5. Civil Society and Reconciliation
Political scientists have traditionally studied democratic transitions from the perspective of political elites by focusing on their abilities to promote stability and governance while protecting peace from the spoiling tactics of disaffected opponents. The four-volume work Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986) oriented much of the subsequent work written on analyzing elite fragmentation and its consequences. Civil society received attention only after significant divisions between elite “soft-liners” and “hard-liners” became insurmountable. Along these lines, political scientists have examined the contributions of elites in fostering reconciliation as a process of balancing civil society pressures and maintaining social stability by strategically using trials and truth commissions to promote moral and political ends while securing the legitimacy of a fragile new state (Gill 2000). Scholars have focused less on civil society actors’ roles in promoting reconciliation and their interactions with elites and the state in these struggles.
Nevertheless, the role of civil society in reconciliatory efforts is not merely incidental or epiphenomenal, but is fundamental. Civil society can expand the domain of political contestation and ask difficult questions that leaders may prefer to ignore, while forcing elites to address fundamental issues and challenges. Although the state apparatus is, of course, crucial for implementing retributive measures, providing formal recognition of victims through redistributive and other programs and maintaining the rule of law, civil society is also important for reconciliation politics. Civil society is necessary for publicizing past atrocities and generating public discussions about them, publicizing state complicity, promoting moral recognition, and contributing to the broader normative goals of rule of law and mutual respect among citizens.
Some political scientists have begun to focus on the importance of civil society. In her comparative analysis of justice policies in Chile and Uruguay, Alexandra Barahona de Brito argues that the different outcomes in the two countries can be explained by the strength of the human rights movement and the Catholic Church, and their ties with political parties. Whereas in Chile the Church enjoyed significant moral capital and allied itself with the cause of human rights groups early on: “In Uruguay there were no state-autonomous institutions such as the Church, or powerful rights organizations capable of successfully challenging party inconsistencies. The human rights organizations were too weak to press for a different outcome” (1997, 193). Barahona de Brito's work points to the importance of civil society for transitional politics, an importance best understood as part of a dialectical relationship with the state—one not equal in terms of power (for obviously the state maintains coercive capacity in most circumstances and is, in any case, the locus of formal power)—but nevertheless very real and important for reconciliation. This relationship will become evident in the following pages.
In this chapter, I discuss the role of civil society in reconciliation in several steps. First, I outline three important conceptions of civil society and discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses for understanding the peculiarities of societal reconciliation. Using one of these as a normative-analytical tool, I then turn to an analysis of the role of civil society actors in the public sphere and delineate how they can promote reconciliation by influencing political discourse and action at the institutional and political society levels. Next, I discuss some broader normative contributions civil society can make through the promotion of mutual respect, recognition, and the rule of law. Finally, I note several difficulties that emerge when advocates rely too heavily on civil society for reconciliation: (1) the problem of an over-politicized, oppositional civil society that undermines the efficacy of state consolidation and rule; (2) the problem of internal differentiation and authoritarian enclaves in civil society (and the retrograde impulses this can engender); (3) a civil society that loses its critical potential and becomes eviscerated of any communicative or influential power; and (4) the broader problem of normatively overburdening this social level for attaining reconciliation. In keeping with my general thesis that reconciliation must develop across four social levels, I discuss how civil society is strongly connected with developments elsewhere, and thus is a necessary but insufficient element of reconciliation.
Theorizing Civil Society
The concept of civil society has a long, complex pedigree. For early thinkers through the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it meant all social life outside of state institutions (Keane 1988; Ehrenberg 1999; Hodgkinson and Foley 2003). In particular, it referred to the institutions, groups, and activities that were mostly autonomous from state regulation. Market relations, for example, were traditionally at the center of the idea of civil society, and this understanding still represents a particularly influential and powerful model. Today, however, many political theorists and scholars view civil society and the associational life it encompasses as distinct from both the economy and the state, though the actual definition of the term is widely contested (Walzer 1995; Fullinwider 1999).
For my purposes, civil society refers to a space of social relations autonomous from the state where groups and movements create new alliances, further their interests and views, and engage with one another to shape public and elite opinion with the aim of influencing state policy and public discourse. Civil society is also where more universalistic bonds of solidarity are created and recreated, remaining in tension—sometimes productive, sometimes not—with particularist identities and claims that resist the construction of a broader social “we,” as Jeffrey Alexander has argued (2006, 42). It is, ultimately, a domain of public participation in debates over issues that are important to society as a whole as well as a space for the creation of identity and meaning, and while civil society actors do not exercise formal power, they can nevertheless mobilize the public and ultimately affect social policy. As this is not an uncontested conceptualization, I sketch three relevant views of civil society:1 (1) a liberal interest-based view, defined by competing groups seeking to influence the state and further their own sectoral interests; (2) a participatory/oppositional model that emerged during the period of oppositional social movements in communist East Europe and authoritarian Latin America, referred to as a “self-limiting” revolution by Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, two of its greatest elaborators; and (3) a “discourse theory” model, which sees civil society as distinct from the state but nevertheless serving as an important sphere of deliberation and influence that can inform state policy. Although these are not completely distinct models of civil society, they highlight different perspectives on its role, with different consequences and expectations as to the ultimate function of civil society.
