This article enquires into the narration of reconciliation in South Africa and its political implications. It scrutinizes the subjects, objects and material practices that flow from the reconciliation story. The investigation turns on two crucial assumptions: (a) that discourse is an ideological system of meaning that constitutes and naturalizes the subjects and objects of political life, and (b) that narrative is a special discursive form, the structural features of which have specific political effects that are not illuminated by a more general discourse analytic approach. A narrative perspective is important because the TRC explicitly undertook the task of telling a story about South Africa’s transition from past violence to future reconciliation, and argued that storytelling was fundamental to catharsis, healing, and reconciliation on an individual and a national level. Narrative theory renders more specifically applicable some of the general claims of political discourse analysis; while the insights of political discourse analysis highlight the political contexts and effects of governing narratives to which most narrative theory, on its own, is blind. The combination of these two theoretical premises furnishes a powerful approach to understanding the story about reconciliation told by the TRC, and its political implications.
Contemporary debate about compensation for past wrongs turns on the assumption that state reparation benefits the victims of atrocity by acknowledging harm and ameliorating victim suffering. Indeed, much recent theoretical and practical work has concurred to establish reparation to victims of state crimes as a cornerstone of human rights. However, this article argues that reparation can also function to placate victim demands for criminal justice and to regulate the range of political and historical meanings with which the crimes of the past are endowed. This is most evident in transitional political contexts in which gestures of reparation are usually concomitant with the inauguration of new political orders, and formal investigations of past atrocity are conditioned by the balancing of the political demands of new and old regimes. This article argues that in such contexts, state reparation can work to control social suffering with the consequence that it sometimes intensifies rather than alleviates it. To evidence this claim, the article investigates the refusal of reparations by the victims towards whom it is addressed, with reference to Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo. This analysis of their refusal demonstrates how victim groups make important challenges to some of the core assumptions in the field, reveals internal inconsistencies within the analytical architecture of the scholarly and professional discourse, and indicates the ways in which reparations carry political, and not just palliative, significance.
This article argues that the forms through which violence and atrocity are expressed -legal, statistical and testimonial -are important objects of analysis because credo is manifest in form, and an examination of form reveals something about the relationship between the 'world view' of human rights organizations and the 'styles of thought' that shape and inform their representations.The article considers what the discursive forms that seem indigenous to human rights and human rights advocacy both express (legalism, scientism) and repress (historicism), and discusses ways in which these forms of representation potentially facilitate and inhibit action.
This article has three parts. First, it identifies, defines and characterises a distinctive trend in modern humanitarianism: that of ‘forensic humanitarianism’. Forensic humanitarianism is often deployed in the wake of atrocity to answer two questions: who are the dead, and how were they killed? These questions have been addressed in diverse contexts with the aim of establishing accountability for atrocities and identifying and returning the dead to their families. Examples include the investigation of the crimes of Argentina's junta, the trial for genocide of Guatemala's former President Rios Montt, the return of human remains to families of the dead in the former‐Yugoslavia, and the exhumation of clandestine civil war graves in Spain. Forensic humanitarianism is distinguished by two imperatives that are characteristic of humanitarianism more broadly: adjudicative and ameliorative. These imperatives manifest in the ways in which forensic humanitarianism plays a critical role in justice for atrocity and addresses human suffering. Second, the article historicises the emergence of forensic humanitarianism, showing that it has been shaped by the conjunction of four particular and related histories: humanitarian, legal, political and scientific. Third, and finally, the article asks whether, as a consequence of the practice of forensic humanitarianism, we can argue that the dead, now, can be understood to have human rights.
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