Rethinking Political Reconciliation in Divided Societies

The Deliberative ‘Right to Justification’ and Agonistic Democracy

Abstract

Deliberative theoretical accounts and agonistic democrats have conceived of political reconciliation and sought to contribute to its achievement in different forms. In this article, I explore how insight can be derived from key tenets of both strands of democratic theory in the struggle to achieve political reconciliation. War-torn or divided societies face myriad, unexpected challenges that require a set of different prescriptions even as democracy remains the end goal. The ineradicability of disagreement in political life in post-conflict societies is sympathetic to the agonistic tragic view of the world. Rather than subsume disagreement or straitjacket it in ‘rational’ deliberation, I propose contingent, open-ended but inclusive contestation as a means to political reconciliation. In this vein, I build on the contributions of theorists who seek to demonstrate that integration between agonism and democracy is possible. To harness the strengths of both models, I explore how the deliberative ‘right to justification’, set out by critical theorist Rainer Forst, can be put to work in an agonistic politics of reconciliation. I want to show that deliberation over the right to justification and the duty to justify constitute conjoined means of consensus-seeking, but can do so in ways that are contingent, fluid and sensitive to entrenched relations of power and inequality—two dynamics that deliberative theorists have been accused of deflecting or obscuring.