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Reconciliation is generally studied from the perspective of how the process affects the individual. This study on the contrary, seeks to explain how the individual expectation of the process affects its outcome by investigating the relationship between motives to participate and the outcome of acceptance for your former adversary. A research gap has been identified in studying individual motives for participating in reconciliation processes between social factors as a facilitator for reconciliation and the actual joining of a process. Studying this gap has resulted in support for the hypothesis that individuals with the motive to tell the truth in a process experience high levels of acceptance towards their former adversaries, compared to individuals who participate in a process with the motive of holding the other party accountable for past sufferings. Using the method of in-depth interviews in Cambodia and thematic analysis reveals the main finding that acceptance is facilitated by the mechanisms of acknowledgment and understanding of the other party in combination with active interaction between the parties. This study presents three main recommendations for future ideas and reconciling establishments.

In this dissertation, I defend an interpretation of Foucault’s parrhesiast (those who speak truth to power frankly) that blends it with his various methodological turns by casting the relationship as rhetorical. For that proposal, I attempt to introduce five major strategies defending the necessity of adopting a certain rhetorical standpoint, without which we cannot fully justify philosophy’s underpinnings. The opening of that rhetorical standpoint (in a special sense to be elaborated mostly in the first chapter) helps me to interpret some of the major tenets of Foucault’s philosophy, like his peculiar theory of discourse, his panoply in mapping a very specific history of knowledge (savoir), and finally the way Foucault envisages the role of the individuals in their historical predicament.

This thesis analyses information disclosure in clinical practice from a legal, ethical and professional perspective. It examines therapeutic privilege, the duty of candour and the application of virtue ethics to truth-telling in nursing practice. I argue that each of these areas requires further clarity, articulation and application in order to assist the decision-making process of health care professionals and improve disclosure practices. In analysing these areas this thesis recognises the context of disclosure practices in relation to respect for patient autonomy and trust in the patient-health care professional relationship. The first published paper at the core of this thesis considers the status of therapeutic privilege in English law and concludes that further clarification is needed to establish its legitimacy. I argue that the shift in English law towards a disclosure standard judged by reference to the reasonable patient requires a doctrine of therapeutic privilege. There are strong ethical arguments in favour of information disclosure, particularly founded on respect for patient autonomy. As such, further clarification is needed to identify and define the grounds on which this exception exists, when the information can lawfully be withheld and how this exception extends to the rest of the health care team, particularly nurses. The second paper examines the ethical and practical considerations that underpin the disclosure of medical errors to patients. This provides a foundation for a discussion of how the law can best support a duty of candour. I argue for the introduction of a statutory duty of candour and analyse the current legal mechanisms and proposals for addressing this issue. The final paper argues that virtue ethics is a useful approach from which to explore decisions relating to information disclosure. Its explicit focus upon moral character, the role of emotion, intention and the importance of practical judgement are considered from the nurse's perspective. This thesis contributes to the dialogue on information disclosure on a number of levels. In terms of methodological approach, it recognises the importance of the synthesis of law and ethics in addressing issues in clinical practice. It uses an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating both legal and ethical perspectives, to examine the substantive questions as well as incorporating reference to empirical research to further underpin its normative claims. Moreover, this thesis considers the nursing perspective in relation to issues of information disclosure to explore the role of the nurse in decision-making regarding disclosure practices.

This dissertation combines psychology with peace and conflict research in a cross-disciplinary approach to reconciliation processes after intrastate armed conflict. Two overarching contributions are made to the field of reconciliation research. The first is conceptual and methodological. The vague concept of reconciliation is defined and operationalized (Paper I), and a method is proposed for how reconciliation may be studied systematically at the national level (Paper II). By discussing what reconciliation is and how we should measure it, comparative research on reconciliation is facilitated which is imperative if we wish to learn of its promises and pitfalls in post-conflict peacebuilding. The second contribution is empirical. There has been an assumption that truth telling is healing and thereby will lead to reconciliation; healing is the assumed link between truth and reconciliation. This assumption was investigated in two studies in Rwanda in 2006. A multistage, stratified cluster random survey of 1,200 adults was conducted to assess whether witnessing in the gacaca, the Rwandan village tribunals for truth and reconciliation, was beneficial for psychological health; thereby investigating the claim that truth telling is healing (Paper III). The results of the survey are disconcerting. Witnesses in the gacaca suffered from significantly higher levels of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder than non-witnesses also when controlling for important predictors for psychological ill-health such as gender or trauma exposure. To acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the experience of witnessing in the gacaca, in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 women genocide survivors who had witnessed in the gacaca (Paper IV). The results of this study challenge the claim that truth telling is healing, suggesting instead that there are risks for the individuals on whom truth-telling processes depend. Traumatization, ill-health, isolation, and insecurity dominate the lives of the testifying women. Insecurity as a result of the truth-telling process emerged as one of the most crucial issues at stake. This dissertation presents a novel understanding of the complexity of reconciliation in post-conflict peacebuilding, demonstrating that truth and reconciliation processes may entail more risks than were previously known. The results of this dissertation can be used to improve the study and the design of truth and reconciliation processes after civil war and genocide.

