Historical Justice And Memory

Historical Justice and Memory highlights the global movement for historical justice—acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs—as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the systematic persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities. The historical justice movement has inspired the spread of truth and reconciliation processes around the world and has pushed governments to make reparations and apologies for past wrongs. It has changed the public understanding of justice and the role of memory. In this book, leading scholars in philosophy, history, political science, and semiotics offer new essays that discuss and assess these momentous global developments. They evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the movement, its accomplishments and failings, its philosophical assumptions and social preconditions, and its prospects for the future.

This book examines state efforts to shape the public memory of past atrocities in the service of nationalist politics. This political engagement with the 'duty to remember', and the question of historical memory and identity politics, began as an effort to confront denialism with regard to the Holocaust, but now extends well beyond that framework, and has become a contentious subject in many countries. In exploring the politics of memory laws, a topic that has been overlooked in the largely legal analyses surrounding this phenomenon, this volume traces the spread of memory laws from their origins in Western Europe to their adoption by countries around the world. The work illustrates how memory laws have become a widespread tool of governments with a nationalist, majoritarian outlook. Indeed, as this volume illustrates, in countries that move from pluralism to majoritarianism, memory laws serve as a warning – a precursor to increasingly repressive, nationalist inclinations.

This reconstruction of the work of 'dialectical memory' in Hegel raises the fundamental question of the principle that presides on the articulation of history and indicates in Hegel's philosophy two alternative models of conceiving history: one that grounds history on 'ethical memory,' the other that sees justice as the moving principle of history.

Modern historiography embraces the notion that time is irreversible, implying that the past should be imagined as something ‘absent’ or ‘distant.’ Victims of historical injustice, however, in contrast, often claim that the past got ‘stuck’ in the present and that it retains a haunting presence. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence is centered around the provocative thesis that the way one deals with historical injustice and the ethics of history is strongly dependent on the way one conceives of historical time; that the concept of time traditionally used by historians is structurally more compatible with the perpetrators’ than the victims’ point of view. Demonstrating that the claim of victims about the continuing presence of the past should be taken seriously, instead of being treated as merely metaphorical, Berber Bevernage argues that a genuine understanding of the ‘irrevocable’ past demands a radical break with modern historical discourse and the concept of time. By embedding a profound philosophical reflection on the themes of historical time and historical discourse in a concrete series of case studies, this project transcends the traditional divide between ‘empirical’ historiography on the one hand and the so called ‘theoretical’ approaches to history on the other. It also breaks with the conventional ‘analytical’ philosophy of history that has been dominant during the last decades, raising a series of long-neglected ‘big questions’ about the historical condition – questions about historical time, the unity of history, and the ontological status of present and past –programmatically pleading for a new historical ethics.

The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, creating collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that have emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts, such as Germany, Romania, Russia and others.

The yearning for historical justice – that is, for the redress of past wrongs – has become one of the defining features of our age. Governments, international bodies and civil society organisations address historical injustices through truth commissions, tribunals, official apologies and other transitional justice measures. Historians produce knowledge of past human rights violations, and museums, memorials and commemorative ceremonies try to keep that knowledge alive and remember the victims of injustices. In this book, researchers with a background in history, archaeology, cultural studies, literary studies and sociology explore the various attempts to recover and remember the past as a means of addressing historic wrongs. Case studies include sites of persecution in Germany, Argentina and Chile, the commemoration of individual victims of Nazi Germany, memories of life under South Africa’s apartheid regime, and the politics of memory in Israel and in Northern Ireland. The authors critique memory, highlight silences and absences, explore how to engage with the ghosts of the past, and ask what drives individuals, including professional historians, to strive for historical justice. This book was originally published as a special issue of Rethinking History.

Based on case studies spanning time and geography from the Spanish to the Nigerian civil wars, to government repression in Argentina and genocidal policies in Guatemala and Rwanda and, finally, to forced population removal in Australia and Israel, this collection represents a focused attempt to come to grips with some of the strategies used to publicly engage with traumatic memory work.

This book analyses, above all, the laws, policies and judicial decisions adopted in Spain that were related to the construction of the past and could therefore be understood as measures of transitional justice. By comparing this experience with transitional decisions adopted in other countries, the book highlights the main features of the Spanish case and the lessons that can be learned from it. Measures adopted during the transitional period, such as the amnesty and subsequent decisions aimed at giving some kind of partial reparation to the victims of the repression, are here studied. Demands for reviewing the past, the 2007 Act of Historical Memory, and the controversial use of criminal justice are also considered. Criminal Law is hardly applicable to the facts of the past, but the purely amnesic option can no longer be defended.