Post-Conflict Potter: The Forgotten Aspect

Alright, I'm a couple days late to jump on the Post-Conflict Potter bandwagon but having read some of the better responses to the original article (see responses from The Duck of Minerva , The Monkey Cage and Running Chicken) I've noticed that one factor seems to have been forgotten in all this "analysis" - I'm trying not to think too hard about this, I swear, but I am easily drawn in to these kinds of thought exercises - namely the importance of, to steal from the R2P doctrine, the responsibility to rebuild after the conflict.

All of the responses so far have focused on the need to rebuild following Harry's defeat of Voldemort at the end of the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But everyone seems to have forgotten that the only reason Voldemort was even able to come back to "life" after he failed to kill Harry was that the Death Eaters were never successfully re-integrated into the British wizarding community the first time around. Just look how quickly they were willing to go back to their old ways of terrorizing mixed bloods, muggle-borns and those that held different views than them.

The authors of the original article (Malinowski, Holewinski & Schultz) recognize the importance of transitional justice the second time around, prescribing that,

Surviving Death Eaters will have to be brought to justice or reintegrated into magical society. Long-standing rifts among magical communities that the war widened must be healed. Most of all, we must ensure that the values that triumphed in the final battle -- tolerance, pluralism, and respect for the dignity of all magical and non-magical creatures alike -- are reflected in the institutions and arrangements that emerge from the conflict. What ultimately matters is not just whether something evil was defeated, but whether something good is built in its place.

This time around they have the ability to learn lessons from the past and incorporate them into the rebuilding efforts, but not the lessons from the American muggles in Afghanistan or Iraq, as the authors suggest, rather their own mistakes with the same group of Death Eaters 17 years earlier. They have seen from the events of the last two years, books... and/or corresponding movies, I guess, (Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows) what happens when former combatants are not successfully re-integrated and the human cost incurred. If you are going to rebuild after a conflict, make sure that you are willing to make the commitment that reconstruction requires because doing a poor job will only just postpone the eventual return of violence (*cough**cough**Somalia**cough**cough*).