# Life After War When a war ends, the work of mending a society begins. Groups who were sworn enemies for decades, even generations, must find ways to live together in peace. The process of reconciliation takes a long time, and involves all levels of society: civilians, government institutions, political elites. August 13, 2025 Melani Cammett Dženana Šabić Hamidović Cathal McManus Embed In this episode, we speak to experts on Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Northern Ireland who study the factors that help and hinder reconciliation after violent conflict. They are part of a new international consortium called the [Global Scholars Network on Conflict and Identity (GSNIC)](https://gsnic.wcfia.harvard.edu/), that brings together researchers, educators, and practitioners from around the world to find best practices in postconflict reconciliation. In an effort to define reconciliation, Melani Cammett describes different levels of coexistence that might be achieved. But the process takes decades—if not longer—because violence politicizes identities when a conflict pits groups against each other. She notes that Lebanon has not ever had a formal reconciliation process—unlike Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example. Dženana Šabić Hamidović works directly with community members in Sarajevo in a therapeutic setting to talk about their experiences during the war, and their narratives about each other. Beyond emotional barriers, she explains that there are geographical barriers in the country, such as very limited transportation that makes it difficult to visit each others’ communities. Cathal McManus studies the process of “othering,” that is, how people of one identity group ascribe blame to the out-group, and have a hard time looking inward to accept their own role in perpetuating divisions. As an educator, McManus creates activities to help revise long-held narratives that young people, who identify as Protestant/Unionist or Catholic/Republican, hold about each other. Dženana Šabić Hamidović emphasizes the need to keep groups talking in all postconflict settings. People have very different experiences of the war depending on where they lived, she says, and it’s important for people to be able to hear each other's “truths” without judgment. This especially applies to societies with extreme polarization, such as the United States, to prevent a descent into conflict. --- ## Guests [**Melani Cammett**](https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/melani-claire-cammett), Center Director; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Identity Politics; Faculty Associate; Harvard Academy Senior Scholar (on leave 2025–2026). Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University. [**Cathal McManus**](https://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/ssesw/study/postgraduate-research/find-a-phd-supervisor/dr-cathal-mcmanus.html), Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work, The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. [**Dženana Šabić Hamidović**](https://i4di.org/staff-view/dzenana-sabic-hamidovic/), Behavioral and Social Change Professional, Mentis Institute, Sarajevo. ## Host [**Jessica Barnard**](https://wcfia.harvard.edu/people/jessica-barnard), Administrator, Weatherhead Research Clusters on Global History and on Global Climate Policy. ## Producer/Director [**Michelle Nicholasen**](https://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/people/michelle-nicholasen), Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. ## Related Links - [Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict](https://gsnic.wcfia.harvard.edu/) - “[Political Interventions to ‘Ripen’ Peace Initiatives: An Analysis of the Northern Ireland and Israeli/Palestinian Conflicts](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449057.2022.2031790)” by Cathal McManus (*Ethnopolitics*, 2022) - “[Conceptualising Islamic ‘Radicalisation’ in Europe through ‘Othering’: Lessons from the Conflict in Northern Ireland](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546553.2017.1368495)” by Cathal McManus (*Terrorism and Political Violence*, 2017) - “[Lebanon, the Sectarian Identity Test Lab](https://tcf.org/content/report/lebanon-sectarian-identity-test-lab/)” by Melani Cammett (*The Century Foundation*, April 10, 2019) - “[Power Sharing in Postconflict Societies: Implications for Peace and Governance](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022002711421593)” by Melani Cammett (*Journal of Conflict Resolution*, July 16, 2012) ## Music “[m plate](https://mobygratis.com)” by mobygratis. *Source: mobygratis (*[*license agreement*](https://mobygratis.com/license-agreement)*)* ## Transcript \[THEME MUSIC\] JESSICA BARNARD: Welcome to the Epicenter podcast from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your host, Jessica Barnard. We can often put a date on the start and the end of a war. But what happens after war and conflict? How do people live together after their communities have been torn apart by violence and trauma? Today, we are looking at three countries that have emerged from civil or regional conflict. Lebanon, Northern Ireland in the UK, and Bosnia andHerzegovina. We are talking to experts who study or work in post-conflict reconciliation to find how people from different groups are relating to each other years after the end of formal conflict, and what helps and hinders the civilian peace process. \[RELAXING MUSIC\] Let's welcome our guests. Melani Cammett is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Her research explores ethnic politics, conflict, development, and authoritarianism in the Middle