Transcending discourses on violence : peace constitutive practices of truth, justice and authenticity in Rwanda, 1998-2002

• Main Author: Raschdorf, Ann-Christin
• Published: London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London) 2005
• Subjects: 327.1
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.645610

This thesis is a critical theory based investigation into communicative and normative preconditions for peace. It is a theoretical inquiry into questions of argumentative truth, justice and authenticity and their relevance for conflict resolution and transformative peace-building. Following Habermas, it explores the formal argumentative requirements for peace and examines corresponding cognitive and societal/perceptual prerequisites for its intra- and interpersonal realisation. In this context, it identifies conceptual spaces of violence that impair peaceful interaction. It scrutinizes the communicative dynamics of transformative change and moral actor-hood from a critical theory perspective. It raises questions of communicative and moral learning, reasoning and structural change. It seeks to identify and explain formal-argumentative procedural correlations in the dialogical set-up of truth-seeking, norm-setting and norm-enforcing entities and argues for institutional complementarity and coherence. It calls for a conscious transition of normative and communicative barriers between conflict transformation efforts at community, national and international level and specifies theoretical alternatives to the present functionalist peace-building discourse in the form of a critical theory based model to conflict transformation. Some of these theoretical assumptions will be illustrated by the example of Rwanda.