Transitional Justice and Memory: Exploring Perspectives

This article suggests that the study of transitional justice could benefit from the insights of memory studies, and proposes that transitional justice is a first step in ongoing 'memory cycles', and that the politics of memory after state violence is qualitatively different from that which occurs in times of peace and normality. It illustrates some of the limitations of abstract normative approaches, and discusses how these and historically grounded and context-specific perspectives may be mobilised as two partial ways of looking at the same reality. It suggests Wilber's framework as a useful device to think in a multi-perspective and multi-disciplinary way about the topic. Keywords: Transitional JusticeSocial MemoryPolitics of MemoryUniversalismRelativism Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jennifer Dixon for bringing some studies combining international theory with memory studies to my attention. Notes [1] There is an extensive literature on post-1945 politics of memory, although most of it does not apply political science transitional justice perspectives. Two recent examples are Art (Citation2006) and Lebow et al. (Citation2006). There are some studies combining international relations theory with memory studies (Lind Citation2008; He Citation2009). Some key examples that deploy both transitional justice and memory insights are Jelin (Citation2003a; Citation2003b; Citation2003c), Olick (Citation2003; Citation2007), Roniger & Sznajder (Citation1999), Payne (Citation2008; Citation2009) and Wilde (Citation1999). The special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science also focuses on the politics of memory (AAPSS, Citation2008). [2] There is overlap between the politics of memory and social memory-making, as the former is an example of the latter. The boundary between one and the other is not clear—it would be hard to fix it temporally—and in terms of specific content, insofar as all social memory reflects on past injustices, it is also hard to fix it qualitatively. However, we can consider the politics of memory to be that which reflects on past injustice that is followed by regime change and that mobilises transitonal justice strategies. [3] For further development of this section see CitationBarahona de Brito & Whitehead (forthcoming). [4] Giambattista Vico's term; see Berlin (Citation2003, p. 10). [5] For a sensitive discussion of emotions and transitional justice, notably resentment and indignation, see Mihai (Citation2010). [6] This author's emphasis. [7] These labels are somewhat misleading, since the theories proposed by the relativist are every bit as universal in their ambitions as those proposed by the universalist, but I retain them here anyway. For further development of the ideas in this section, see Barahona de Brito & Whitehead (Citation2009). [8] While I recognise there are much deeper epistemological and deontological issues at stake, I focus here only on the human rights aspects of this debate. [9] I do not swallow whole Wilber's integral perspective, and am frankly antipathetic to his extrapolation to society and politics, in the form of states and stages of development and 'memes' theory, of his studies of consciousness. However, I find his tripartite framework and his 'quadrants' very useful devices for thinking about a subject more broadly and from a variety of angles. [10] Following Habermas and others, Wilber argues that the defining characteristic of modernity is that it differentiates the three spheres so that each can pursue its 'truth' separately without domination by the others. It separates the 'we' from the 'it' (freeing science from the Church), and the 'I' from the 'we' (freeing individuals from the collective). This constitutes 'the dignity of modernity'. Its counterpoint is the 'disaster of modernity', the tendency to reduce the interior dimensions of 'I' and 'we' to exterior surfaces of objective 'its', so that objects without simple location (A.N. Whitehead) become invisible. This reduction of depth to surfaces has produced what Wilber terms a 'flatland' view of things, and he calls for a vision based on an integration of all three spheres and making use of all three types of validity claims (Wilber Citation1998).