The Foundation of Transdisciplinary Reconciliation Studies

The book is a collection of published and unpublished articles by Martin Leiner on the foundation of Reconciliation Studies. It offers a fascinating journey on conceiving and designing a new scientific field, learning from experiences world-wide and from people who discovered reconciliation as a way to deal more successfully with conflicts, to overcome violence and hatred and to find peace within themselves and with others. The collected papers show how a new terminology and new scientific frameworks and hypothesis have been elaborated and adjusted, how works of doctoral researchers and colleagues have been integrated, and how experiments, field studies and experiences of practitioners have inspired new thoughts. They also show how new fields such as "Reconciliation and films", "Reconciliation and Refugees", "Reconciliation and Heritage Conflicts" or "Reconciliation and the Digital Revolution" have motived new approaches. Therefore the book also gives an outlook into the future of Reconciliation Studies. One of the most important and well-known scientific descoveries of Martin Leiner is the "Hölderlin Perspective" building on a quote of the novel "Hyperion": "Reconciliation is in the middle of strife and all things divided find each other again". With many case studies, the papers show that reconciliation is not confined to apologies, forgiveness and reparations after the end of a violent conflict. In the middle of violent conflicts there are always people who work for reconciliation with the enemy. Those people often are at risk because they can be attacked as "traitors"; while in reality they are building the future which is needed, because one day every war comes to his end. To accelate those ends, Reconciliation Studies are proposing to limit wars in their impact on societies, culture and free speech. It should not be a problem to appreciate the cultural and human achievements of the nation which has become an enemy through the decision of political leaders. In comparative cases studies the collected papers show between many other topics the deep ambivalence of boycotts which are not limited on weapons and ressources which are used for military purposes. All other boycotts are a deadly weapons which mainly produce humger, lack of medicaments and kill civilians or discrimnate mixed families, minorities, artists or scientists. Another example for the papers in this book is the increasing concern to develop a positive and pluralistic concept of peace and not to understand peace as absence of something such as violence (J. Galtung). This approach leads to a deeper integration of concepts of peace developped in non-Western cultures. Another article documents the work carried out as part of a DFG-project from 2013 to 2021 in collaboration with Palestinians and Israelis, which focused on addressing the suffering of the other; it also includes an update in light of the current wars in the Middle East.