A post-conflict society tends to get locked in a history war. As the practice of history in its broad sense is a moral craft, representations of guilt and victimhood prevail in social memory. The representations are often bolstered by mythical references, wherefore deconstruction of myths is expected from history education for the purposes of post-conflict reconciliation. This article deals with the post-conflict uses of history in Finland, South Africa and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The three cases constitute examples of a class war, a race conflict and an ethno-religious armed clash. The memory politics and history curricula differ between the cases. Their comparison indicates, how far an imposition of one ´truth´, a dialogue of two ´truths´ and segregation of different memory communities are feasible strategies of post-conflict history education. The article suggests that history lessons can be an asset instead of a liability in the pursuit of reconciliation.

The concept transitional justice refers to a wide range of measures which are applied in times of political and societal transformation. Its starting point is a state of widespread and grave violations of human rights which is typical for undemocratic rules, for times of conflicts including both national and international, but it also existed within some of traditionally democratic countries such as Canada or New Zealand in a form of systematic discrimination against the indigenous population. The target of transitional justice measures is to establish democratic system which protects human rights and fundamental freedoms as a reliable guarantee of sustainable peace. Transitional justice is sometimes considered to fall within measures strengthening the rule of law however some steps such as vetting may temporarily deform the rule of law and equality of citizens before the law which is its integral part. International law regulates transitional justice measures by means of international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law. International criminal law, or more generally measures of criminal law nature, has been in modern history the primary response to breaches of human rights. Later, other measures were added including those of judicial and non - judicial...

Creative ambiguity as a negotiation strategy is used often in peace agreements and refers to when ambiguities are used in agreements to serve as a positive motivation to get over obstacles. While it has many positive impacts, the use of creative ambiguity also often times shifts the burden of the negotiation phase to the implementations phase, and thus can result into agreements that are not implemented as well as plummeting the relations between the parties affected. This thesis aims to understand how the use of creative ambiguity in the Brussels Agreement between Kosovo and Serbia had an impact on the heightened conflict between the countries. This thesis is a single instrumental case study that illustrates the issue of creative ambiguity through the case of the Brussels Agreement. Through analysing interferences from material mainly collected from both countries’ government websites, this study conducted that the use of creative ambiguity had a harmful impact not only on the relations between Kosovo and Serbia, but also on the implementation of the agreement.

This research aimed to test the effectiveness of a new social-psychological intervention aimedat conflict resolution and intergroup reconciliation. It was set in a relevant post-conflictcontext exploring intergroup attitudes and relationships between Serbs and Albanians.Existing empirical evidence shows that intergroup conflict affects perceptions of groups ́morality which in turn, are important for peace-building efforts. Recent research has providedevidence demonstrating that learning about outgroup moral exemplars, a novel interventionaimed at challenging social beliefs about a relevant outgroup, can improve intergroupattitudes such as increased contact intentions, reconciliation beliefs and perceptions ofoutgroup morality. Nonetheless, it remains to be explored whether this intervention (learningabout outgroup moral exemplars) would be effective in contexts marked by prolongedintergroup animosities and what processes could explain the expected positive effects. Thisstudy (N=373) presents experimental data demonstrating that learning about outgroup moral(vs. neutral) exemplars induces moral elevation regarded as a positive emotion promotingmoral affiliate behaviour which in turn, is related to positive intergroup outcomes (such asprejudice reduction and approach behaviour). The present research confirms the effectivenessof the moral exemplar approach in regards to intergroup reconciliation processes. Moreover,in this paper we extend the current literature by demonstrating that moral elevation could be apsychological mechanism relevant for facilitation of positive intergroup outcomes in conflictsettings.