On Irreconciliation focuses on the less examined but frequent ethnographic instances when survivors refuse to forgive in response to persistent impunity of past injustices, particularly, in the face of absence-presence of the rule of law and staged processes of justice which serve the powerful. An ethnographically-informed, interdisciplinary theorisation which makes irreconciliation visible in the contexts of Northern Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, Bangladesh, Canada, Argentina, Sri Lanka, Colombia, USA and UKTriangulates a discussion of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices, debates relating to statues of slave owners, racial prejudice and institutional responses Contributors demonstrate the relationship of irreconciliation with law, aesthetics, temporality, resistance and the limits of the conceptMakes a theoretical and ethnographic case for irreconciliation as both a social and political phenomenonProposes an understanding of the past based on a positive commitment to ‘irreconciliation’ which might interest anthropologists, historians, philosophers, critical legal and political theorists, peace, conflict resolution and transitional justice scholars
