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

level of participation, a rich, blooming civil society with
bridges across conflict divides, elites who see conflict as raw
material to be processed into higher levels of peacefulness, and
by peaceful means. Violence is not in the culture; peace is.
Negate all of this and we get conflicts monopolized by elites
who use violence to "settle" the conflict and to secure their own
position, and people standing by, watching, waiting, accepting the
monopoly of national elites and of the world elites in the
"international community". Violence is in the culture, because
"it is in human nature; such is life."
So Phase I slides into Phase II, violence occurs, with all,
most or many of the effects to be pointed out in Table 3.1. There
is a cease-fire, and Phase II becomes Phase III. What do we do?
Learn from people: they do the same as ants when their hive is
destroyed: they start reconstruction (chapter 7 below). But of
human beings we should expect more. Whether the war was
"internal" or "external" there is the necessity of some kind of
reconciliation (chapter 8 below). People cannot live apart and in
agony forever. And: there is the need to do in Phase III what was
not done in Phase I, resolution (chapter 9 below). If not, Phase
III becomes the new Phase I, reproducing the tragedy.
3. Mapping the Violence Formation
Our first point of departure was an impressionistic listing of the
violence aftermath. The second point of departure was the vicious
cycle in a violence triangle of direct, structural and cultural
violence. In a third effort we shall now bring this together in a
more complete map, covering six "spaces", and both
material/visible and nonmaterial/invisible effects:
Table 3.1: Visible and invisible effects of direct violence
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SPACE Material, Nonmaterial,
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