East and other contexts. Cathal McManus is a lecturer with the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work and a fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast. His research focuses on processes of othering that help to generate and maintain communal tensions and polarization, and especially how popular histories contribute to the maintenance of social divisions. \[RELAXING MUSIC\] Dzenana Sabic Hamidovic is a social behavior change professional with Institute Mentis in Sarajevo, which provides counseling to families and facilitates dialogical practices with community groups. She has extensive experience working with civil society organizations to promote inter-group dialogue. Prior to this, she worked for the UN's International Organization for Migration. \[RELAXING MUSIC\] Melani, let's start with you. The Lebanese Civil War was 15 years of on-and-off conflict. At the end of the war, would you say that reconciliation ever truly happened? MELANI CAMMETT: Well, thanks so much for having me on and for this question. I would say, first of all, a 30,000-foot comment, which is that reconciliation, depending on how we define it, is incredibly hard to achieve. And coming out of violence is particularly difficult because violence politicizes identities when it's waged in the name of those identities. So it's incredibly difficult to achieve reconciliation. And if we take a deep understanding of reconciliation, whereby members of different communities view each other as equally deserving of compassion and humanity and human treatment and as equal victims in a conflict, then it's virtually impossible to achieve reconciliation immediately after a violent conflict. One could even argue that it takes decades upon decades, if not longer. But that said, let's say we're taking a more short-term, pragmatic understanding of the term reconciliation, whereby people coexist, learn to live together, perhaps don't agree with each other, don't share the same narrative of the conflict they're coming out of, but again, agree to live side-by-side and engage in minimally productive exchanges with each other. Then even that, I think, is difficult to say has occurred in the context of Lebanon. And in many contexts, it takes a long time. It's not just a question of signing a parchment paper peace agreement. It's also a question of elite- and mass-level changes. At the mass level, people, again, need to recognize each other's right to exist and even agree to disagree. And at the elite level, politicians and other forms of elites need to be able to work productively together. So the Lebanese situation is interesting because there never was any kind of national level formal reconciliation process. JESSICA BARNARD: Hmm. MELANI CAMMETT: There were these micro-level, quasi-formal agreements within certain villages, municipalities and so forth. But in some national framework, you never had a reconciliation process the way we know of it when we think about the South African case or Rwanda. And by the way, those cases, which are considered paradigmatic, particularly the South African case, are contested. Not everybody agrees in their efficacy and that they've worked, depending on how you define success. But certainly in the Lebanese case, you haven't had this. And scholars of transitional justice in Lebanon consider this a case of active collective amnesia, where political leaders don't go and try to reconcile in any systematic way. JESSICA BARNARD: Before we get to the elites, can you remind us who these main identity groups are in Lebanon? MELANI CAMMETT: So from the outside, people that haven't spent that much time in Lebanon think, oh, this is a religiously divided society. And you have the main-- you have 18 officially recognized sects, depending on how you count it. The main ones roughly correspond to Sunni Muslim, Shia Muslims, Christians of various stripes. Within that category, there's many subdivisions, the dominant group being Maronites, Druze and so forth. But the fact of the matter is that the real divisions are not so much across religious lines. They're more across political sectarian lines. So they are different political actors, parties, movements that are linked to these different communities, not all 18 of them, but different manifestations of them, again, largely breaking down to Christian, Sunni, Shia, Druze, with a few other examples or categories. And so those are the main meaningful divisions. And while these parties all largely enjoy support from members of their own religious communities, not everybody supports those communities. And that's a really important distinction. So many, many people who are, say, Sunni Muslim do not support the main, quote, unquote, "Sunni Muslim" parties. And the same goes for every group. So it does look on the outside the main cleavages are sectarian, but in fact, they're politicized versions of these sectarian groups. And it's in the interests of the leadership to maintain these divisions because they profit from the divisions immensely, even while they agree on the macro-level rules of the game. JESSICA BARNARD: What's the state of inter-group relations today, and are there competing narratives about the war? MELANI CAMMETT: Certainly, there are different narratives of the war. If you go into high schools that are run by Christian groups versus Shia or Sunni groups, you're going to get different understandings of how the Civil War played out. And some schools entirely skirt the issue of teaching the Civil War. In fact, most do. So there isn't an agreed upon narrative. Historians have been working with the Ministry of Education for years upon years to try to come up with