Liberal Civil Society
The classic liberal model of civil society emphasizes the importance of freedom from the state. In this view, life is divided into two spheres: one public, characterized by the state and its attendant coercive capacity; and the other private, where we exercise freedom and pursue our (pre-social) interests. The latter sphere is civil society, which is largely the same as the private market domain. For the liberal, the public and private spheres are largely incompatible, and to the extent that the former encroaches on the latter, liberty disappears. The currency of the state is power; the state can at best enforce certain limited, basic conditions for individual flourishing (e.g., guaranteeing peace, contracts) but unchecked it can easily move beyond its legitimate domain and restrict the freedoms of individuals. There can be no profitable relations between the two spheres in such a view, and thus the only desirable social arrangement requires carefully restricted state power.
Furthermore, society is broadly understood as a series of binary relations: freedom and power, people and the state, and market and the government, with each element in opposition to the other. Because freedom is located in the private sphere, individuals find self-actualization and happiness there by pursuing their needs and interests with as little interference from the state (and others) as possible. To the extent that the state may be engaged, it is to promote particular interests of certain sectors of society (i.e., interest groups); no general public interest or common good is articulated or even considered necessary. It follows that relations in civil society are contractual relations, which allow individuals to secure the goods they want and satisfy the needs they have through mutually beneficial contracts. Relations between civil society and the state are also largely contractual; the state may, in some instances, be able to provide certain services that cannot be secured in the private domain. The market is seen as the primary arena for the distribution of goods and services due to its superior efficiency but the overriding danger of unchecked state power requires individuals to remain wary of government promises to provide too much, as this is the first step on the short road to serfdom.
Such a radically binary view of state-society relations requires a strong scheme of individual rights to protect people from government power. Unsurprisingly, then, the interest-based model has often included the strongest defense of individual liberties possible by presenting them, at least in one formulation, as trumps against the utilitarian policies of the state (Nozick 1974). But what is particularly important for our purposes is how this framework conceives of the individual as largely an economic being, homo economicus; one who equates freedom with the unhindered possibility of pursuing economic interests with little concern for fellow citizens. While this may represent freedom in a Hobbesian sense—the lack of “impediments” means liberty—it results in a very impoverished notion of civic life with little if any concern for social cooperation, collective action, or solidarity. The idea of citizens having a stake in society or having an interest that transcends their narrow individual desires is largely absent here. Even the more attenuated version of liberalism found in Robert Dahl's theory of polyarchy, which identifies the bedrock of democracy as the institutionalization of formal representation through periodic voting and the separation of governmental powers, remains skeptical of any conception of civil society that considers public will beyond interest-based politics. Indeed, in this formulation, civil society consists of a network of polyarchic relations and transactions that are shaped and legitimized by an existing party system, which help achieve something like a “general advantage” (1991, 295). Policy making is the result of negotiation and accommodation between different groups. For Dahl, the key is to ensure that civil society actors, promoting their interests, can shape and influence policy outcomes.
The liberal conception of civil society replaces sociability and publicness with the pursuit of private interest. As the citizen becomes a solitary and “autonomous” consumer, issues of shared concern cannot be thematized from a broader perspective that includes the well-being of society as a whole. Indeed, at best, one is left with citizens who seek to maximize their interests and preferences, and politics is reduced to instrumental relations.
Civil Society as a “Self-Limiting” Revolution
Some analysts view civil society in a more Gramscian sense, one that consists primarily of popular social movements standing in opposition to the state. Here, civil society opposes the state's coercive power and creates and sustains a domain where individuals, acting collectively, further social solidarity and their conceptions of the common good. Civil society can certainly play this role in transitions to create a space free from government repression where subordinate groups can contest official power. This view was widely endorsed in the Latin American civil society movements of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Carina Perelli (1992) has documented how youth movements in Uruguay confronted the authoritarian state first through small acts of disobedience and later, as their temerity lessened, through rallies and publications that made explicit their antagonism toward the military regime. While the youth movement was never able to maintain significant links with other groups in a broad front, it is nevertheless epigrammatic of this conception of civil society. In Chile, too, civil society became organized and politicized beginning in 1983. In May of that year a series of large demonstrations were begun by labor groups, and grew to include a variety of youth groups, religious associations, leftist political organizations, women's groups, and even some organizations representing middle class interests (Martinez 1992). These demonstrations failed to remove Pinochet, but fundamentally altered the political landscape, eventually leading Pinochet to hold a referendum in 1988, which he lost. The movement's refusal to countenance any negotiations with the regime reflects the politicized divide between state and society at the center of this approach (a position that was, alas, reciprocated by the government).
This popular, confrontational approach gains its most theoretically careful elaboration in the work of Polish activist Adam Michnik. Under the category of “new evolutionism,” Michnik conceptualizes civil society in radical opposition to the state, and speaks of the necessity for an “unceasing struggle for reform and evolution” based on a “steady and unyielding stand” against the government (1985, 142–143). Michnik draws on the importance of creating links with a host of civil society actors, including the Catholic Church. Civil society, in his estimation, should be a repository of transformational and horizontal relations between non-state groups, but it should be restrained, or “self-limiting”; that is, civil society actors do not seek formal power but remain in permanent relations of contestation with the state in the process democratizing the regime and society more broadly (1985, 144). This conception of broad opposition is useful insofar as it identifies the importance of social struggle against a repressive state—one that is unlikely to begin reform and expand civil liberties on its own initiative. It is rooted in contesting the legitimacy of authoritarian governments through self-limiting but forceful action. In present day Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and social movements like the Women of Zimbabwe Arise have continuously pressured President Robert Mugabe to recognize civil rights, hold fair elections, and share power with opponents, all the while eschewing violence or revolutionary struggle (Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum 2008). The fact that Mugabe agreed to a power-sharing arrangement with the MDC speaks to the power, but also significant limitations, of civil society in that country and oppositional politics more generally (Human Rights Watch 2008).
