Language and Genocide: Working on questions about the power of linguistic practice to shape social reality led me to become particularly concerned to understand the conditions that make genocide possible. My research focuses on the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. In 2005, I presented a talk at a United Nations conference in Sarajevo, BiH, on the power of apology to offer recognition to victims of genocide, with a close analysis of American President Bill Clinton’s 1998 apology to the Rwandans. This research focus has resulted in several papers, including “Epistemic Aspects of Evil,” “Genocidal Language Games,” and “Apologizing for Atrocity: Rwanda and Recognition,” “Transitional Justice in Rwanda: An Integrative Approach,” and it infuses the projects below.

Apology Project: Everyday apologies for minor and somewhat more serious transgressions are not hard to comprehend, but the power of apology in the face of grievous harm is more challenging, and takes us to questions of the power of words, speech, as actions. My view is that words heal through the recognition they offer, and this recognition is often necessary to living with injury or in the best cases, overcoming it.  My apology project includes several papers, addressing questions of the power of apology to offer recognition, the role of sincerity in apology, political apologies, and differences in the conventions governing public apologies compared to private ones. 

Emergent Forgiveness, with Alisa L. Carse, (Georgetown). We are developing a new conception of forgiveness, focusing on forgiveness in cases of grave wrongs, which often result in what we call “world-shattering harms.” World-shattering harms can be widespread, as in genocide and war, or they can be individual experiences, as happens in cases of rape, incest, or ongoing abuse.  The first, very short version of this project is published as “Forgiving Grave Wrongs.” Our plan is to develop several more papers, setting out distinctions between Emergent Forgiveness and classical (decisional/transactional) forgiveness, on the one hand, and between emergent forgiveness and reconciliation on the other. We are working on clarifying the concept of worlds and world-shattering harm, and trying to articulate the ways that hope and trust are built on the emergent model.