INTRODUCTION

The theoretical frameworks of the rule of law and reasonable default political trust discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 enrich our understanding of some of the important moral issues that are expressed in many of the actions during civil conflict and repressive rule that are widely regarded as morally problematic. However, they do not address all of the issues that should be of moral concern. Indeed, many of the most obvious and deeply troubling aspects of political relationships, like normalized and systematic violence, do not seem best described as failures of the rule of law or trust. An appeal to the relational problems associated with the absence of enforced rules and distrust does not seem sufficient for explaining how systematic violence afflicts relationships within a community, nor does conceptualizing the tasks of processes of reconciliation strictly in terms of the establishment of the rule of law and the cultivation of reasonable trust seem to capture all that we care about achieving in the rebuilding of political relationships.

The central thesis of this chapter is that many intuitively damaging characteristics of relationships during civil conflict and repressive rule are helpfully analyzed using the capability framework. The capability framework enables us to understand the various kinds of harm involved in common unjust institutional structures and patterns of interaction, and the ways in which it may be possible to repair them.