It seems like the world is in free fall as peace has remained elusive for most people. Even stable democracies are experiencing their fair share of political instability. It would not be out of place to question the notion of a “free world.” Predictability has become problematic as voters defy, once reliable, exit polls in their political choices. It is ironic that in its quest for more stability and positive peace our choices have the exact opposite effect.

For more than 20 years, first as a student and anti-Apartheid activist, and then as a civil society contributor to building a new democratic South Africa, in my everyday work, I was constantly integrating the goals of building peace and reconciliation in my country, with the needs to address both past and future experiences of injustice. Whether by reference to torture and disappearances, or the seismic processes of race and class-based marginalization or dispossession - for practitioners - our engagements with peace, justice and development, were practically and necessarily indivisible… in part because ordinary people experienced them as such. However, in the subsequent ten years, working with international civil society organizations dedicated to either human rights or to peacebuilding - despite rhetoric to the contrary - I have encountered a sustained discomfort or lack of innovation and imagination in both fields, to practically integrating these social and programmatic objectives.

No peace without justice? Can there be justice after the loss of a human life? How do we compensate for a lost human life? How do we provide reparation for the life that has been lost? What compensation or reparation would be appropriate and sufficient? What would be too little, and what would be too much?