This perspective is certainly helpful for contexts where an oppressive regime is in power. Unlike the liberal model presented above, it is not primarily private in orientation; rather, it emphasizes the importance of continued engagement and popular pressure on the state through broad social mobilization, while maintaining and cultivating a social space unencumbered by state interference. It is less useful, however, for understanding transitional situations and theorizing what future relations between society and a reformed state should be. Civil society cannot be only oppositional; it must maintain selective links with the state if it is to maintain any influence and deepen democratization. In democratic transitions, the new regime distinguishes itself by its commitment to the rule of law and democratic responsiveness, and requires new state-society relations based on principles of trust that emerge naturally over time. The crucial point, however, is that while popular mobilization may be necessary in response to an authoritarian regime, civil society actors must transform themselves during the transition as well, for otherwise important links with the state will fail to develop and democratization may not occur. This model provides few insights for rethinking new relations and risks reducing itself to either a depoliticized liberal-pluralism that emphasizes personal autonomy and little social engagement (as Vaclav Havel did in the mid-1990s), or a confrontational stance that remains wary of any state action.
The “self-limiting” revolutionary model underscores the importance of broad-based social mobilization, making social solidarity the primary desired norm. It shares with liberal-pluralist views skepticism toward the state, while it rejects the liberal demotion of collective action in favor of the private pursuit of satisfaction. Neither approach, however, satisfactorily explains how civil society actors can shape state policy and historical understanding in transitions. A more fruitful approach, I think, is found in the discourse theory model, which draws our attention to the importance of the deliberative force generated in the public sphere by civil society actors, and its influence on state practice and social discourse.
The Discourse Theory of Civil Society
In the discursive approach, civil society is conceived as a “network of associations that institutionalizes problem-solving discourses on questions of general interest inside the framework of organized public spheres” (Habermas 1996, 367). Through open-ended, public engagement with one another, myriad social groups form (or re-form) public opinions that shape and influence political elite behavior and state action. There are numerous mediating institutions (e.g., radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the Internet) that promote the proliferation of public opinion. The crucial contribution of this model is its theorization of the “public sphere.” This is a domain in which civil society actors operate and is neither a formal institution nor organization, but rather a network where citizens (in a non-official capacity) can communicate information and contest differing views on issues of common interest, with the goal of ultimately shaping public doxa. A well-formed public sphere allows for the greatest possible participation and resists political and economic pressures that can disrupt free discourse, while privileging argumentation based on basic principles of status parity among participants. Importantly, any public issue is open to discussion. “Public discourse,” argues Jean Cohen, “also has the important political purpose of controlling and influencing the formation of policy in the juridically public institutions of the state” (1999, 70).
The discursive approach is concerned only with those issues that are of distinctly public relevance; as such, civil society “refers to the structures of socialization, association, and organized forms of communication in the life world to the extent that these are institutionalized or are in the process of being institutionalized” (J. Cohen and Arato 1992, ix). With its privileging of the public sphere, this model emphasizes the communicative power that flows from public deliberation. Unlike the liberal conception, however, the discourse model does not conceive of deliberation as the result of preformulated aggregate individual or group interests; its content is broader, and includes rethinking and debating basic social norms and ways of reckoning with the past. In this sense, then, it is also transformative of the participants. They must subject their opinions and beliefs to public scrutiny and debate, justify them in ways that appeal to common interests, re-frame them as new criticisms, and then raise counterarguments. With these transformations, participants move toward achieving some degree of consensus on issues of public concern.
While this model has much in its favor, we should be wary of some of its rationalist pretensions. Critics have argued that cultural pluralism, economic inequality, institutionalized status differentiation, social conflict, and a highly contested social public sphere make the idea of consensus through public reason at best chimerical. In the context of transitional settings, where material and status differences can be more pronounced, the idea of an open public sphere seems even more vulnerable to these criticisms. We can draw some important lessons from the discursive approach, however, if we loosen some of its requirements. First, we should acknowledge that the theoretical distinction between “rational” and “emotional” speech, central to much rationalist deliberative theory (especially Jürgen Habermas's [1996]), is empirically unsustainable and normatively problematic. The elevation of rationality and demotion of affect not only misrepresents the nature of actual deliberation but assumes that the latter contributes nothing of value to discourse. By privileging “rational” modes of communication at the expense of other forms that may employ emotional appeal or rhetoric, this approach risks delegitimizing interlocutors before they can even participate in collective deliberation, thus circumscribing the domain of appropriate debate arbitrarily (Young 1996; Streich 2002; Dryzek 2005). Furthermore, the assumption that rational debate can result in uncoerced consensus rests on a suspect teleology; that is, an end goal that is particularly unlikely where collective identities are deeply divided and groups disagree not only about current interests but even basic moral orientations and historical understandings. Where there is so little in common, except perhaps for a shared mistrust, robust rational consensus of the kind endorsed by Habermas is probably unattainable.
