ABSTRACT
Reconciliation presents special challenges after civil wars, when former combatants must find a way to live alongside each other once again. This chapter introduces the diverse nature of those challenges and establishes the value of studying post-civil war reconciliation efforts comparatively and transnationally. It previews the contents of each chapter in this volume, presents the US Civil War as the volume’s principal case study, and suggests that reconsidering the limitations of US reconciliation in international perspective makes it look less exceptional. The chapter discusses the prevalence of civil wars around the modern world and the fact that civil wars are notoriously difficult to permanently resolve. Even after the violence stops, underlying conflicts tend to persist, and reconciliation itself is used by many groups not so much as a way to move beyond conflict but to continue fighting for their goals in another form.
