Thammasat University students interested in political science, history, sociology, economics, civil rights, social evolution, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
After Dictatorship: Instruments of Transitional Justice in Post-Authoritarian Systems is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110796629/html?lang=en
It is edited by Professor Peter Hoeres and Dr. Hubertus Knabe at the university of Würzburg, Germany.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of how dictatorships end.
The publisher’s description reads:
Numerous studies concerning transitional justice exist. However, comparatively speaking, the effects actually achieved by measures for coming to terms with dictatorships have seldom been investigated. There is an even greater lack of transnational analyses.
This volume contributes to closing this gap in research. To this end, it analyses processes of coming to terms with the past in seven countries with different experiences of violence and dictatorship. Experts have drawn up detailed studies on transitional justice in Albania, Argentina, Ethiopia, Chile, Rwanda, South Africa and Uruguay. Their analyses constitute the empirical material for a comparative study of the impact of measures introduced within the context of transitional justice.
It becomes clear that there is no sure formula for dealing with dictatorships. Successes and deficits alike can be observed in relation to the individual instruments of transitional justice – from criminal prosecution to victim compensation. Nevertheless, the South American states perform much better than those on the African continent. This depends less on the instruments used than on political and social factors. Consequently, strategies of transitional justice should focus more closely on these contextual factors.
- Examines the impact of transitional justice measures
- Focus on processes in 7 countries on 3 continents
- First analysis of transitional justice from a long-term historical perspective
- Essential reading on effectively coming to terms with dictatorships
The book’s introduction begins:
Numerous institutions, organizations and individuals are engaged in the political, cultural, social, and religious reappraisal of dictatorships. These include the successor governments that replace dictatorships, political parties, and civil society organizations such as human rights associations, victims’ associations and churches or other religious communities. After the end of the National Socialist and fascist dictatorships in 1945, the collapse of the communist regimes at the end of the 1980s and the fall of numerous dictatorships in Africa, Latin America, and Asia between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, the challenge was to ensure a peaceful transition to post-dictatorial societies on the one hand, and to come to terms with the overthrown dictatorships, punish the perpetrators and provide satisfaction for the victims on the other. The underlying international circumstances, the historical-cultural contexts, and the preconditions in terms of historical mentalities in this regard were very different. The memory boom from the 1970s onwards and the emergence of the paradigm of commemorative culture since the 1990s¹ have also intrinsically motivated academic research to devote more attention to this subject area. What often got lost in this development was the broad historical perspective, was diachronic localization, but also –and this is especially true of the German preoccupation with coming to terms with the Nazi past – the international comparative perspective. As it happens, the German example is surprisingly absent in many cases from recent research on transitional justice.
[…]
If we take the victims’ view, things look different: following the fall of a dictatorship, victims may demand recognition, satisfaction, compensation, and remembrance of their suffering. From this perspective, perpetrators should not go unpunished. They should be deprived of their privileges and ousted from influential positions. Furthermore, political lessons should be learned, and the victims rehabilitated and recognized. Only then can there be reconciliation and a subsidence of memory. Nonetheless, victims in particular may not necessarily want to be reminded on a daily basis of their suffering and the injustice they experienced.
These different needs and goals have determined the dialectical culture of remembrance since antiquity, which was characterized by the interplay of limited revenge and (restricted) amnesties, the commemoration of the dead and the prohibition of remembrance. The all-round ideologization of the enemy in the First World War broke with this tradition. Indeed, the ostracism of and discrimination against the enemy were made permanent by the peace treaties, which contained implicit attributions of guilt and thereby departed from traditional amnesty clauses: the Treaty of Versailles even provided for the extradition and punishment of the Kaiser and – unilaterally – of war criminals. Today, the commemoration of the genocides of the twentieth century, of the Holocaust, the Holodomor or the mass murder of the Armenians during the First World War, acts as a collective imperative to prevent the repetition of such atrocities. This kind of command to remember is also applied to other issues, such as the colonial past. However, it does not necessarily follow that permanent remembrance will prevent a repetition of atrocities. The numerous wars of recent times, such as those in the Balkans or in the Ukraine, resulted in part from an excess of remembrance rather than a lack of it and make generalizations regarding the pedagogics of memory appear questionable.
In most post-dictatorial societies, it is therefore rather an interplay and struggle between the poles of remembrance and reappraisal on the one hand and reconciliation and forgetting, silence, but also repression and the obscuring of memory on the other, which can still be observed today. The central importance of justice in coming to terms with dictatorships – not for nothing is the generic term ‘transitional justice’ used – appears dialectical with regard to remembering and forgetting. ‘The demand on law has as much to do with forgetting as it has with remembering: paradoxically, if the past is too alive it will never be past, yet, the truth has to be remembered first in order that it can be forgotten.’ If the law is applied, the legal institution of amnesty, as with confession, is not about pushing away and suppressing injustice, but first about revealing and naming the injustice. Only then can forgiveness be granted, or punishment be restrained. This is the idea behind the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, which promised amnesty in return for admissions of guilt. In order to achieve a depoliticization of the past in the long term, and thus to pacify the present, transitional justice must take into account and balance the will to truth and the desire for pacification in equal measure.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)