Abstract

BEVERNAGE, Berber. Writing the Past out of the Present. History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice. Rev. colomb. educ. [online]. 2016, n.71, pp.25-52. ISSN 0120-3916.

One of the most remarkable trends of the past decades in the field of transitional justice is undoubtedly the rise of the so-called 'truth commissions'. With the increasing political investment in truth commissions, and with a worldwide celebration of historical truth, history has moved to centre stage in the ethico-political management of the past. However this focus on history is far from a self-evident virtue and raises a simple but important question: why recently have states which have come out of a period of violence turned to history in order to attain national unity and reconciliation? The answer to this question, I argue, must be sought in history's relation to a specific 'politics of time'. Instead of interpreting transitional politics in terms of an opposition between remembering and forgetting, as is often done, I will show that the current field of transitional justice is an arena for two conflicting ways of remembering which are driven by contrary temporal features. Truth commissions do not appropriate any kind of remembrance, at random, but specifically turn to history, or, more accurately, to a certain discourse of history. Once introduced into the field of transitional justice, this discourse of history tends to conflict with memory, or, more accurately, with a certain kind of memory. History, I claim, is introduced into the field of transitional justice not despite an already overabundant memory but because of it; and the conflict between the two is centred on different conceptions of time and different conceptions of the relation between past and present. Throughout this paper we will use illustrations from the South African and Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.

Keywords : Memory; history; justice; transitional; truth commissions.

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