ABSTRACT
This book has examined the role of truth recovery in the context of societies coming out of a conflict. Truth recovery becomes a sub-project within a larger enterprise of what has come to be called post-conflict reconstruction. The reader is cautioned in Chapter 1, that this book leaves largely un-interrogated the idea of a ‘peace process’ and is alerted to the possibility of seeing a peace process as entirely constructed by the imposition of an external framework of meaning on an armed conflict rather than by any quality inherent in the conflict itself. Defining when a conflict tilts from being a conflict into a post-conflict situation, and the imposition of such a framework, is the prerogative of powerful political actors. As is evident in the Iraq of 2007, a nominally post-conflict situation may be virtually indistinguishable, in terms of levels of hostility and instability, from war.
