Description
Transformative justice shows the potential for justice to transform relationships and structures of exclusion at the everyday level by reshaping political interactions between citizens of a post-conflict society so that they treat each other as civic equals. The role of acknowledgment – or the dynamic process of individuals accounting for past events, recognising the claims of others in this regard and respecting each other’s personal and social experiences – is central to this transformative potential and has been argued to be a necessary condition for the building of social trust, civic engagement, social capital and even reconciliation in transitional societies. We do not, however, have any empirical way of identifying acknowledgment between individuals in order to ascertain if transformation of interactions is occurring. I address this by conceptualising acknowledgment as deliberative reciprocity, which allows me to examine how individuals present and justify their own arguments, as well as how they respectfully listen to others’ arguments. I then operationalise it using Conversation Analysis – a method that allows for the analysis of the back and forth, or processual, character of interaction – to be able to classify different types of reciprocity in exchanges across ethnic lines. I use the typology to analyse a text corpus derived from 12 inter-ethnic focus groups with young people conducted in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia. The high specification of the typology allows me to identify higher quality reciprocity and to then analyse what triggers reciprocity. The findings show that triggers of reciprocity are closely linked to identity constructions in interactions across ethnic lines and to how individuals show support for these constructions. The paper provides a replicable framework of analysis for the identification and classification of reciprocity, which can show us whether individuals are treating each other as civic equals.
