Fostering ‘national reconciliation’ after conflict and repression has become a popular norm in global politics. Reconciliation is widely accepted as an authoritative ideal of post-conflict peacebuilding and the so-called truth and reconciliation commission has emerged as a primary institution thereof. This paper suggests a way to reconstruct the emergence of the reconciliation discourse and to critically examine its performance in global politics. It offers a discourse theoretical approach to the emergence and performance of normative narratives that is based predominantly on the discourse theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The paper argues that ‘reconciliation’ can be understood as an empty universal, a vague yet powerful ideal that emerged in South Africa in times of severe social crisis and was articulated into a powerful reconciliation discourse which establishes truth-telling in a truth commission as a legitimate and appropriate practice of reconciliation. This discourse, it is argued, proliferated globally through the academic and political debate on transitional justice and post-conflict peacebuilding, and has meanwhile become a powerful technology of post-conflict peacebuilding. Examining the example of Sierra Leone, the paper argues that, when brought to local post-conflict situations, the reconciliation discourse performs by establishing a particular ‘reconciliation reality’, which tends to neutralize the political claims raised by the local population for the sake of harmony and political community.