A discourse model of civil society requires a more participatory model of discursive exchange that allows for other forms of communication, particularly if it is to retain relevance in deeply divided societies. Rather than require, or expect, rational deliberation through epistemically robust norms of argumentation and decision making among free, equal, and purely rational actors that would result in substantial consensus, we can use the discursive approach from a different vantage point; one that offers us a way of rethinking the importance of drawing attention to and debating the most important political and normative issues that transitional societies confront. That is, deliberation is ultimately the primary legitimate means of engaging one another over concerns of deep political importance: It is the sine qua non of democratic life. The discursive model draws attention to the centrality of a public sphere as the proper domain for formulating, assessing, and contesting concerns. One of the strengths of such a model is its insistence on the open-ended nature of public discussion, and the expectation that long-held beliefs be “tested” in a public forum and even transformed through continuous critique. The ultimate aim is to reach normatively acceptable compromises on the most contentious issues of public concern; that is, political compromises that recognize the importance of accountability, commit actors to presenting accurate accounts of past violence, include victims in deliberations and acknowledge them as fellow citizens of equal moral worth and dignity, promote mutual respect, and further the rule of law. In this sense, the deliberative approach sketched here seeks to replace a politics of violence with a politics of discourse, but a public discourse that retains a normative edge precisely through its commitment to these normative concerns.
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato have argued that the discourse model emphasizes the importance of having associations whose internal structure is democratic. To the extent that civil society groups are internally democratic, civil society as a whole becomes more democratic and processes of democratization become better anchored. Here I wish to loosen this requirement, as it is clear that although internally democratic organizations are desirable, their necessity is less clear. As I discuss further, some organizations, like the Catholic Church in parts of Latin America, have played extremely important roles in promoting human rights and condemning abuse while remaining internally hierarchical. The correlation between internal structure and the institution's values is not as linear as Cohen and Arato argue. Nevertheless, it is clear that, broadly speaking, social movements and civil society organizations represent a key element of “a vital, modern, civil society and an important form of citizen participation in public life” (1992, 19). Particularly in transitional settings, what is needed is a civil society constituted of myriad groups that are committed to principles of accountability, the recognition of the moral status of victims, investigation of the past, and the basic norms of democracy and the rule of law. Thus, operating as “counter-hegemonic blocs of social movements,” to take a term from Nancy Fraser (1997, 86), these groups can serve important roles in resisting collective amnesia or revisionist, self-serving histories.
The discourse model is sympathetic to Michnik's concern about “self-limitation” (1985, 65). Civil society should not replace the market nor the state as the sole domain of human activity. However, it breaks with Michnik in rethinking civil society not as permanently opposed to the state but instead connected to it through a series of mediating spaces, such as political society, through which civil society can influence social dynamics and processes. Civil society actors and the state become strongly oppositional when “these mediations fail or when the institutions of economic and political society serve to insulate decision making and decision makers from the influence of social organizations, initiatives and forms of political discussion” (J. Cohen and Arato 1992, ix—x). Certainly, civil society cannot resolve fundamental social problems; hence the need to establish and maintain robust mediations with both political leaders and the state. But from the perspective of a theory of reconciliation, the public sphere ideally serves as the location for citizens to thematize and contest basic social values and policies related to the past. Habermas (1996) argues that through unconstrained communication (i.e., a public sphere with no limitations on rights of access and participation) a collective will forms, with civil society serving as a critical bulwark to state power and the legitimacy of (possibly limited and self-serving) norms that the latter promotes. Public will, reframed as public opinion, seeks to influence state action by identifying those issues that concern collective life. While Habermas's view perhaps sets a normative ideal that is too high for transitional contexts, we can argue that civil society has a democratizing role to play in transitions insofar as the formal deliberative institutions with decision-making power, such as the legislature, can be influenced by public discourse.
The discourse model emphasizes groups that are internally democratic, a point about which I have raised some concerns. Nevertheless, it shares with the oppositional approach a focus on a domain where citizens feel they have a stake in issues concerning the common good. Because plurality is a fact of modern political and social life, shared world views can no longer be taken for granted—a situation particularly pronounced in transitions—and norms of reciprocal respect and tolerance must play important roles for generating and maintaining social cohesion while also expanding the opportunities for meaningful recognition. The main point here, however, is that the multiplicity of groups must be committed to resolving differences through deliberation, and that civil society cannot substitute for the power of the state but rather should remain autonomous from the state while helping to shape elite policy.
Civil Society and Reconciliation
Using the somewhat reconstituted discourse model sketched above, we now turn to a discussion of the role civil society can play in fostering reconciliation. If civil society is to work positively under such fragile circumstances, that is, where the threat of a return to violence often seems likely, its participants must espouse an ethics of deliberation, respect, and tolerance without sacrificing the commitment to critically interrogating the past. Here I draw attention to several contributions civil society actors make before moving on to some limitations.
