Peace Negotiations and Peace Talks: the Peace Process in the Public Sphere

The article develops an understanding of public deliberations during a peace process, focusing on the interaction between the elite level negotiations and the “public peace process.” It does so by examining the dialogical mechanisms that are set to work in the public sphere once the elite consider the possibility of identifying the former enemies as allies or friends. These dialogical mechanisms, the author argues, add up to a shift in the manner the public interprets the discourse that regulates its relationship with the elite toward what the author calls, following Paul Ricoeur, ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ Thus, the peace process generates a need for the public to re-examine the terms of understanding that defined its relationship with the former enemy. However this same process might also lead the public to re-examine the terms by which it understands its relationship with the elite.