were eager to share their stories and wanted their artwork to communicate their concerns to the adults around them. In this article, we argue that it is important for adolescents in Mali to have a voice on questions of education and agency and we discuss why education actors and policy makers should pay attention to the perspectives of young people even (and especially) in times of crisis.
This article draws on key normative principles grounded in important values - solidarity, partiality and friendliness - in African philosophy to think critically and deeply about the ethical challenges around returning individual genetic research findings in African genomics research. Precisely, we propose that the normative implication of solidarity, partiality and friendliness is that returning findings should be considered as a gesture of goodwill to participants to the extent that it constitutes acting for their well-being. Concretely, the value of friendliness may imply that one ought to return actionable results to participants even when their preferences regarding feedback are unknown. Notwithstanding, returning individual genetic results will have a cost implication. The cost of feeding back is relevant in the context of African genomics research projects, which are often funded by international sponsors and should be researched further.
The development of transitional justice options has not created a separate body of law that would strip away any obligation towards international law. The process of confronting systemic injustice must always accord with international rules and principles. In the words of Noemi Turgis, transitional justice operates ‘under the umbrella of international law, which sets up the appropriate standards for the protection of human rights and clarifies the priorities that the new governments have to focus on’.
This article examines the role of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs) and their former members in delivering reparations to victims and communities affected by past acts of violence. The article draws from extensive interviews with former members of armed groups, victims and communities affected by violence in Colombia, Guatemala, Nepal, Northern Ireland, Peru and Uganda. Grounded in the theory and practice of restorative justice, this article critiques the legalistic and state-centric analysis which often characterizes the field of reparations and makes four interconnected arguments. First, that NSAG engagement in reparations can offer a unique practical contribution to meeting the needs of victims (including truth recovery, the recovery of disappeared bodies, de-mining etc.) but also represent a powerful symbolic effort to restore the human dignity of victims and a commitment to prevent violence from recurring. Second, that by taking ‘active responsibility’ through reparations work for past violence, NSAGs and ex-combatants can themselves become involved in processes of delabelling and destigmatization, finding routes to demonstrate their own humanity, and in some cases, becoming involved in work that resonates with the political ideology that motivated them to engage in political violence in the first place. Third, that NSAG reparations can play a significant role in societal and political transformation in post conflict societies, with ex-combatants themselves being key drivers for change through such reparative work. The article concludes by arguing that NSAG and ex-combatant reparative work can represent a self-conscious effort to ‘change the script’, transforming relationships previously defined by violence and harm to ones designed to improve the lives of victims, ex-combatants themselves and the societies in which they live.
This article treats rituals of apology and reconciliation as responses to social discontent, specifically to expressions of anger and resentment. A standard account of social discontent, found both in the literature on transitional justice and in the social theory of Axel Honneth, has it that these emotional expressions are evidence of an underlying psychic need for recognition. In this framework, the appropriate response to expressions of anger and discontent is a recognitive one that includes victims of injustice in the political community by showing them that they are valued members. In the aftermath of injustices, such recognitive responses are thought to include acknowledgments of victim suffering, reconciliatory gestures, and rituals of contrition. I will argue, against this narrative, that treating victim anger as evidence of an underlying need for recognition threatens to depoliticize emotional responses to injustice by treating them as symptoms of psychic injuries instead of intelligible political claims. Discussing mainly the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation process set up to deal with the history of the Indian Residential School system, I show how rituals of reconciliation and apology, in the context of settler-colonial states and neoliberal politics, serve as a biopolitical management of “bad” emotions. This will serve as a critique both of the politics of reconciliation and of social–theoretic approaches that treat expressions of discontent exclusively through a lens of recognition. Instead, I argue, in politics as well as theory, we need to engage with emotional expressions as intelligible political claims that exceed the psychic need for recognition.
Efforts to respond to oppression are often framed as strategies of ‘resistance’ or ‘liberation.’ This paper uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the assumptions implicit in these strategies and shows that they derive from a realism of ‘normative adversarialism,’ where confrontation is seen as a natural and inevitable approach for achieving social change. The paper then asks what an alternative conceptual lens might yield, where social transformation is reimagined as evolutionary, developmental and integrative. It concludes that, through such a lens, responding to oppression can be recast as an effort of ‘constructive resilience.’ Coined in relation to the systematic persecution of Iran’s largest religious minority—the Bahá’í faith—this term describes a strategy of transcending years of state-sponsored discrimination through activities such as literacy and empowerment initiatives for children and youth in socio-economically marginalized neighborhoods, as well as through a home-based university initiative. Consequently, this paper introduces a shift from confrontation to cohesion as the main driver for social change.
We're all getting older from the moment we're born. Ageing is a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life. Yet in ethics, not much work is done on the questions surrounding ageing: how do diachronic features of ageing and the lifespan contribute to the overall value of life? How do time, change, and mortality impact on questions of morality and the good life? And how ought societies to respond to issues of social justice and the good, balancing the interests of generations and age cohorts? In this Cambridge Handbook, the first book-length attempt to stake this terrain, leading moral philosophers from a range of sub-fields and regions set out their approaches to the conceptual and ethical understanding of ageing. The volume makes an important contribution to significant debates about the implications of ageing for individual well-being, social policy and social justice.
Up to now, a very large majority of work in the religious philosophy of life's meaning has presumed a conception of God that is Abrahamic. In contrast, in this article I critically discuss some of the desirable and undesirable facets of Traditional African Religion's salient conceptions of God as they bear on meaning in life. Given an interest in a maximally meaningful life, and supposing meaning would come from fulfilling God's purpose for us, would it be reasonable to prefer God as characteristically conceived by African philosophers of religion to exist instead of the Abrahamic conception of God? At this stage of enquiry, I answer that, in respect of the range of people to whom God's purpose would apply, a more African view of God would plausibly offer a greater meaning , but that, concerning what the content of God's purpose would be, the Abrahamic view appears to offer a greater one. I conclude by reflecting on this mixed verdict and by suggesting respects in which non-purposive facets of the African and Abrahamic conceptions of God could also have implications for life's meaning.
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