Grassroots Reconciliation Activism from a Comparative Perspective

Despite decades of attempts to develop and fund a sophisticated international policy toolbox for peacebuilding and transitional justice, the results continue to be chequered at best. This book argues that the problem lies not in implementation but in the fundamental logic of 'winning' that underpins these efforts—winning wars, winning court cases, winning elections. Victory, even when pursued graciously, creates losers who must concede, pay reparations, or suffer humiliation. It institutionalises violence rather than removing it.Across the world, grassroots reconciliation initiatives operate in tension with, in response to, or entirely outside state-led frameworks. Through cases from Colombia, Australia, Uganda, Northern Ireland, Canada, Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Israel/Palestine, this book examines how communities pursue reconciliation when they recognise that winning is either impossible or beside the point. It develops a typology of five approaches: instrumental, dialogical, restorative, transformative and experiential, revealing the diverse ways practitioners navigate the gap between what top-down policies deliver and what communities actually need. The proposed typology does not resolve the conceptual confusion around reconciliation but renders it productive, enabling comparison without imposing singular standards and centring power relations in reconciliation processes.Drawing on ecological thinking, the book contrasts the 'gardening' mentality of liberal peacebuilding with a 'rewilding' approach that embraces complexity, multiplicity and uncertainty. At its core, and contrary to some popular understandings of the concept, the idea of "rewilding" resists the nostalgic impulse that haunts both conservation and peacebuilding. Peace, it argues, is not a stable endpoint but an ongoing process of relationship maintenance, emerging through networks strong enough to hold contradiction and plural truths.