Peacebuilding, memory and reconciliation: bridging top-down and bottom-up approaches

摘要

Since the end of the cold war, in the throes of the ongoing 'memory boom' which was already gathering pace in Western Europe and the United States by the mid-1980s, it has become a widely accepted truth that the fall of dictatorships, the end of civil wars and the resolution of all kinds of conflict require a thorough confrontation with the past for the healing of the societies affected. So common is this view that it is worth reminding ourselves that deliberate forgetting of painful pasts has far and away been the dominant mode of dealing with conflict throughout human historv.