This volume contains the Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications "RTA-87" held in Bordeaux, France, May 25-27,1987. This meeting follows the very successful one that took place at Dijon in 1985. On this occasion many members of the Rewriting community, who had not met previously, but worked in the same field, had an opportunity to talk to each other and many interesting discussions took place both during the sessions and outside them. Many results published since this meeting started from ideas debated at Dijon, and volume 202 of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science is often referenced in literature published since.