a shared understanding of Lebanese historiography around the Civil War. They've not been successful thus far. So in that sense as well, we don't see reconciliation, not even reconciliation in the form of, I have my narrative, you have yours. We agree to disagree. We're all in this entity together. We don't even see that as manifested in history and civics curricula, for example. But that doesn't mean that everybody at the mass level wants to kill each other. Not at all. I would say many people socialize across group lines. There's some intermarriage. Many people are not active sectarians who want to go out and punish members of other groups, and don't feel animosity along these lines. The final point I'll make is that the recent war and continued Israeli bombardments are definitely creating tensions in the country that sometimes look a little sectarian, although they too, I think, are very much tinged with politics. JESSICA BARNARD: Well, thank you for reminding us that there are different levels of reconciliation, from cordial to warm to everything in between. And you mentioned these elite politicians and leaders are invested in the status quo. How are they perpetuating this, and what could be done to overcome it? What could they do otherwise? MELANI CAMMETT: Yeah, so it's worth mentioning that these elites in what some people call patronage democracies, democracies where patronage is a key form of obtaining political support, that is, giving jobs out to your supporters and that sort of thing-- Lebanon is an example of this. I think scholars of Bosnia would agree that Bosnia is also an example of this. These places enable elites to profit tremendously from the status quo. They control economic opportunities. They ensure that their cronies, their supporters, get access to these opportunities and get the government jobs and so forth. So they have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, even if, again, they ostensibly disagree with each other. One other thing I want to add is that when you look at the major political cleavages in Lebanon, they don't neatly break down along sectarian lines. For example, you will see Christian groups that are allied with Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim group. And you will see Christian groups that are vehemently opposed to Hezbollah. So it's not like this neatly breaks down on sectarian lines. And every party has their own members who are from different sectarian communities or allies. So it's much more about politics than religion, per se. And so they perpetuate these tensions in order to perpetuate their own power. How do they do this? They do this materially by doling out economic opportunities, jobs and so forth, as I've already alluded to. They also do this by playing on fears and sectarian threat. And this is where it gets a little bit murky and where some people might push back on some of my comments saying that this is really not about religion. I would still maintain it's not about religion, but people are activated by perceived threats. That is extremely well-established in social psychology. And many people feel threatened in an unstable area with full-blown war that was raging for many years next door in Syria. And of course, the region is on fire. The Middle East is on fire. And so it's easy to mobilize people along the lines of fear and to say, look, you are getting targeted as a member of this community. And lo and behold, you've had ISIS targeting Shia Muslims and Christians and so forth. So there's a lot to play with out there that political elites can use to their advantage. JESSICA BARNARD: So if you feel vulnerable, you're more likely to believe the narratives you hear. MELANI CAMMETT: When you don't feel that your state is providing social support and other forms of security to the population in an unbiased way, you are easily susceptible to these mobilizational narratives that you are under threat by your political leaders. And then to get to your last question, how can this be overcome, I think that's the million dollar question. I'm trying to write a book on this right now. Frankly, it's unrealistic, at least in the case of Lebanon, I think, although I could be proven wrong tomorrow, to think that this system will be overthrown overnight and dismantled overnight, and that capable state institutions that provide socioeconomic and physical security for everyone are going to be constructed. So it's probably a more incremental process. And I think the key is to focus on what can incentivize political and other elites to behave more nicely, to stop whipping up the fear and insecurity, to allow more inter-group collaborative exchanges that don't cue on sectarian or ethnic differences, that cue on shared interests and so forth. So that, to me, is where we need to be looking. And that may have to involve some external influence as well as domestic incentives. Whether the world is there right now, I'm not sure. But I do think that this is something that requires external support as well as domestic dynamics. JESSICA BARNARD: Thank you, Melani. That's a really fascinating look at a complex situation. I'm going to move on to Cathal and ask some questions about Northern Ireland. For background, the troubles of the 1990s refers to the violent conflict between the two groups, identified as Protestant unionists, loyalists on the one hand, and Catholic Republican nationalists on the other. In many ways, Northern Ireland is farther along in the reconciliation process than the other two countries we're talking about. Despite a relatively robust peace that followed the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, you write that