doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12237 Political Reconciliation: With or Without Grand Narratives? Nadim Khoury I. Introduction In the last twenty years the concept of political recon- ciliation has gained currency amongst political and so- cial theorists. 1 The South African Truth and Reconcili- ation Commission, the democratic transitions of several South American countries and other similar cases in- troduced this seemingly foreign concept to our contem- porary political lexicon. Reconciliation typically refers to attempts for divided societies to grapple with his- torical and enduring injustice. To use expressions that are predominant in the literature, political reconcilia- tion is the effort to “address,” “deal with,” and “come to terms” with the past through apologies, reparations, truth commissions, memorials, and forgiveness. Ac- cording to scholars, these symbolic, legal, and political efforts are believed to yield a variety of outcomes such as civic trust, psychological closure, mutual respect, nation-building, or the constitution of a new founding moment. 2 Given its recent surge, political reconciliation is typ- ically conceived of as a new phenomenon, one that emerged at the end of the 20 th century. John Torpey crit- icizes it as a symptom of identity politics and the demise of future-oriented politics that followed the end of the cold war. 3 Elazar Barkan, on the other hand, sees in it a new international morality, a positive sign of a growing self-reflexivity within states that is qualitatively differ- ent from realpolitik behavior, 4 and Jeff Spinner Halev theorizes it as an awareness of liberalism’s shortcom- ings and the need to address these shortcomings. 5 De- spite these different diagnoses that span disciplines, all are struck by the novelty of reconciliation. Attempts to deal with past injustices constitute a new phenomenon and should be studied as such. This novelty also makes it a cause for concern, and critics heed warnings to han- dle it with care. Reconciliation is a foreign concept that was recently smuggled from the fields of interpersonal ethics and religion. As an alien import, it has to be taxed with sustained philosophical critique before it is allowed free circulation in the market of political ideas. 6 Treating reconciliation as a novelty, however, is mis- leading because it downplays the concept’s importance in the history of political thought. “Although it has not been generally recognized,” writes Michael O. Hardi- mon, “reconciliation represents an important concern within the tradition of modern political philosophy.” 7 The longevity of the concept of reconciliation raises the following questions: what is the relation between our late modern understanding of reconciliation and previ- ous understandings of the concept? How has the under- standing of reconciliation transformed over time? What potential lessons can one draw from studying such trans- formations? These are the questions that I will tackle in this article. Scholars who turn to these issues typically focus on the Christian origins of the concept and its reappearance in contemporary secular settings. Michael Philipps and Danielle Celermajer, for example, examine the transpo- sition of religious ideas in secular political discourses; 8 Claire Moon and Andrew Schaap flag the dangers of religious narratives of restoration for presupposing a re- turn to a harmonious community that never existed; 9 and Pablo De Greiff writes about the need for a neutral idea of reconciliation in multicultural societies. 10 Rather than focus on the distinction between the religious and the secular, I offer a different conceptual matrix that hinges on the notion of grand narratives. What characterizes earlier accounts of reconciliation, I argue, is their depen- dence on grand narratives. Late modern accounts, on the other hand, are characterized by their resistance to such grand narratives. By referring to late modern accounts, I do not mean to collapse all contemporary accounts of political reconciliation into one category. In the current literature there are different accounts of reconciliation, grounded in different and competing philosophical po- sitions (agonistic, deliberative, liberal, communitarian, etc.). 11 By using the category “late modern accounts of reconciliation,” I am referring to features they share when compared with earlier accounts of reconciliation. Jean Lyotard famously introduced the idea of grand narratives in The Postmodern Condition to analyze the conditions of knowledge in late capitalist societies. Modernity, for Lyotard, relied on grand narratives that provided strong foundations for epistemological, moral, and political judgments. Late modernity represents a break with these totalizing schemes, what Lyotard fa- mously called “incredulity” towards grand narratives. 12 As these foundations collapsed, we were left with petits r´ ecits — localized representations that have lost their claim to any kind of universal status. I neither want to revisit Lyotard’s argument about the postmodern condi- tions of knowledge nor to defend the idea that we live in a post-grand narrative era. My goal is more limited in scope. I turn to discussions of grand narratives, essen- tialism, and anti-foundationalism to explore the topic of political reconciliation. As I will show, the notion Constellations Volume 00, No 0, 2016. C  2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.