The role of information recovery and accountability in advancing reconciliation

The parties to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement 1998 expressly recognised the need to acknowledge and address the harms experienced by victims; stating it ‘was a necessary element of reconciliation’. However, the Agreement itself only sparsely addressed how that should be done. Since then there have been numerous official and civil society initiatives have sought to advance reconciliation within Northern Ireland. While many of these projects have made important interventions within communities across Northern Ireland, media reports and academic analyses continue to point to how, 25 years after the Agreement, reconciliation has yet to deliver on the promise of the peace process. At a time when new legislative proposals on reconciliation and information recovery are progressing through Westminster, this paper draws on transitional justice theory and practice to explore how the concept of reconciliation can be understood and related to information recovery and accountability.