Northern Ireland is still a deeply divided society. Can you give examples of what you call banal sectarianism? CATHAL MCMANUS: Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I think the starting point, particularly when we talk about Northern Ireland, is to acknowledge and to recognize that there has been a lot of progress here since the agreement in 1998, as you say. But we are living in a society that continues to be bitterly divided. It's certainly not as bad as it was, and we continue to progress on a lot of things. But when you look at things like education, we are still sending our kids to predominantly "one side or the other" schools. Very often, we are still divided in terms of where we live, in terms of the housing. We're divided on the types of sports very often that we play, the music that we listen to. So everyday activities, the banal activities, if you'd like, those are where we are still living in a relatively divided society. There's a lot of work to do try to break down those particular divisions. And we continue to be divided for a variety of different reasons. We have had-- I think it would be no exaggeration to say that our political leadership has provided some example of good practice in terms of showing leadership, in terms of trying to break down barriers, but it has been relatively inconsistent. Other factors start to take on an almost political connotation. And you're seeing that on issues around, for example, developing the Irish language, for example, where one group is looking to try to protect and enhance the Irish language and Irish culture. For others to do that is actually part of a strategy to undermine the Britishness of the state. Where we talk about equality, cultural equality, for one side, that is about equality. Supposedly, for the other side, that represents a threat. So there is still a lot of trust-building that needs to be done within Northern Ireland society. And I think that our efforts to address that distrust has been relatively inconsistent. There have been some very, very good projects. There have been some very good efforts. There has been good policy devised. But unfortunately, I'm not so sure that the full implementation has been as impressive as what the intention was behind the policy. JESSICA BARNARD: So if you have this inconsistency on the political level, you seem to view individuals as having a strong influence on changing social norms. What do you think individuals can do, and what can't they do? CATHAL MCMANUS: Well, I think-- and perhaps this is part of the problem here as much as anything else. A lot of the efforts at reconciliation have been put on to other groups and other individuals within society. So that might fall to community groups. It might fall to youth organizations, even to educational bodies as well, to try to bring two communities together as a way of enhancing trust and to encourage better engagement and political discussions. I think we have seen some very, very good examples and some good practice at grassroots level of getting people involved in cross-community work. And the projects that we see are very educational. You've seen young people, for example, from the likes of the Catholic nationalist community. They're doing at grassroots level a lot of work on things like World War I and the role that Catholics played in the first World War, which would be historically, I suppose, more attached to the historical culture of unionism in the Protestant community. Similarly, you have a lot of groups who will be taking young unionists and young Protestants to the Irish Republic and to major historical sites there around things like the 1916 Easter Rising, even the Battle of the Boyne, which is, again, a unionist cultural event. And we can see those types of projects having a real impact for those that participate. The problem is that those projects aren't supported in a way that has a real longer-term impact. The funding is very obviously piecemeal, or very often piecemeal. You'll get particular funding for projects to run, and then they won't be followed up in any meaningful way. And so the groups that we see trying their best to work at grassroots level, they're constantly having to run around trying to find new sources of funding, trying to find new ways of keeping projects going, of keeping the relationships going that they've developed in the first place. So it's a real, real struggle. So there are pros and cons to this. And there is, as I say, always good work going on. But we need something a little bit more longer-term, something a wee bit more ambitious, perhaps, at times. We are starting to see that in various levels. So for example, you do have the Shared Education Project, which is trying to develop closer ties between schools, Catholic schools and Protestant schools, where you are building up relations. So those are more official types of initiatives. There are certainly things like that happening. JESSICA BARNARD: Can you tell us about some of the youth programs you've been involved in specifically? Because these programs have young people that weren't even alive in 1998. So are they able to bridge this divide? CATHAL MCMANUS: The hope is, yes. But you do always have to factor in that there is an awful lot of intergenerational trauma that is associated with the conflict. A key thing for us is trying to address the types of divisive and divided types of histories that young people grew up in, politics that people grow up with still, so the language that we have at a time of conflict often makes its way into periods of peace and into an era of peace. And so it's trying to get young people to rethink, I suppose, what