CBC Ideas Week: War and Peace

What does it take to create peace? What ideas and values can knit a society back together – or at least make it possible for enemies to lay down their arms and live side by side? Past peace deals offer badly-needed models for our own time, but the process of making peace is often imperfect. And at worst, peace agreements can cement injustice and make future conflict all but inevitable.

This series, moderated by Ideas host Nahlah Ayed, explores four pivotal attempts to make peace over the last three decades, and asks what we can learn from the best - and worst - thinking of the past. The series culminates in an exploration of what it takes to make peace in the fraught context of the 21st century.

 Peace, Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa

After Nelson Mandela was released from prison, the South African apartheid government and its opponents began negotiating the terms of the transition from apartheid to democracy. The 1991 National Peace Accords set a date for the first democratic election, established an interim constitution and, controversially, promised some form of amnesty to perpetrators. They also paved the way for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that’s still praised as a model for healing – but according to Desmond Tutu, Mandela’s successors left the process “scandalously unfinished.” Nahlah Ayed and guests consider what other countries, including Canada, can learn from South Africa about how to dismantle injustice and build truly equitable, multiracial democracies.