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AbstractThis article examines why states ask for forgiveness from other states or peoples that they have harmed. Asking for forgiveness has significant political, legal, and moral implications. But beyond these, the subject concerns how states confront their history and their collective responsibility for wrongdoing. My focus on the reasons states have for asking forgiveness could also improve our understanding of conflict resolution. The article introduces an innovative typology of requests for forgiveness by presenting important conceptual distinctions in the terminology currently employed in the field. Apologies, regrets, and expressions of sorrow are conceptualised as distinct avenues of asking forgiveness with varying degrees of significance and meaningfulness. I assert that the type of request for forgiveness is influenced by the degree of severity attributed to a wrongdoing and by the extent to which a state perceives its image as threatened by its wrongful act. The article analyses the important 1951 statement of West Germany's Chancellor Adenauer regarding the Jewish Holocaust as an example of a type of request for forgiveness.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been growing academic interest in the speech act of apology. Both the nature of apologetic communicative processes and the potential of apologies to promote reconciliation remain, however, under debate. The aim of this article is to map common types of rituals found in what is termed 'the age of apology', to identify the processual and structural characteristics of these rituals, and to understand their contribution to restoring relations in the global arena. The analysis yields three types of rituals of apology: purification – that is, asymmetrical rituals in which the offender issues an apology in order to purify his or her dismal past but does not necessarily need the approval of an offended party; humiliation – that is, asymmetrical rituals in which the offended party forces the offender to participate in a degradation ritual as a condition for closure; and settlement – that is, symmetrical rituals in which both sides strive to restore relations. The theoretical and practical implications of these rituals are discussed.