War and reconciliation

Many scholarly disciplines as well as popular opinion recognize reconciliation as a powerful force in restoring social order following conflict. Reconciliation between countries following a war or a series of wars has attracted little attention from international relations scholars, however. This paper uses four international events datasets developed by others and a reconciliation events dataset assembled by the authors to determine whether reconciliation events lead to a discernable decrease in the level of conflict between former belligerents. The results suggest that reconciliation events signal a change towards more cooperative and less conflictual bilateral relations in a number of cases. The impact of reconciliation is hardly uniformly positive, however, and limitations of the data constrain what can be asserted. The paper concludes with thoughts on continuing this inquiry to determine the forces that give rise to reconciliation and the factors that might explain the variance in the dependent variable—post‐reconciliation relations between former belligerents.