The most important contribution civil society can make to reconciliation is to foster public deliberation, a point central to thinkers such as David Crocker (1999). Civil society actors can move political discourses based on exclusion and threats of violence away from reductionist, zero-sum argumentation. Although J. Cohen and Arato do not explicitly link rational discourse with reconciliation and broader social regeneration in this manner, their notion of communicative activity and its theoretical presuppositions are conducive to the development of respect, mutual recognition, and rule of law. A politics based on argumentation and criticism at the very least rests on minimal respect, as it places limits on the kinds of strategies admissible in political debate. It requires, for example, that one give reasons for one's beliefs and arguments, rather than resort to the threat of force to “convince” an opponent. Deliberation rests on the assumption that one's interlocutor enjoys at least some basic rights that cannot be abrogated. J. Cohen and Arato stipulate more stringent requirements: A commitment to deliberation necessitates certain procedural safeguards such as ensuring that participation is as inclusive as possible and free from “deformations of wealth, power and social status” (J. Cohen and Arato 1992, 186) and that arguments be justified by reasons that can in principle be addressed to all. Thus, decision-making processes produce collectively authored results. While I have argued for flexibility in the rationalist strictures of this approach to deliberation, the core argument—that a commitment to reciprocally endorsed norms of contestation are central to civil society—is important in several respects. It moves us toward achieving respect among citizens, since open deliberation is fundamentally inclusive of everyone who could potentially be affected by the outcome, and at the very least accepts their claims to participation. Additionally, deliberation includes within it a defense of tolerance, since public deliberation is always about debate and contestation, and differences of opinion must be tolerated (i.e., not censored or suppressed) if deliberation is to be sustained, though of course they can be criticized and repudiated through further debate. Indeed, in a deeper sense, deliberation can promote a form of public moral education by teaching the importance of values like democracy, basic human rights, how to listen to others with whom we disagree, and how to accept deep moral disagreements without turning to oppression. By engaging with others we partly rehumanize them and come to see aspects of them that we see in ourselves; that is, we extend a kind of moral recognition. Moral education is based in ongoing practice and can be reinforced though deliberation and mutual engagement. Without sustained engagements with others and without learning how to listen to contending voices, moral development is unlikely to occur.2 Deliberation also means a respect for the rule of law, as it rests on legitimized procedures for fair and open participation that are the scaffolding for vigorous but peaceful political life. Respect and tolerance among citizens and respect for the rule of law strengthen one another over time. Respect and tolerance are reciprocal norms (i.e., all participants must endorse them for their actualization), and institutions of the rule of law become firmly anchored only when citizens and elites endorse public deliberation, with its attendant expectations of renouncing violence, as the primary mechanism for resolving disputes.
Second, civil society can inform the definition of categories of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Political violence leaves behind numerous victims, but disagreements about who is and is not a victim can persist long after the violence is over. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the issue of victim recognition works along several axes: material-symbolic and individual-collective. Legally, a victim is anyone whose rights were violated; that is, the law constructs and categorizes victims according to its own internal logic of rights, duties, and remedies. Although this is certainly a political-interpretative process insofar as some persons are interpellated as victims while others are not, the issue becomes significantly more complex as we move from individual victims to family members (or even entire communities) who may or may not be considered victims, to the various consequences that flow from this. For instance, if an entire group is defined as a victim, such as an ethnic group, we are highlighting some common features that give salience to their victim status, aside from the fact of having been violated.3 Take, for example, the repression of indigenous groups in rural Guatemala. The state instituted a policy of systematic violence against indigenous communities that was framed as part of its anti-insurgency campaign. The indigenous were seen as subversive and treasonous persons who had forfeited their basic rights. In a sense, then, the Maya indigenous community as a whole was a victim of state terror. However, some political leaders have claimed that though violations occurred on a relatively large scale in some areas, this was a result of “excesses” rather than an actual policy. Where authoritarian enclaves persist, and especially in situations where individuals of the previous regime continue to serve in the current government, there is a tendency to reframe past abuses as “excesses,” without interrogating the structural and systematic aspects of violence. Rather, past policies (and their consequences) are framed as either necessary or unfortunate but otherwise unrepresentative instances of atrocity. Civil society actors can resist these accounts and work to expand the category of victimization to include those close to them and others who were affected by their loss. Admittedly, this kind of discourse can be generalized to the point of including all of society as the victim, with the consequent loss of real distinctions between actual victims and perpetrators, so that the terms lose their normative content. The risk is that responsibility is shifted away from actors to “history,” where persons were “forced” to do what they did. But the importance of civil society lies in its ability to define and elaborate different categories of victims, and thus ensure that those groups who have been marginalized or otherwise ignored are given the moral recognition they deserve from the public. Indeed, victim recognition requires more than state redistributive policies; it also necessitates efforts at recasting victims as fellow citizens with moral claims to respect. The state and political elites, of course, play a central role in this; however, civil society can deepen this goal of victim recognition by ensuring that victims are not simply ignored or overlooked in official accounts of the past.
Civil society actors can also catalyze debate about responsibility and perpetrators. They can highlight the complexity of this category and show how juridical guilt does not exhaust the category of perpetrator. Groups like the Association of the Relatives of the Disappeared in Peru (Asociación Nacional de Familiares de Secuestrados y Detenidos-Desaparecidos [ANFASEP] 2002) have played crucial roles in ensuring that culpability is not conceived as belonging only to a select few. Rather, they have shown how “perpetrator” should include material and intellectual authors of crimes as well as the members of the bureaucratic apparatus who carried out state terror. In conjunction with other human rights groups, they have initiated campaigns to bring attention to the responsibility of the state and Marxist guerrillas in the perpetration of crimes. The Association for Human Rights (Asociación pro Derechos Humanos [APRODEH] 2009) and the Andean Commission of Jurists (Comisión Andina de Juristas [CAJ] 2009), two other Peruvian human rights organizations, have been instrumental in generating public debate about the extent of violations through workshops, publications and, in the former case, grassroots efforts at informing citizens about the complicity of some elites in violence and the corruption that fostered it. Maintaining a broader conception of who is a perpetrator, one that includes others such as high-level bureaucrats who facilitate the commission of wrongs, forces elites and society in general to confront the past and their place in it. In this respect, civil society can deepen public reflection on responsibility and guilt beyond that found in a juridical setting.
