This chapter conceptualises reconciliation and unreconciliation as two spaces. The chapter analyses Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana together with the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Bagosora et al. and Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife alongside the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Milošević. The reflective narratives depict geographical proximity, trust and shared culture or history as supportive of the space of reconciliation. Fear and mistrust, physical distance and forced forgiveness maintain unreconciliation, and fear may be symptomatic of the absence of the rule of law. Addressing fear and reconciliation simultaneously could be beneficial and a means to break the cycles of attitudes and behaviours which, for example, allow the lack of trust to prevent communication needed for establishing trust. While reconciliation takes place among and between individuals and different size groups in diverse societal spheres and contexts, the chapter positions the dead as an overlooked stakeholder group.

This chapter maps the overall picture of transitional justice in Rwanda and the former Yugoslav countries, which shapes how the future has been imagined. Since reflective narratives do not always align with the local, national and international actors’ understandings of post-atrocity realities, this chapter explores which mechanisms, policies and practices have sought to contribute to the transitional justice goals of truth, justice, healing and reconciliation. The chapter highlights that studies driven by goals of transitional justice can help identify complementary and contradictory aims and extend the wealth of research that focuses on specific transitional justice mechanisms.

This concluding chapter returns to the aim of the book to locate the conceptual contribution of reflective narratives in the field of transitional justice. It discusses the implications of the case study chapters, reiterating the ways in which the reflective narratives that imagine futures can help rethink existing conceptualisations and challenges of transitional justice. It explores the relevance of the findings to practitioners and policy makers. The chapter also identifies thematic connections of agency, silence, listening, and death or the dead that emerge as a web of spaces and touchpoints across the different chapters and goals of transitional justice. This contributes towards possible future research avenues and leads towards returning the focus on the individual human beings who live with the complex and evolving legacies of genocide and war.

This chapter examines truth, foregrounding the shared characteristics of different types of truth. The chapter brings together Boris Boubacar Diop’s novel Murambi, The Book of Bones and the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Simba alongside Goran Vojnović’s Yugoslavia, My Fatherland and the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Mrkšić et al. Building on insights from narratology, this chapter traces the dialogicality of truth through analysis of the construction of truth in dialogue, the ways in which truths are obscured in dialogue, the impact of the absence of dialogue, and truth that emerges in dialogue with objects and documents. The literary texts offer certainty that remains absent in the ambiguous and open-ended accounts is the legal narratives. Revising the dominant focus on differences between personal, social, legal and forensic truth, the chapter argues that these types of truth are social and partial.

The opening chapter outlines how reflective narratives can elucidate and extend existing conceptualisations of transitional justice goals. It traces the characteristics of historical, legal and creative narratives about the war and genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the different meanings these narratives have given to violence and its aftermath. Here reflective narratives – produced slowly in and through the arts and law – emerge as stories that imagine or help imagine futures different to the present. The chapter introduces the entanglement of the methods of ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’ in this book. It also locates the arts and law in the field of transitional justice, arguing for the need to understand core goals from new perspectives that account for the interdisciplinarity of the field and for the inclusion of non-participatory arts in knowledge production. The chapter closes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

‘Football is a like a religion to me’, Pelé once confessed, ‘I worship the ball and treat it like a god.’ This chapter turns the spotlight on an occasion during the Cold War when football and faith clashed head-on – and god lost. It centres on a friendly match in Dublin in 1955 between teams representing Catholic Ireland and Tito’s Yugoslavia. For most of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the powerhouse of Eastern European football, renowned for exporting players to the West. Irish sports fans greeted news of the Yugoslavs’ visit with excitement, only for the Archbishop of Dublin, John McQuaid, to spark an almighty row by trying to ban the fixture. McQuaid hated atheistic communism; Tito’s imprisonment of Catholic priests was proof of its evil. In what became a test case for the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, McQuaid suffered a rare defeat. Despite intense pressure, the Irish Football Association refused to back down and the match went ahead, with Yugoslavia’s great striker Miloš Milutinović bagging a hattrick in a 4–1 win. Ireland lost on the pitch. But through football having put a dent in Catholic authority, many people later claimed the country won off it.

We’re back at the 1974 World Cup Finals in West Germany. Just as the reigning champions Brazil, winning 3–0, are about to take a free kick at goal against debutants Zaire, Mwepu Ilunga rushes out from the defensive wall and boots the ball up field. BBC commentator John Motson calls Ilunga’s clearance ‘a bizarre moment of African ignorance’. The truth is Ilunga knew football’s rules perfectly well but was angry and afraid. Days earlier, Zaire had been trounced 9–0 by Communist Yugoslavia. Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was so humiliated by this scoreline he’d told his squad they’d never see their families again if they lost heavily to Brazil. This chapter tells the full story of Zaire’s disastrous first and only World Cup appearance. It reveals how Mobutu – a canny recipient of Chinese and American Cold War support – meddled in Zaire’s World Cup campaign. It explores how Mobutu’s menacing influence led to his country’s historic trouncing by Yugoslavia and explains what happened to its players after the tournament. The chapter demonstrates that dictators didn’t always have things their own way on the football field during the Cold War. But they still left victims in their wake.

This chapter analyses the dynamics of nationalist grounding in ethnic and civic projects of nationhood. It focuses on the Yugoslav case to explore why both historical instances of civic-based nation-formation have ultimately failed. The chapter focuses on the development and transformation of Yugoslav nationalism with a spotlight on its two main incarnations – the Yugoslav idea as articulated in the centralised and monarchic state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (1918–1941) and the development of the Yugoslav project during the state socialist period (1945–1991). The chapter argues that despite the nominal commitment towards building a civic nationhood, the Yugoslav project has paradoxically provided organisational, ideological, and micro-interactional mechanisms for the relatively continuous rise of ethnic nationalisms. The failure of Yugoslav nationalism stems in part from its uneven and misdirected grounding. It is this structural unevenness that also contributed to the relatively continuous proliferation of a much better-grounded ethnic nationalisms.

The chapter explores contrasting approaches to population policy and family planning in Yugoslavia, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and India, focusing on the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. It discusses how Yugoslavia shifted toward supporting global population control policies in stark contrast to other Communist countries, while Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, maintained strict anti-contraception laws. The United States evolved from reluctance to active involvement in global birth control programs to widespread financial support, and India transitioned to coercive sterilization policies during the state of emergency that was declared by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. The chapter argues that UN resolutions around family planning and human rights played a key role for these policies despite the fact that these resolutions were not binding. How the resolutions were interpreted depended strongly on regional and local power configurations. The relationship among human rights frameworks, political decisions, and societal attitudes shaped the divergent paths taken by these countries in addressing demographic and family planning issues.

This chapter reveals how hazardous a cultural stereotype could be by reviewing the U.S.-Japan trade friction. A cultural stereotype is typically formed by another culture and tends to attach negative value to the target culture. The preconception of “Japanese collectivism” created an image that Japanese economy must be a collective economy, which was ungrounded as shown in Chapter 4. When Americans faced a large trade deficit against Japan, this image caused fury at Japan’s “collective economy” among Americans who had individualism ideology and aversion to collectivism. The alleged collective economy of Japan justified severe trade restrictions against Japanese products and interference in domestic affairs of Japan, which caused collapse of major industries and finacial meltdown in Japan followed by stagnancy of Japanese economy. Cultural stereotypes brought even more serious disasters in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. It is necessary to understand the properties of cultural stereotype in order to prevent it from exacerbating possible inter-group conflicts in the near future due to such global phenomena as population increase and global warming.

Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.