Reconciliation civil society and the politics of memory : transnational initiatives in the 20th and 21st century How did civil society function as a locus for reconciliation initiatives since the beginning of the 20th century The essays in this volume challenge the conventional understanding of reconciliation as a benign state driven process. They explore how a range of civil society actors from Turkish intellectuals apologizing for the Armenian Genocide to religious organizations working towards the improvement of Franco German relations have confronted and coped with the past. These studies offer a critical perspective on local and transnational reconciliation acts by questioning the extent to which speech became an alternative to silence remembrance to forgetting engagement to oblivion.