Perpetrator and bystander are not always easily distinguished from one another, however. As we move away from individual juridical culpability we encounter a kind of moral responsibility that is characterized by a “responsibility for inaction,” or sin of omission. The Association of the Relatives of the Disappeared in Peru, as well as other survivor groups, have drawn attention to the urban elites’ lack of interest in the suffering of poor indigenous peasants during that country's civil war. For some, the fact that leaders were in a social position where they could have publicly denounced state violations against peasants but chose not to underscores their moral culpability. Certainly, it is often difficult to know who is a perpetrator or a morally responsible bystander: If leaders support a war with awful consequences for the poor, does this make them perpetrators or accomplices of some other sort? Often there are substantial numbers of persons who benefited from the violence and chose not to denounce it. They fall outside the normal purview of justice but without their tacit—and sometimes explicit—support, the violence would likely be lessened, in either intensity or duration. How do we understand the responsibility of morally compromised bystanders, those whose guilt extends beyond the juridical, and how do civil society groups contribute to this understanding?
Karl Jaspers uses the term political guilt: a kind of guilt that attaches itself to all citizens who tolerated what was done by the state in their name. According to Jaspers's rather strong formulation, everyone “is co-responsible for the way he [sic] is governed” (1961, 31), a position echoed by groups as diverse as the Peruvian Association of History and Reconciliation and the Argentine Alliance for Refounding the Nation to emphasize the broad responsibility that all of society carries. While Jaspers attempts to draw some distinctions between different forms of guilt, political guilt is perhaps too expansive and rough, since it fails to articulate how different individuals can be responsible in different ways, and how responsibility at this level may be better thought of on a moral continuum. It levels differences between perpetrators and others by extending responsibility to everyone, thus erasing specific perpetrator responsibility. Used in this way, civil society actors not only misrepresent responsibility but also distort history. However, a focus on the complexity of responsibility and the ways in which it goes beyond juridical conceptualization can open a space for more nuanced—and difficult—reflections on the extent of popular support for previous policies and the moral weight that this carries. Will this promote reconciliation? Clearly, any effort at widening debate about responsibility is likely to be divisive, at least in the short term. It can heighten antagonisms between former enemies and degenerate into political theater meant to tarnish one's opponents, rather than reckon with the past and its place in the present. But in the risks of such an endeavor lie its strengths. Maintaining an open debate about responsibility can shake complacent and self-serving historical accounts by placing those stories—and the population at large—under a critical eye. It reframes debate by resituating moral responsibility squarely in the center of discussion, and redirects attention toward the actual suffering of victims, the violation of their rights, and the moral burdens that society as a whole may carry. Civil society actors contribute to this by keeping alive these debates about responsibility and resist efforts at simplifying culpability. Indeed, the introduction of the bystander as a moral category reduces the ability of elites as well as common citizens to distance themselves from their history and moral obligations.
A third important contribution concerns civil society's ability to interrogate and resist apologist historical accounts that justify past violations. Nietzsche (1997) defended the importance of critical historical inquiry as a way of investigating and ultimately destabilizing those histories that are unreflective (i.e., unaware of or uninterested in examining their own assumptions) and serve the interests of power, a point discussed in Chapter 2. The importance of this critical history cannot be overstated. Civil society can critique existing narratives to weaken and even replace elite accounts that mask their own ends and interests. In Peru, the human rights umbrella group National Coordinator for Human Rights (Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos [CNDDHH] 2009) plays a pivotal role in disseminating information on human rights abuses with the explicit goal of overturning elite interpretations and “raising the consciousness of the population.”4The CNDDHH has published numerous large reports and shorter, glossy booklets and pamphlets for wide distribution contesting the inevitability and necessity of abuses (an argument often made by combatants on all sides), and articulating an alternate historical interpretation that focuses on human rights abuses and the disproportionate suffering that fell on rural populations. The goal here is twofold: (1) to trace how the Shining Path's crude Marxist philosophy of history and the state's national security doctrine both provided ideological justification for atrocities, and (2) to re-situate victims at the center of discussions about the war, forcing a reconsideration of existing interpretive frameworks that see the conflict as nothing more than a civil war between armed sides. This re-situation provides at least some form of public recognition of victims.
The CNDDHH campaign to discredit past narratives has been echoed in Timor-Leste. The Timorese NGO Perkumpulan Hak (2008) has worked extensively to highlight how Indonesian supremacist ideology gave legitimacy to the state's violent policies. Hak and other NGOs have continued to document how this ideology shaped the perceptions of the Timorese by creating substantial challenges to developing reciprocal moral respect.
