Colloquium today
Please join us for a talk on the role of Trust in Political
Reconciliation Tuesday April 15 at 4pm.
The talk, by Professor Colleen Murphy, is sponsored by the Center for
Ethics and Public policy and will be at 4:00 pm Tuesday April 15 in the
library rotunda on the 4th floor of the UMD library. All are invited
and the talk is open to the public. Professor Murphy has researched in
Northern Ireland and South Africa, and has studied at Oxford University,
the University of Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill. She is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at
the Texas A&M University, where her research focus is on the role of
trust and rule of law in post-conflict political reconciliation.
Details of her research can be found below.
Colleen Murphy Research Statement
Political reconciliation refers to the process of re-building damaged
political relationships within societies transitioning from civil
conflict or repressive rule to democracy. Societies that have faced or
are facing the need for this type of political reconciliation include
South Africa, Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Political
reconciliation is an /important /and /controversial/ challenge. It is
/important/, given the consensus that reconciliation is a condition for
successful democratization. It is /controversial/, both because the
moral justifiability of the pursuit of political reconciliation has been
questioned and because there is significant disagreement about what
kinds of processes (e.g., amnesty, criminal trials, truth commissions)
actually promote political reconciliation. In my research, I am
articulating and arguing for 1) criteria for critically evaluating
particular accounts of political reconciliation and 2) a specific
analysis of what political reconciliation entails. I develop my
proposed understanding of political reconciliation by focusing on three
concepts in moral and political philosophy: the rule of law, substantive
justice, and trust. Each provides, I argue, distinctive resources for
1) explaining /how /intuitively problematic aspects of political
relations during civil conflict or repressive rule are damaging in
morally significant ways 2) suggesting /why/ and /how/ political
relations need to change and 3) evaluating the effectiveness and moral
justifiability of processes of reconciliation.
http://philosophy.tamu.edu/~cmmurphy/