Reconciliation has become an integral part of the post-conflict peacebuilding process, and has come to be seen as an integral part of sustaining peace and security, particularly at the local level. The tension between a state security and human security approach to peacebuilding is particularly evident in national reconciliation and transitional justice processes. There is a continued emphasis on high-level reconciliation processes and the reconciliation of elite actors over processes that facilitate reconciliation at the community level. This article explores this in the case of Zimbabwe, where the emphasis is on a state-based approach to resolving conflict, which fails to take into account or address the needs and issues that affect local communities. Drawing from fieldwork undertaken in Matabeleland in April, 2014, this article describes what community members identify as their central needs when it comes to reconciliation, within the context of the state-driven processes that have been implemented to date.
Over the past few decades, there has been a growing interest in restorative justice in terms of the alternatives it offers to the narrow limits of the criminal justice system. This has also been the case in the African context, where some argue that local justice processes reflect a restorative approach to justice. In this 1 The authors would like to acknowledge the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) for support of the project and fieldwork on which this article draws. The authors would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments were most helpful in refining this article.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.