it is that they themselves claim to stand for. So very often, it is about getting younger people to try to engage with their own political or stated political aspirations and political ideas, and to try to highlight the complexities of what that is and what that looks like, and try to get them to picture a future that includes the other as well as just themselves. One of the things that we tried to develop, and which worked quite well in the past, was for a young group that we were working with, which would have been predominantly loyalists, unionist loyalists, was to develop-- I suppose a bit of context here. Within the unionist loyalist community, there would be quite a strong attachment to the Glasgow Rangers Football Club, which would be an intense rivalry with the Glasgow Celtic Football Club, which would be, you've guessed it, supported by predominantly Catholic nationalist Republicans in Northern Ireland. So there is very often sectarian tensions around those football matches. So what I did was to develop a short history of Rangers Football Club. And we got young people into talking about the history of Rangers, what Rangers stood for, the players that they had. But very famously, for a long part of their history, Rangers had no Catholic players. And so I was able to introduce issues around sectarianism into the conversations around football and around the types of rioting and conflicts that you've seen in the football stadiums during the '80s and the '90s. And from that, we were able to introduce them then to the Northern Ireland conflict and then present a degree of context within that. So you did have to be creative to try to get young people to engage with their politics and to see why the issues were very much real and very much relevant to their lives. And so we've been doing different things, projects like that, with both young nationalists and young loyalists. And they are-- they do have an impact. But as I say, the problem is that they're quite small-scale when it comes to these types of projects. And so you need something a lot bigger. JESSICA BARNARD: Well, thank you for this other viewpoint on reconciliation. And I think that a youth program with the football team sounds like a great example of meeting young people where they are and bringing them into the conversation. Dzenana, let's turn to you now. You've worked with many different groups and stakeholders who are involved in peace efforts, in particular, with civil society organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What are they, and how have they been successful? DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: So by the law, the civil society organizations are the organizations formed by the groups of citizens that come together. And they form the association, so the organization, that has a certain strategy, vision and mission that gathers them around it. The first such formal organization of the citizens were those who were aiming to try to rebuild or build peace right after the war. And so that was very important to understand how our civil society functioned before, because there was-- citizens were not able to organize in that way in pre-war and socialistic Bosnia and Herzegovina. So for us, after the war, there was a whole new concept of the possibility for citizens to organize themselves for some joint cause and mission. And so the civil society as we know them today actually are rooted in the peace-building movement, because those peace-building activists that started to be interested in rebuilding the country right after the war were working on the peace-building initiatives. So their main vision to initiate the gathering citizens in the formal structures of the civil society was peace-building. And I think that's telling. That means that there are a lot of people, individuals, citizens who think that building peace makes sense and that that's a purpose. Right after the war, they didn't form organizations to go to build, I don't know, schools or other things. That was international aid coming to. But the citizens understood that the way that they want formerly to be organized is to build peace. And I think that is hopeful in a way. And so examples of their activities, as I was mentioning, was inter-religious, was arts, was sports, was toward policy advocacy, empowering judiciary systems. And one of the programs that those organizations implemented, but are still implementing, is this inter-country mobility to build peace. Because as we are divided by the ethnic lines, it's very important to enable and to create opportunities for young people, but also other citizens to get to travel through the different parts of the country. And that's very important. And one other aspect of this mobility was also regional mobility. They were bringing-- because our war is very complex as you know it. And so they were bringing young people and women. These two groups, I would say, were mostly involved in peace-building from Serbia, from Croatia, from Montenegro, North Macedonia. So this mobility had a very important aspect in building peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then there were initiatives where the civil society organizations networked between them. They created different partnerships and coalitions because they understood that we need to build local capacities for peace, that it's not only important to have enthusiast citizens and activists who formed the civil society organization, but it's important to get buy-in from the other citizens who maybe didn't want to join formal structures, but needed to be involved in building peace. And then there was a whole work on the institutional