The Place of Forgiveness in Conflict Management: Scale-Bound Institutional Arrangements in the Moroccan Nomosphere

Abstract

Concepts of forgiveness materialize in various shapes and contribute to different courses of action and dynamics depending on the circumstances, underlying legitimations, epistemologies, and forms of institutional embeddedness. This chapter addresses the way in which practices of forgiving are embedded in larger assemblages of instruments of conflict management that take effect in a wide variety of human lifeworlds across religious-spiritual and geographical-spatial frames. It focuses on the normativity of forgiveness, which entails situating it in its uncomfortable relation to morality and justice. Using data from fieldwork in Morocco, I first distinguish three conceptualizations of forgiveness: the secular-pragmatic, religious, and transnational-legal. Such conceptualizations prove to be mutually constitutive and inform one another. I then analyze normative forgiveness (acceptance that the perpetrator acknowledges responsibility) as an institution that complements apology (asking for forgiveness and taking over of responsibility) in a form of conflict regulation that is inscribed in a logic of retaliation. Together with mediation, protection, and other institutional components, the apology-forgiveness nexus forms an infrastructural design that allows for a formal post-conflict social reintegration of the parties involved. Such conflict processing may take place under the radar of formal judiciaries or in various degrees of conjunction with them. Taken together, such institutional assemblages offer an exit option to end confrontation.