Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century

How did civil society function as a locus for reconciliation initiatives in twentieth-century Europe? The essays in this volume challenge the conventional understanding of reconciliation as a benign, state-driven process. They explore how a range of civil society actors-from Turkish intellectuals apologiing for the Armenian Genocide to religious organiations working towards the improvement of Franco-German relations-confronted and coped with the past. These studies offer a critical perspective on local and transnational reconciliation acts by questioning the extent to which speech became an alternative to silence, remembrance to forgetting, engagement to oblivion.