ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the multiple ways in which the quest for recognition and redemption enables oppressed people to contest or transgress the power of their oppressors while carrying out a critique of the modalities of recognition, return, and settlement as well as the identity practices that enable violence to persist among previously oppressed groups. It suggests that challenging officially recognized spaces and dominant regimes of recognition does not simply mean bringing in those who had been excluded while maintaining our ontological and sentimental attachments or structures of relation. A revisiting of historical sites of estrangement and practices of mediation and redemption in order to interrogate the forms of recognition and violence that returns to haunt the present. The critical diplomatic and ethico-political task involves going beyond our partialities by unsettling and disturbing dominant regimes of recognition while experimenting with mediation practices and an ethics of encounter and cohabitation that does not reproduce these monstrous nuptials.
