This article seeks to contest the frequently repeated assertion that anger poses the greatest threat to transitional societies moving from authoritarianism to democracy. Against suggestions that victims of past injustices should forswear their 'negative emotions' lest they spark a renewed cycle of violence, it argues that it is important to recognize the moral legitimacy of their anger. While anger is notoriously (though contestably) vulnerable to excess and needs to be moderated in reference to shared norms of reasonableness, it represents an appropriate response to wilful harm and needs to be afforded a central role in any conception of justice.
In both Australia and South Africa a state‐sponsored discourse of reconciliation has been deployed as a tool of national integration and state building. This usage has tended to encourage a politics of selective memory that runs contrary to the spirit of reconciliation as recognition of different views of the nation. This article seeks to recover (and promote) a more positive concept of reconciliation by treating it as a discursive, democratic space in which different versions of the national story can be acknowledged and negotiated. The cases of Australia and South Africa are used in a mutually illuminating way to explore what “telling the truth” about the past might mean and how such “truth‐telling” might help restore legitimacy to liberal states confronted with a “broken moral order”.
As a reoccupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972 demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992 Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.
This article seeks to both re-examine the legal and political basis for the denial of Aboriginal `sovereignty' in Australia and to question the universality of the discourse of sovereignty itself. Drawing on Foucault's recently translated lectures from the Collège de France, Society Must Be Defended, it endeavours to show how the discourse of territorial sovereignty was mobilized in the colonial context (as a myth of foundation) to shore up the position of the British Crown and extinguish alternative conceptions of politics and justice. The article argues that the institutionalization of British sovereignty in Australia does not represent the beginning of the reign of law (more or less just), but a partisan victory — the victory of a modern western conception of politics over a pre-existing system of Indigenous self-governance. On the basis of this analysis, it suggests that the problem that arises in the colonial context is not simply that the sovereign assumes an exceptional position in relation to the law. It is also (and possibly more importantly) that government becomes equated with sovereignty in a way that automatically discounts forms of politics not based on the principle of territoriality.
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