ABSTRACT
Confl ict transformation and transitional justice scholars agree on the crucial importance of interventions promoting socioemotional learning in divided societies. Such interventions are designed to confront the emotional and perceptual legacies of past confl ict in order to break down potential obstacles to reconciliation caused by existing feelings of victimization, guilt, distrust and fear between groups. The provision of justice is central to such efforts, requiring transitional authorities to counter perceptions of impunity for past human rights abuses by acknowledging those victimized by violence and by assigning some form of accountability to perpetrators. In this way, the provision of justice can also contribute to social leaning by symbolizing a shift in the normative ethos that once legitimized the use of violence between former antagonists, and can therefore serve as a vital bridge between a society’s divisive past and a more inclusive and peaceable future. Alongside justice, socioemotional learning also requires some aspect of historical investigation capable of establishing the ‘truth’—understood as a mutually accepted or at least mutually tolerable shared understanding capable of countering the highly biased collective memories and narratives of past abuses between former enemies. Left unaddressed, such antagonistic belief systems have been shown to directly impede the development of more cooperative relations and sustainable peace in deeply divided societies.