Some civil society groups have focused on truth telling by mounting investigative projects to detail and publicize government abuse. In Brazil, Chile, and Guatemala, human rights and church groups catalogued violations and later published their findings. A group of Brazilian investigators secretly worked with the World Council of Churches and the Archbishop of Sao Paolo to copy hundreds of thousands of pages of judicial testimony of prisoners who were tortured. Smuggled out of the country during the dictatorship, the records became the heart of the report Brazil: Never Again (1985), which analyzed the state's use of torture over a decade and a half. During Pinochet's rule in Chile, the Roman Catholic Church's Vicaría de la Solidaridad collected thousands of judicial records on disappearances. Later, these records played a central role in Chile's truth commission report. In Guatemala, the Archdiocese of Guatemala City (1998) created the Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) to document atrocities committed by both sides in the civil war. As Melissa Ballengee (2000) notes, REMHI's work was pivotal in providing additional information and documentation that was missing from the official Historical Clarification Commission (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [CEH] 1999), which was hampered by financial constraints and a limited focus. REMHI's final report, Guatemala: Never Again, was disseminated widely around the country through public presentations, radio, and print, enjoying a much larger audience than would otherwise be possible in a society with significant illiteracy. The report estimated 150,000 deaths and another 50,000 disappearances during the civil war, holding government forces and their civilian militias responsible for approximately 90 percent of the violations and the insurgents responsible for roughly 5 percent (with the rest undetermined). REMHI was crucial for bringing public attention to the scope of violations and countering the justifications and lies of the military elite. In these and other examples, civil society groups have produced historical accounts that have challenged widely held beliefs and contributed to ongoing debates about complicity, collective identity, and obligations to victims.
Fourth, civil society groups can reframe historical memory by encouraging the state to establish public memorials about the past. In an important respect, monuments and memorials are reified memory; they freeze public conceptions about common identity and give meaning to, if not create, a shared past. As markers of political violence and the experiences associated with it, these public works provide a locus around which a society can confront its history. The Argentine civil society group Sere Association for Promoting Memory and Life (2008) has used a former torture center as a synecdoche for the crimes of the previous regime, where the center itself assumes the status of symbol or icon for violations. Focusing on the torture center shows an alternate history of state terror that gives lie to previous official histories that minimized state atrocity and treated victims as traitors. Ugandan groups like the Gulu District NGO Forum (2009) have worked extensively to establish memorial sites for the Acholi people, and in Cambodia, the former torture site Tuol Sleng S-21 (2009) is today a museum documenting the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge.
Finally, civil society actors may give technical and policy recommendations for restructuring institutions most responsible for violations. As Naomi Roht-Arriaza (2002) has argued, professional groups such as lawyers associations, scholarly institutes, and rights organizations with specific technical knowledge can provide useful assistance to the state in restructuring sectors of the government and achieving institutional reform. Consider the reform of the legal order: Groups such as the Peruvian CAJ have provided detailed recommendations on revamping the courts by instituting stronger chains of accountability to civilian leaders, greater transparency in the operation of the judiciary, and removing the most unfit judges from power. They have worked closely with certain sectors of the government, most notably the Ministry of the Public (in charge of prosecutions and rights violations) to strengthen the rule of law, and have provided technical reports on that country's “antiterrorism legislation,” an instrument used by the previous government to facilitate the commission of numerous human rights abuses.5 Similar professional organizations provide training programs to professionalize members of the judiciary and security forces. In Argentina, the Center for Legal and Social Studies (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales [CELS] 2009), has conducted numerous training workshops for the judiciary and published a series of reports on reform that have had an important impact in judicial restructuring. The Santiago-based Commission on Human Rights (Comisión de Derechos Humanos 2009), an NGO founded by attorneys in 1978, continues to give legal advice on restructuring the military and police in Chile. In Sierra Leone, the Campaign for Good Governance ([CGG] 2009) has developed important policy recommendations on security sector reform, which has enhanced women's access to voting and reduced corruption in state institutions. Much of its success has come from its command of technical issues relating to government reform, placing it among a relatively small number of Sierra Leonean NGOs with professional training and experience on complex reform issues. The CGG's combination of technical expertise and ability to publicize instances of state corruption and abuse has made it an influential civil society actor in Freetown.6
None of this is to say that these organizations should replace the state in providing services or administering the security apparatus. Rather than promoting the devolution of state power to civil society and the privatization of governmental obligations, civil support for institutional reform seeks to enhance the efficacy of the state and guarantee greater democratic responsiveness and accountability. We should nevertheless avoid placing too great an expectation on the influence of civil assistance: These organizations cannot guarantee state reform or ensure that their recommendations are heeded. Often, their greatest impact stems from their ability to monitor reforms, provide policy recommendations, and watch for continued state abuses. But professional groups can contribute to public deliberation by publicly recommending needed reforms and thereby signaling the importance of state responsiveness to public accountability and input.
Reconciliation and the Challenges of Civil Society
Civil society's contributions to reconciliation are important, but limited. There area number of limitations that should bring pause to those who identify civil society as the fundamental wellspring of reconciliation. Its transformative role as a site for debate and democratic practice can be hampered by other social dynamics, thus weakening its critical potential and contributions to social change. And it can only aid the pursuit of accountability and recognition of victims, as David Crocker notes: “Government has an indispensable role with respect to some forms of prosecution, punishment, investigation, compensation and commemoration” (2001, 390–391). Even civil society's greatest contribution, the promotion of an ethics of deliberation in an open public sphere, has a limited ability to resolve significant problems without state action. The state is necessary for securing these goals, and without elite and institutional commitment it is unlikely that the public will succeed in achieving reconciliation.
