Meaningless gestures or pathway to healing and reconciliation? Comparing the perspectives on political apologies in victim and non‐victim communities in El Salvador, the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Political apologies have been theorized to play an important role in healing and reconciliation processes in postconflict settings. Whether they actually fulfil this function, however, remains unclear as the voices and perspectives of victim communities have largely been underrepresented in research. To address this, we examined the role of apologies that were offered for the El Mozote massacre (El Salvador), the Jeju 4.3 massacres (Republic of Korea) and Bloody Sunday (United Kingdom), according to members of these communities and the broader public. Although we anticipated that victim community members should find the apology more valuable and meaningful and should, therefore, be more positive about its role in healing and reconciliation processes, we found that this varies across countries. This variation could be explained by people's trust in the country's institutions. Across the samples, we found that the apology was seen as a relatively important gesture. For the apology to be perceived as impactful, however, it had toThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Political apologies and their acceptance: Experimental evidence from victims and perpetrators nations

“…Moreover, our paper answers call for new research agendas that have emerged in within-group studies (Bobowik et al, 2017) and that propose moving beyond individual-level determinants (Sagherian-Dickey et al, 2023) towards the understanding of apologies in different groups and communities (McNeill et al, 2014). The subgroup perspective pursued in this paper sheds more focused light on the operation of intergroup apologies.…”

“…There are other aspects of political apologies that were not included in the study, for instance, the performative nature of the apology, the type and gravity of the wrongdoing and the time‐lapse (Philpot & Hornsey, 2011; Sagherian‐Dickey et al, 2023; Wenzel et al, 2018). Indeed, some properties of apologies, especially expressions of regret, may not be fully captured by words.…”

“…Indeed, reparations for slavery were not universally rejected by white Americans and not universally demanded by African‐American respondents (Blatz et al, 2009). There may be groups within each nation, such as victims and non‐victims (Bobowik et al, 2017; Sagherian‐Dickey et al, 2023), ideological camps and opinion groups, which find political apologies more acceptable than groups with a more hardened attitude towards the other nation (Kitagawa & Chu, 2021).…”