AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

dangerous has been proved by the violence. An immediate effort to
start reconstruction, from the first act of violence, signals
total rejection of the violence and its effects and a non-fatalist
determination even under the most trying circumstances. Adding to
this acts of reconciliation would be very strong nonviolence,
again with the rider that there is no guarantee it will work, only
the guarantee that blunt violence will not work, particularly not
in the longer run. Efforts to arrive at conflict resolution may
work much more smoothly in this 2R context. Above all, do not
wait for violence to end!
Building Conflict Transformation Capacity. As mentioned, a
major casualty of violence in general, and war in particular, is
conflict transformation capacity. The reason can be given a
simple formulation: violence makes people pessimistic. They tend
to see others as inherently evil, and violence/war as inherently
unavoidable, the famous Naturgesetz. If wars are unavoidable,
then they are also permissible. Journalists and historians make
major contributions to this pessimism in their inability to add
conflict resolution, peace and construction to their single-minded
focus on violence/war and destruction. Added to this comes the
focus on elites rather than common people, often framing the
elites as perpetrators and people as victims rather than a more
balanced view of both of them.
More particularly, with reference to Table 9.1: the three
basic capacities, for nonviolence, creativity and empathy, are
eroded. Somehow they have to be rebuilt, or created, and in as
many participants as possible. How can that be done?
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