The 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone raised the bar of cruelty as high as any war in recent memory. Infamous for mass amputations and kidnapping and recruitment of children into armed forces, Sierra Leone should face severe obstacles to reconciliation between combatants and civilians or combatants from opposing sides. But this is not the case. Sierra Leoneans are strikingly willing to say they forgive and will reconcile with those responsible for ravaging their villages and their lives. Popular anger is directed instead at top government officials even though their predecessors, not they, were responsible for the corruption and mismanagement that led to the rebellion. Until Sierra Leoneans see real change in governing practices, the most important form of national reconciliation in Sierra Leone, (re)establishing popular trust in the state, will be difficult to achieve.;Achieving sentient reconciliation requires more than addressing war-related crimes. Problematic social structures and tensions that contributed to the war must be understood so that post-war transitional processes can avoid replicating them. The Sierra Leone TRC showed that, given a mandate to investigate the broad context of war, truth commissions can assist reconciliation by identifying these social structures and tensions and thus provide essential information for effective transitional planning.;Keywords. Reconciliation. Peacebuilding, Sierra Leone, Restorative Justice, Truth commission.;This research explores the multiple meanings of reconciliation after mass atrocity; the roles of transitional institutions in promoting reconciliation, and barriers to deep reconciliation. Based on field research in Sierra Leone, including observations of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, I argue that conciliatory processes fall into two groups: those that must be evaluated on rational grounds and can be measured (described as 'coming together' or 'coming to agreement') and those that can only be felt (described as 'trust,' 'healing' and 'coming to terms' with the past). Institutional efforts to promote reconciliation strive for measurable outcomes that are too often taken as proxies for deeper, sentient forms of reconciliation. With few organized processes besides the truth commission to promote dialogue about the past. Sierra Leoneans often turn to religion or their own informal trust-building strategies to fill the gaps.
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