In this essay I defend a politics of reconciliation as a means of addressing conflict in the hopes of realizing a legitimate ethical-political reality, which is one based in a common and explicit trust. The ideal guiding this model of reconciliation is the affordance of peaceful and reciprocal meaning making or dialogical relations; that is, I understand reconciliation to be both the formation of the conditions of the possibility of cooperative meaning making, insofar as it involves the creation of the secure conditions needed to reestablish basic forms of trust between conflicting persons, and eventually the cooperative meaning making itself that leads to deeper forms of trust such as friendship or solidarity. Insofar as trust is crucial to the health of a democratic political system, a politics of reconciliation is needed in realizing this fundamental relationship, and this politic requires the enactment of a permanent reconciliatory apparatus.

Post-communist Eastern and Central Europe has witnessed a rise in ethnonationalism. The struggle of identity formation has often involved a re/turn to traditional, or even fundamentalist, religious practices that are authoritarian and patriarchal. Faith communities within such a sway often undermine the organs of society that ideally in a democracy negotiate between the government and the citizenry, the domain of civil society.Since the end of the civil war of 1992-1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has struggled under the constraints of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which institutionalized a tri-partite government along ethno-national lines. Today this country lags behind every successor state of Yugoslavia (measured by GDP per capita), and political instability continues to thwart hopes for EU ascension. A civil society that fosters a critical citizenry offers hope for support of constitutional amendments that would recreate and support a functioning multiethnic state. Despite the common association of faith communities and ethno-nationalism, some work, usually “on the ground,” to create a civil society that engages both the political and religious hierarchies.The representatives of faith communities considered here, in BiH and Croatia, who must maintain a lower profile politically, receive, consequently, less attention in the international arena. Yet, their work provides crucial support for European integration and open societies in the region and deserves special attention now, when the threat to their work is on the rise.

The purpose of this article is, firstly, to expose the basic assumption in Hannah Arendt’s The Jewish Writings, and, secondly, to discuss her critique of Jewish life and the Zionist entity—later the Jewish state—in Palestine. As I will suggest, her basic assumption is that politics can exist only as a dynamic process, as an interplay between different players with different worldviews and interests. Thus, politics cannot be reduced to a state of inertia, what Arendt calls “inalterable substance.” According to Arendt, adherence to such inertia leads to the destruction of politics and the loss of any chance to conduct a normal and fully productive life. As it turned out, the Zionist movement was fixed from its very inception in a state of inertia and thus introduced into its own definition a permanent antagonism toward other nations. As a result, Israel is in a permanent state of war and conflict, in danger of being annihilated, in a perpetual arms race, and is degenerating into a modern Sparta. The nation-state is an embodiment of the state of inertia. Arendt believes that it is only by adopting a federal system instead of a nation-state system that the Zionist enterprise could turn into a dynamic political process and a place where one can conduct a productive and fruitful life. I will firstly present Arendt’s main claims and then criticize them, pointing at the merits and fl aws in her thesis.

Rutilio Grande, S.J. was the first priest assassinated in El Salvador on March 12, 1977. He was targeted for his work with the poor as he applied Vatican II and the Medellín conference to his own reality in El Salvador. Grande’s progressive, creative and ultimately transformative ministry with the rural poor was aided by the UCA Jesuits with whom he partnered. Through his pastoral strategy of listening to communities, using the social sciences to understand their reality and embracing a pedagogy of conscientization, Grande challenged traditional pastoral strategies in El Salvador by collaborating with the UCA Jesuits. Ultimately, these commitments to helping Grande organize and educate rural agricultural workers contributed to government persecution and their eventual death at the hands of the Salvadoran military.

This paper is about African conflicts and their tendency to persist despite attempts to resolve them. Such persistence has in the past been attributed to various causes but it is the contention of this paper that African conflicts fester due to poor governance and thereafter persist and recur because the issues that led to the conflict are not adequately addressed in the course of resolving the conflict. To justify this position, the paper attempts a classification and analysis of what it considers to be recurring patterns in the conflict processes of some post-independence African states and also attempts a classification and analysis of efforts at resolving them. It argues that the expedient is often promoted over equity in the management of African conflicts and that mediators and facilitators routinely disregard the underlying issues of the conflict in their haste to abstract an agreement from the parties. It posits that some of the compromises that are extracted from the parties fail to meet their basic expectations and thus force them into a temporary peace that is abandoned at the earliest opportunity. The paper concludes that lasting peace is only feasible when issues of justice and equity are given priority of place and the parties are accorded sustained assistance as they embark on national reconciliation.

As a site of historic preservation, the “Hezbollah Museum,” as the Mleeta Resistance Landmark in South Lebanon is often called, engages in rhetorical invention on multiple levels: 1) generating a partisan story about the complicated, ongoing war between factions Mleeta calls the Zionists and the Resistance; and 2) creating a public space for the performance of persuasive political discourse about the resistance as an empowered, efficient, successful, and righteous social movement. The rhetorical utterances generated at Mleeta serve propaganda, prowar, sectarian ends, to be sure, but that rhetoric is also rooted in an increasingly neoliberal ideology and surrounded by neoliberal trappings, which creates a striking juxtaposition of gloss and extremism.

Power-sharing agreements, despite their disappointing history, are still the prevailing tool used for diffusing intrastate conflicts in Africa. One element that requires additional analysis is the role of third-parties in power-sharing negotiations. An analysis of the role of France in power-sharing negotiations in Chad, Mali, Central African Republic, Rwanda, and the Ivory Coast, suggests a biased approach that harmed the outcomes and sustainability of those negotiations. A better approach is to increase the power of third-parties like the African Union (AU). Currently, this organization lacks the executive capacity to guarantee the implementation of power-sharing negotiations. Empowering the AU’s executive arm through the formation of a military force, should allow for enhanced capacity in power-sharing negotiations.

This mixed-method design aimed to determine how practicing mindfulness in a high school classroom influences students’ academic focus and affective experience. Thirty-nine tenth-grade students participated in an eight-week intervention, in which they practiced mindfulness activities led by their certified English and yoga teacher once per week. Students completed a pre- and posttest Likert-scale survey to measure mindfulness using Greco, Baer, and Smith’s Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM) as well as three, open-ended post-test reflection questions. The survey data were analyzed to assess change in mindfulness and change in focus, and the qualitative data were analyzed to understand students’ self-perceptions of their affective experience. Results show that students’ scores for both mindfulness and focus increased after the intervention and they also show that students made gains in self-knowledge. The findings provide implications for educators to improve their classroom environments and reduce their own stress.