Debates over history are rarely polite affairs, particularly when groups have their basic values and very sense of identity riding on the outcome. In such a context, it is not unlikely that exclusivist ideologies will develop within civil society that strategically downplay a complex history and evade responsibility for crimes and in some instances shift the blame on opponents. The very liberties central to a healthy civil society, such as free speech and open debate, can become mechanisms to distort and even dismiss historical facts and experiences. Under circumstances where the public sphere simply becomes a venue for political combat, groups are driven to provide apologist accounts that ignore or minimize the complexity of past experiences and substitute simple narratives for complex events. Simplification, then, is a danger common to not only elite state discourse but also civil society.
Indeed, a civil society fractured by deep differences with radically opposed historical understandings is unlikely to sustain the norms of respect and tolerance that are needed for social stability and cohesion. Without at least some shared understandings of the past (i.e., without some shared narratives) society will remain as torn as it was before the violence, as in Bosnia and Herzegovina today (Verdeja 2007). The old distinctions that played a pivotal role during the violence are rewritten in public debate, with in-groups and out-groups occupying the same positions they did in the past. In some cases polarization can hinder open debate to such an extent that authoritarian enclaves remain in place, ensconced in the same stories that work self-servingly to give them the legitimacy they seek. A recent World Bank (2005) study found that in the aftermath of conflict civil society organizations frequently worked to reinforce political divisions and mistrust by manipulating past events to strengthen sectoral interests while ignoring the need to promote open deliberation. This, of course, is surprising only to thinkers who equate civil society with progressive and inclusive politics (one can read Habermas's [1996] stronger formulations in this way). Such a shattered civil society is hardly civil, and in any case contributes nothing to a shared exploration of responsibility and reconciliation.
I emphasize, however, that we should be wary of treating opposition as illegitimate. The public sphere, and democratic politics in general, should be as open and inclusive as possible, and this means tolerating groups with whom we strongly disagree. I am not arguing that contestation is permissible only when we agree with the groups involved, as this effectively means tolerance in name only. Rather, we should draw a distinction, at least conceptually, between those groups that are willing to respect democratic and peaceful politics but nevertheless harbor radically different views and may even support the previous regime, and those who reject the very premises of the democratic game and are little more than spoilers who are unwilling to compromise. Spoilers exist at both ends of the political spectrum; they may include those who are unabashed in their defense of the most offensive past policies and those who will brook no compromise (or even the possibility of coexistence) with defenders of the past. Spoilers, in other words, includes the most unrepentant apologists as well as adamant retributive absolutists who view anything short of “full” justice as unacceptable. If politics is to replace violence, then citizens must accept that compromise and coexistence with former enemies are unavoidable. My concern with oppositional spoiler politics is that it does not generate values of respect for the rule of law, tolerance, deliberation, and other norms that are at the core of a functioning democratic order. Under these conditions state authority risks paralysis through its constant confrontations with an oppositional civil society, and the public sphere loses it crucial capacity to nurture debate and reach acceptable compromises. Communicative power and argumentation become tools in the search for the tactical domination of opponents, and the possibility of solidarity or even mutual respect disappears in the face of increasingly virulent discourse. Relations between the state and society, and within society itself, are destroyed.
An alternative possibility is simply that public discourse becomes so drained of analytical and normative potential that apologist doxa remains supreme, and the communicative power of a critically engaged civil society disappears. Rather than sustaining counter-hegemonic discourses, social movements disappear due to lack of public interest and citizens seek a more privatized, less overtly political public order. In such a context, a weakened civil society ceases to try influencing political elites or resisting policies of official forgetting. The critical resources at the center of a deliberative civil society are no longer sufficient to mobilize continued interest in accountability, victim recognition, and truth telling. Tomás Moulian (1998) gave a fascinating, if dispiriting, reading of Chile in the 1990s along these lines, showing how apart from a relatively small group of highly active human rights organizations and pro-military associations, many Chileans preferred to put the past behind them and place their energy in the emerging consumerist culture. This second outcome bears more than a resemblance to the defenses on historical oblivion discussed in Chapter 1. And it faces the same moral challenges. Precisely because the public sphere is such a crucial site for resisting self-serving elite calls for letting “bygones be bygones,” civil society's loss to apathy and disengagement is a powerful blow to meaningful reconciliation.
Under either condition of a radically oppositional or politically weak civil society it is not uncommon to find existing enclaves of authoritarian power. In the first scenario, authoritarian blocs are often able to stall or derail efforts at historical reckoning or accountability, whereas in the latter situation authoritarian leaders may step into the vacuum left by an engaged civil society and make compelling public cases to simply “move on.” Under the former condition, however, it unlikely that mutual respect will gain much support, precisely because a significant portion of the population refuses to engage in morally relevant issues. In the latter condition, of course, victims will continue to encounter forms of misrecognition and continued authoritarian power that will hamper democratic governance.
These points underscore the fundamental difficulty of normatively overburdening civil society. What is clear is that civil society can contribute to reconciliation, but its fragility means that we should not expect more from it that it can achieve. It is a necessary, though insufficient, level for reconciliation. Its importance stems from its potential for generating communicative power with which to pressure the state to address past wrongs and push for greater recognition of victims. Furthermore, it is in civil society that the general normative concepts of rule of law and mutual respect are nurtured and deepened. It is here where a politics of deliberation can replace a politics of violence, citizens can learn through practice the importance of human rights, and where they can embark on the difficult project of achieving a just reconciliation. If reconciliation is to occur, it must be deepened at this level.