Acknowledgments

This is a work about political reconciliation, about the need and challenges of reconciling after severe political violence. I became interested in this subject while living in South America as a child and seeing firsthand the difficulties of engaging with a fraught past. Many years of thinking about these issues led me to graduate school, culminating in a doctoral dissertation on which this book is loosely based. I would like to thank Nancy Fraser and Courtney Jung, who provided valuable suggestions and direction on the dissertation, and Richard A. Wilson and Andrew Arato, who reminded me of the importance of retaining the connection between normative theory and practical politics in my work. Matthew Goldfeder read the text with care and pressed me on a number of points, making the argument more coherent than it otherwise would have been. His patience with my questions was matched only by the wit and clarity of his suggestions.

While at Wesleyan, J. Donald Moon and Nancy Schwartz kindly read the entire manuscript and gave detailed and important feedback on the fundamental arguments. Their intellectual support and friendship helped me enormously in this project. At the University of Notre Dame, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change provided financial support and a wonderful environment in which to write. I would especially like to thank Daniel Myers for securing this support and making Notre Dame such a welcoming place. A number of persons in Chile and Bosnia and Herzegovina kindly shared their experiences with me, and I am enormously grateful to them. Many thanks also go to Temple University Press and Micah Kleit for taking on this project.

I dedicate this book to my parents, Martha and Ernesto, who have always encouraged me in everything I have done and showed me the beauty of learning, and to my Bettina, whose love and warmth made this long journey possible and worthwhile. Without her support, this would have been a difficult, lonely road.