capacity-building. And I think that this hasn't perished. I think that they are-- I've met many organizations who are still doing and are still persistent in these initiatives. JESSICA BARNARD: Well, thank you. That's really powerful to hear about. Am I right that these civil society organizations are bringing together different identity groups for this one cause that they're working on? DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: Yeah, yeah. There are many civil society organizations who are bringing people from different ethnic backgrounds, and they were even formed by the people from different citizens from the different backgrounds. So that is something that makes them really unique in their actions. JESSICA BARNARD: And what about the obstacles to mutual understanding? You've written there's resistance among neighbors and community members to discuss or even acknowledge past conflict. How can you encourage dialogue, and is discussing the past really a crucial and necessary part of reconciliation? DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: \[SIGHS\] \[LAUGHS\] JESSICA BARNARD: Just a small question. DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: Yeah, the reality, the experiences of the war in the country, are very different in different parts of the country. And so that's very important. That means that if you think that you understood this conflict in one part, you move to the next, and you understand that conflict has-- your understanding of the conflict in one part has nothing to do with the conflict that happened in that part of the country. And so resistance toward discussing the past is also connected to this phenomenon, because we had an enormous internal displacements. And so people were having experience of beginning of the war in one place, and then they moved to another place where they faced another reality of the conflict. So they were not only physically moving, but they were moving their own trauma from one place to another and then experiencing different traumas. So our work with the community has actually made us realize that it's not only that it's difficult because painful, but because they don't know where to start. Then it goes back to which trauma I unpack first. And how do I connect with the people in that community if I didn't know the beginning of the war in that community? And then one important-- the second aspect of it is that we have a strong political state capture, which means that the political narrative dictates relationships, unfortunately. And so the political discourse, which is very divisive when it comes to the past happening, and it's not-- we have three history curricula, let's say. And so it's very difficult to speak in one voice when your education system is divided. And it's very difficult to open up the discussions about what happened even in one geographical space, when there are at least two truths that are existing in that community. But I don't think there is an alternative to dialogue. And I truly believe that, yes, it's painful. Yes, it's difficult. But it's also an act of bravery, an act of openness for us to keep trying to create a space where people will be able to bring that experience and emotion that they have lived. And once they are able to hear each other and connect with that human experience, then after that comes how, then, we deal with this together. So yes, it's difficult, but I think that that's the path. Otherwise, what's the alternative? Yeah, with all the interventions that I've worked on when I was working with the UN and with the civil society organizations, and even today talking to them, is that we need to be more brave. We need to be braver. We need to be persistent in insisting to talk to each other, no matter how much resistance we have, no matter how much obstacles. And obstacles are political or structural, I would say. One of the-- it's beyond political obstructions. We have structural obstructions where, for example, between neighborhood communities, there is no transport to connect them. People cannot take a bus to go to neighborhood community because it's another entity. And so there is an effort in that when you see that they come together, they take a cab. They take private cars to come to discuss about peace. So there is need to be recognition of this. Yes, there are obstacles, but we are united in understanding that we need to make an effort to go beyond them. Because what's the alternative? JESSICA BARNARD: That's really fascinating that there are not only these mental hurdles, but these physical obstacles of actually getting together in an easy way. I do have some questions. I'd like to turn to the whole group. We've heard a lot of things that are different and similar about the situations in your various countries. All of these conflicts were officially resolved in the 1990s. An entirely new generation has come of age. How does it work with the post-conflict generation? We've touched on this a little bit, Cathal, with your youth groups. And I know, Melani, you've said you believe that reconciliation takes decades. But how are these identities passed on to young people from their elders, or are young people showing signs of being ready to move on? Maybe Dzenana, would you like to go first? DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: Yeah, thank you. Recently, we had Peace Vibe Fest, organized with young people. JESSICA BARNARD: Was that Peace Vibe Fest? DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: Yes, yes. And the message that they created after the three days that they had spent together is, the future is ours, and it will be peaceful. And that was-- for me, that was very