In Africa, in particular, the location of some of the most brutal civil wars, an amnesty for the worst war criminals is sometimes offered as the price for the end of conflict. Then, human rights advocates and conflict resolution experts are pitted against one another in advocacy for peace against justice or vice versa. How can people be made to negotiate with perpetrators of the worst possible violations of the human person? Even worse, how can such war criminals be brought into government? Won't the attempt to incorporate such people backfire when they prove unable to give up their ways? But, then again, don't human rights advocates jeopardise the prospects for peace through their insistence on excluding from the post-conflict political landscapes those who have real power to end the fighting, put the guns away and allow the healing to begin? Such sharp polarities are both unhelpful and misleading for many reasons. They exclude from reckoning the fact that wars and the horrible crimes that happen during them often have a long gestation. They misrepresent the transition from descent into war to post-war reconstruction as separate events rather than a continuum of often interrelated causes and effects. They fail to take account of the role of impunity and institutional failures of both government and justice processes in creating cultures of unaccountable violence and civil wars. Ultimately, such polarities are based on flawed interpretations of both peace and justice. © 2004 IPPR.