How Wars End

How does a society move forward after atrocity? After war? Genocide? Now that president Trump has established a ‘Board of Peace,’ in which reconstruction appears to be approached primarily as a real-estate deal, we examine the politics of peace.

Linda Kinstler (journalist for The Economist and a scholar at Harvard University) argues that in peace building, there should be space for ‘oblivion’, a collective process of forgiveness and forgetting. A process of pardoning. Not to let people off the hook, but rather to acknowledge their guilt in a meaningful way. Because: ‘a pardon confirms the crime.’

How have acts of oblivion helped humankind move on since Roman times? What, for instance, was ‘forgotten’ in post-Nazi Germany? Is oblivion still possible in a digital age in which everything is documented? And how is oblivion different from simply ignoring the past and start building a ‘riviera of the Middle East’, as Trump is intending?

Linda Kinstler made her debut in 2023 with her book Come to This Court and Cry, about the Nazi trials. She has also published in, among others, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Guardian.