powerful. And in discussing with young people, yes, they are trying. They are struggling with their dealing with the past. In one aspect, they are trying not to get-- not to take over the burden of their parents of the past conflict and responsibility for it, because they clearly state that they don't want that responsibility to be transferred to them. You will hear a lot of young people saying, well, I wasn't even born during that conflict. It was not my conflict. I didn't participate in it. I didn't initiate it. I don't want to be associated with it as if it was my conflict. So there is this, that they want to be distanced from the responsibility for the conflict. But on the other side, what they are clearly stating is that, yes, we don't want to take your responsibility, but we want you to hear us and acknowledge our intentions to build future differently than you, than your idea is how it needs to be, because it's ours. We are going to be part of it. We are going to create it, and we are going now to start discussing how do we want to see the future to look like. At least here, they are very proactive about it, and they are very vocal that they are not ready to participate in another conflict. And they are struggling, as I said, because there are structural factors, as I mentioned, the transport, but also education, that teaches them the divisiveness in the history. But they are making the moves. And they are saying, yes, there are all these things that divide us, but there are also many things that brings us together. And I'm very hopeful about this. I think that the new generations as we are now seeing it in Serbia, they are saying, no more of this. We want future different, and we want also present to be different. So I'm hopeful for them. JESSICA BARNARD: Melani, can you give us some perspective from the youth of Lebanon? MELANI CAMMETT: Yeah, and let me just say that I think this is a vitally important question. And I think it's complicated because I don't think there is a single category called Youth. And so we see in the language of social science heterogeneous effects, meaning that there are different subgroups. And so you can have radically different perspectives on this depending on young people's socialization, where they grew up. Et cetera. Et cetera. So I've actually looked at public opinion data on this in Lebanon for which there's not a lot of data, but also in the other two contexts in which we're discussing reconciliation today. And what's interesting is when you look at the average effects, there isn't actually much difference in inter-group attitudes across generational cohorts. I think that's because it's masking differences within the category of youth. And so you have quite a few youth who are really hostile to members of other communities. And I'm guessing that's because they grew up in post-war eras when there was less mixing, because war itself causes more segregation for a variety of reasons. And so some of these young people actually grew up in more segregated, more insular communities than their parents did and don't have memories of a different kind of reality. So those folks are not going to be the ones participating in reconciliation programs and peace-building and so forth. But then there's amazing young people, and here I'm disclosing my normative biases, who are able to overcome these divisions and maybe don't feel them so strongly because that's not the way they were socialized. And that starts with the household, but isn't solely constituted by the household. It's also their lived experiences. In the case of Lebanon, I've talked to a number of young people who are students at the American University of Beirut. Undergraduate students. There were master's students there. And some of them say they literally never encountered another person from their community until they went to this university. And they are not the majority by any stretch of the imagination. They're the intellectual and/or socioeconomic elite. So that suggests that there's quite a few of their peers from their neighborhoods, villages, towns who are still never meeting anyone from another community. So I think there's just a huge variation in experiences. And there is definitely something to the famous contact hypothesis, whereby when you have contact with members of other communities under optimal conditions that are well-specified in this literature and still being examined, then you are more likely to have positive attitudes towards members of other communities. But you have to get yourself in that position to begin with, and many people are not in that position. And so that's why I think there's a lot of divergence, and probably why I find no differences cross-generationally, because they're wiping each other's effects out. So there's young people of many different persuasions. JESSICA BARNARD: Cathal, would you like to say more in this? I know you touched on intergenerational trauma before. CATHAL MCMANUS: One of the-- I suppose one of the things that we've seen within the context of Northern Ireland is a bit of both. We see sections of that community that will be less attached to the politics of the past and to the divisions of the past. Those young people are largely young people who will have, if not grown up outside of what we would call segregated areas, then certainly young people that have had new educational opportunities, who have gone to university, who have mixed with members of the other community and who have different priorities in life now in terms of their life goals. But then you will also then have those who continue to be brought up within the context of the narratives of the past