Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: The relationship between transitional justice and historiography is a complex and contested one.Many historians have pleaded for a greater engagement of their discipline in the field of transitional justice.However, many others have strongly criticised this sort of engagement.In this article, I argue that the evaluation of the relationship between transitional justice and the writing of history is strongly dependent on particular ways of conceiving the nature of both practices.I claim that both supporters and critics have predominantly focused on transitional justice's popular theses about 'reconciliation through truth telling' and about the 'healing force of remembering' or 'remembrance as justice'.Accordingly, they have defined the (potential) function of historiography in transitional justice in terms of a search for (objective) truth and/or as a struggle against forgetting.This approach is important but too restricted and one should also pay attention to another aspect: that of the 'politics of time' or 'historicisation'.I argue that a historicising discourse is often used in transitional justice in order to create or regulate people's notions of temporal 'distance' and in order to symbolically delimit the borders between past and present.This raises a number of questions about the ethics of the use of a historicising discourse in transitional justice.
Author: Berber Bevernage
Language: English
Topic: War, Law, and Justice
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2278009207