The Middle East Justice & Reconciliation Initiative

Report on Muslim/Christian faith-based reconciliation dialogue in Cyprus - this report includes a description of faith-based reconciliation methodology in relation to The Middle East Justice & Reconciliation Initiative

Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Forgiveness and reconciliation are central to moral life; after all, everyone will be wronged by others and will then face the dual decisions of whether to forgive and whether to reconcile. It is therefore important that we have a clear analysis of each, as well as a thoroughly articulated understanding of how they relate to and differ from each other. Forgiveness has received considerably more attention in the Western philosophical literature than has reconciliation. In this paper I aim to give it the attention it deserves and develop an account of interpersonal reconciliation. On my view reconciliation is fundamentally bilateral (whereas forgiveness is fundamentally unilateral). It entails transparency and agreement between the wrongdoer and the victim as to the nature of a past wrong or set of wrongs. And, it requires that moral repair be made between the two parties (which entails that both parties bear proper attitudes towards each other). In making my case I contrast reconciliation with toleration and collaboration, in order to demonstrate that reconciliation also entails forgiveness (though forgiveness does not entail reconciliation)

Blind Reconciliation

Information reconciliation is a crucial procedure in the classical post-processing of quantum key distribution (QKD). Poor reconciliation efficiency, revealing more information than strictly needed, may compromise the maximum attainable distance, while poor performance of the algorithm limits the practical throughput in a QKD device. Historically, reconciliation has been mainly done using close to minimal information disclosure but heavily interactive procedures, like Cascade, or using less efficient but also less interactive -just one message is exchanged- procedures, like the ones based in low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The price to pay in the LDPC case is that good efficiency is only attained for very long codes and in a very narrow range centered around the quantum bit error rate (QBER) that the code was designed to reconcile, thus forcing to have several codes if a broad range of QBER needs to be catered for. Real world implementations of these methods are thus very demanding, either on computational or communication resources or both, to the extent that the last generation of GHz clocked QKD systems are finding a bottleneck in the classical part. In order to produce compact, high performance and reliable QKD systems it would be highly desirable to remove these problems. Here we analyse the use of short-length LDPC codes in the information reconciliation context using a low interactivity, blind, protocol that avoids an a priori error rate estimation. We demonstrate that 2x10^3 bits length LDPC codes are suitable for blind reconciliation. Such codes are of high interest in practice, since they can be used for hardware implementations with very high throughput.Comment: 22 pages, 8 figure

Reconciliation: All Our Relations

The author shares the national, community (local) and individual discourses taking place as they pertain to the reconciliation process that is happening with Indigenous and Settler peoples in Canada. Importantly, the author sheds light on a multitude of local efforts of reconciliation happening that have not yet made it to academic discourses and publications, but which could be instrumental in contributing to reconciliation. A key component emphasized in these reconciliation efforts and which could be the catalyst for change, is the importance of relationships. Stemming from an Indigenous epistemological perspective, the creation of positive relationships with others and ‘all our relations’ begins with oneself

Freedom, the State, and War: Hegel’s Challenge to World Peace

Several conflict theorists have appropriated Hegel’s ‘struggle for recognition’ to highlight the healthy dimensions of conflict and to explore ways of reaching reconciliation through mutual recognition. In so doing, some scholars attend to the interpersonal dimension of reconciliation, while others focus on the interstate dimension of reconciliation. This paper argues that both approaches miss important Hegelian insights into the modern state. Hegel understands that freedom must be situated and bounded in order to take a concrete form. He believes that concrete freedom and domestic reconciliation create an atmosphere that can pressure the state to be more confrontational with other states by attaining a stronger individuality. Thus, the common concern about freedom among Hegelian states remains a ‘thin’ version of communication, vulnerable to such factors as national honor or recognition status. Hegel’s challenge urges peace-inspired scholars to explore ways of achieving concrete freedom and domestic reconciliation while simultaneously relieving interstate conflict

The Complex Hybridity of Ham Sok-Heon

This paper examines the multiple elements of Korean Quaker Ham Sok-Heon’s religious, political, and theological identity from the perspective of hybridity, with a special focus on the impact of that hybridity on Quaker reconciliation theology. In this article, I outline the basic elements of his ideas and context, emphasising the ways in which they interact in the intricate web of his thought. I also outline ways in which both reconciliation and Liberal Quaker theology are present in his ideas, and how exploring these overlaps would strengthen theological and ethical thought in both of these areas. His ideas are relatively unknown outside of Korea, due in part to the fact that very few of his writings have been translated: both literally translated from Korean, but also figuratively translated into non-Korean contexts. As I argue, however, his ideas are actually highly ‘translatable’ to both reconciliation theology and Liberal Quaker theology. As a result, I argue that any subsequent construction of Quaker reconciliation theology which fails to take Ham’s work into consideration is incomplete, especially due to the potential implications of his work to respond to the complex hybrid nature of both reconciliation and Liberal Quaker theology