and the narratives of the conflict. When we say "the narratives of the conflict," those narratives have now been translated into narratives that are relevant to the peace, but they've maintain the divisions of the past. So, yeah, one of the things, I suppose, that we've seen for quite a few years was the development of a population in Northern Ireland that we call the neithers, those who in polls would describe themselves as neither nationalist nor unionist. And at one stage, as late as, I think, 2015, 2016, that section of the population would have been-- in the polls, at least, would have been 50%. Would have been 50% of those being polled would have described themselves as neithers. And a large part of those would have been younger people who were detached from what would have been the old labels. Now, we're starting to see a little bit more complexity to that label. We're starting to realize that label is not particularly consistent. So, for example, since Brexit in 2016, we've seen a lot of young Catholics in particular, those that would have come from a Catholic nationalist background, starting to go back to that label again and attach themselves to the politics of the past. And in that sense, I completely agree. I think it's very context-heavy in terms of young people and how they approach their own sense of political priorities. JESSICA BARNARD: Well, thank you for that. And I do have a last question. In the US, we have extreme polarization and tensions right now. Can the conflicts you've studied provide lessons for how we Americans can prevent this kind of conflict down the road, and avoid this violent conflict that will take decades and decades to repair? I think Peace Vibe Fest sounds like a good way to start, but maybe something beyond that. Dzenana, maybe you can go first. DZENANA SABIC HAMIDOVIC: Yeah, I'm always reluctant to give formulas. \[LAUGHS\] I really, truly-- maybe I'm a utopist, but I really, really deeply believe in dialogue. I really believe that if we create-- and maybe you can think about how would that look like for the US to create spaces for the people to encounter, to talk about their own issues that they think that divide them. And if you do it in a manner that my truth does not cancel your truth, and if we can get to the space in which we can try to turn the conversation into, this is the part of your truth that I can connect with and agree with, I think that then we create spaces in which we start from the point of understanding and connecting to what we can understand about each other's truths, if you want. If we don't talk to the people that we essentially don't agree with, then the division is just going to be bigger. And Carl Rogers, I think, was saying that in the dialogue, we don't need to be focused on who's right and who's wrong, but rather how we progress together. So we need more braver people who seek progress rather than being right or wrong. Maybe that's not the answer you were asking for, but-- JESSICA BARNARD: That's a fine answer. I like these words, "bravery" and "courage." Cathal, what do you have to add to this? CATHAL MCMANUS: I think for the starting point is we need better political leadership. We need braver political leadership. In a sense, you need political leaders who are willing to take risks to change the narrative, and who are willing to take risks to challenge narratives that are emerging and that keep people polarized. American society, as controversial as this may sound, didn't become divided just with Trump. Those divisions existed before Trump came and before the rise of the recent polarization that that's there. But what we're starting to see are political movements and political individuals who are capable of exploiting those divisions. I think American society needs to have a big conversation with itself, essentially, about those social issues that have divided it for a very, very long time. And a starting point in that-- and this is a really, really difficult starting point. Whenever people like me say this, it sounds really, really easy, but it's not in any shape, or form, and that is to recognize our own sort of prejudices and to take ownership of our own prejudices. I still see this within the context of Northern Ireland, where people don't see themselves as being sectarian. The sectarianism is always attached to their other. And I think that in American society, nobody is racist, nobody is bigoted, nobody is prejudiced. It's always the other. The other is always to blame for the divisions in society. I think that sometimes we just need to try to reflect upon what it is that we claim to stand for and represent, and say, well, maybe I am part of the problem. Maybe the starting point for change comes from me and people like me, who are willing to say, we can do things differently. \[RELAXING MUSIC\] JESSICA BARNARD: Well, thank you all so much. This has been a really illuminating discussion about these similarities and differences between your countries and seeking reconciliation. And I think we've learned a lot about how this can apply to other situations in the world as well. One thing that's clear is it takes a long time and consistent effort to overcome the divisions in a post-conflict society. \[RELAXING MUSIC\] Many thanks to our guests and to our listeners. This is Jessica Barnard signing off from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Please subscribe to the Epicenter podcast to keep these important conversations going. \[THEME MUSIC\] See also:- [ Podcast ](/media-type/podcast) - [ Middle East & North Africa (MENA) ](/region/mena) - [ Europe ](/region/europe) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)