<p>This dissertation combines psychology with peace and conflict research in a cross-disciplinary approach to reconciliation processes after intrastate armed conflict. Two overarching contributions are made to the field of reconciliation research. The first is conceptual and methodological. The vague concept of reconciliation is defined and operationalized (Paper I), and a method is proposed for how reconciliation may be studied systematically at the national level (Paper II). By discussing what reconciliation is and how we should measure it, comparative research on reconciliation is facilitated which is imperative if we wish to learn of its promises and pitfalls in post-conflict peacebuilding. The second contribution is empirical. There has been an assumption that truth telling is healing and thereby will lead to reconciliation; healing is the assumed link between truth and reconciliation. This assumption was investigated in two studies in Rwanda in 2006. A multistage, stratified cluster random survey of 1,200 adults was conducted to assess whether witnessing in the gacaca, the Rwandan village tribunals for truth and reconciliation, was beneficial for psychological health; thereby investigating the claim that truth telling is healing (Paper III). The results of the survey are disconcerting. Witnesses in the gacaca suffered from significantly higher levels of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder than non-witnesses also when controlling for important predictors for psychological ill-health such as gender or trauma exposure. To acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the experience of witnessing in the gacaca, in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 women genocide survivors who had witnessed in the gacaca (Paper IV). The results of this study challenge the claim that truth telling is healing, suggesting instead that there are risks for the individuals on whom truth-telling processes depend. Traumatization, ill-health, isolation, and insecurity dominate the lives of the testifying women. Insecurity as a result of the truth-telling process emerged as one of the most crucial issues at stake. This dissertation presents a novel understanding of the complexity of reconciliation in post-conflict peacebuilding, demonstrating that truth and reconciliation processes may entail more risks than were previously known. The results of this dissertation can be used to improve the study and the design of truth and reconciliation processes after civil war and genocide.</p>

This study shows how the official death-declaring of bodies in 20th century Sweden became inextricably linked to the modulation of a population’s health through transplantations. In its critical examination of the terms of possibility to declare a body as dead in the latter half of 20th century Sweden the study not only relates to medicinal humanities and studies in contemporary biopolitics but, more broadly, the diverse field of Queer Death Studies. With its interdisciplinarity, the study approaches Swedish official governmental material in a genealogical manner and aims not only to show how bodies historically became declared as dead but, more importantly, to shed light on hidden points of intersections within western biopolitics. While the study reveals several distinctive trajectories—e.g. death-entry from self-evident to dissolved to eventualized—it also highlights biopolitical tactics in attempts to reach desirable outcomes and circumvent obstacles such as the public. Among these, it exposes an ambiguous right to declare bodies as dead with its possibility to produce exceptions from the judicial system—exceptions brought forth through a truth-telling of bodies bare life in tandem with an extraction of previously unattainable organs. Thus, the study suggests that to further understand contemporary governing, and not risking an intensification of it, Agamben’s approach towards hidden intersections between juridico-institutional and biopolitical needs to be extended to encompass a third vector of truth-telling.

Gender inequality has during the past decades become an increasingly studied topic in the field of peace and conflict. However, there are still many gaps to fill. This thesis is an aim at explaining a phenomenon that has yet to be uncovered, namely the relation between conflict related gender inequality and women’s attitudes towards reconciliation processes that include truth-telling and reintegration of ex-combatants. The thesis builds upon prior qualitative and quantitative studies of gender inequality in relation to conflict, and its potential consequences, as well as trauma-related psychology. Using a direct and structured comparative method of comparison between Rwanda and Sri Lanka, it is found that gender inequality both during and after conflict affect women’s attitudes towards peacebuilding negatively.

Comments and Discussions : Yuko ARAYAMA (荒山裕行)

Cette thèse explore le phénomène de whistleblowing et comment il a été encadré, principalement du point de vue anglo-saxon, à travers des lectures proches de récits culturels et une vue critique sur l'érudition existante sur whistleblowing. À travers des lectures rapprochées d'une sélection de cas, la poursuite, l'importance et l'impact de la vérité apparaîtront comme le thème central dans les récits culturelles explorées, mais aussi les moments où la vérité est rendu impuissante, en raison de sa nature coercitive comme factualité. L'impuissance de la vérité vécue par les lanceurs d'alerte ("les whistleblowers") est ce qui relie d'autre part les récits culturels à l'art tragique. Les diseurs de vérité ne sont pas reconnus, et ils entrent dans un conflit tragique parce qu'elles révèlent des vérités qui ne sont pas pratiques pour les gens au pouvoir. En d'autres termes, les whistleblowers, en disant la vérité, cherchent à élargir l'espace épistémique dans la sphère publique et à tenir les gens et le pouvoir responsables. Cependant, ils sont continuellement négativement encadrés avec des métaphores conceptuelles qui obstruent la perception d'eux en tant que conteurs de la vérité. / This dissertation posits that whistleblowing is factual truth-telling, or truthful public denunciation. In scholarship, media, and in the popular perception of whistleblowing, the truth-claim is often overlooked, and in many occasions hampered by the dominant ways it is framed (e.g. as leak, which is explored among other frames as a problematic conceptual metaphor). Interestingly, the representation of the whistleblower is different in cultural narratives. Through close readings of a selection of cases, the pursuit, importance, and impact of truth will appear as the central theme in the explored plots, but also the moments where truth becomes impotent, due to its coercive nature as factuality - a process that furthermore connects whistleblowing with the idea of the tragic. Put differently, the special literary interest of narratives of whistleblowing is to turn ignorance into knowledge, knowledge into telling, and how the unraveling of truth becomes a reversal of fortune for the truth-teller who enters a particular tragic conflict. As frame, as narrative, and as a modern phenomenon of truthful public denunciation, whistleblowing offers particular moments of truth, often about moments of falsehood, and ultimately seeks to be a moment of impetus: for the public to restore justice, and for readerships and audience of narrative and dramatic configurations to choose or to distance themselves from multiple proposals of justice emplotted - not only ethical justice, but also epistemic, hermeneutical, and testimonial justice. In other words, whistleblowers, by telling the truth, seek to expand the epistemic space in the public sphere and hold people and power accountable.