The Role of Economic Goods in National Reconciliation: Evaluating South Africa and Colombia

Scholars have compared the transitional justice processes of Colombia and South Africa in some respects, but there has yet to be a systematic moral-philosophical evaluation of them regarding how they have sought to allocate economic goods. Here I appraise the ways that South Africa and Colombia have responded to their respective historical conflicts in respect of the distribution of property and opportunities. I do so in the light of a conception of reconciliation informed by a relational ethic of harmony, a value salient in the worldviews of many indigenous peoples in both Africa and South America. I argue that, given such an account of reconciliation, one of Colombia’s major proposed ways of allocating property and opportunities, whereby offenders would labour for the sake of improving victims’ socio-economic conditions, would be much better than what South Africa has done, even if Colombia has yet to put such a policy systematically into practice.