The (Re)Collection of Memory after Mass Atrocity and the Dilemma for Transitional Justice
When a government engages in the mass killing of its own citizens, how can the nation ever recover? These atrocities destroy the moral fabric which binds a nation. To recover, this fabric must be remade. Many social scientists and legal scholars believe that developing collective memory – an enduring and shared memory of the events that help to heal the wounds of a tattered national conscience and prevent the recurrence of mass atrocities – is essential to such reconstruction. However, the preservation of collective memory is in tension with another impulse after mass atrocity: the desire for justice. Because notions of individualism and autonomy heavily influence legal institutions worldwide, they risk the destruction of collective memory. This friction constitutes a central dilemma in facilitating transitional justice.In this article, I urge a fundamental reconceptualization of the law’s preference for individual memory in the context of transitional justice. I argue that the inclusion of collective memory will facilitate a better understanding of the collective harms that characterize mass atrocities and will serve the distinct goals of transitional justice, including reconciliation, the creation of a historical record, nation-building, and legal reform. I further argue that human rights lawyers should act as preservers and promoters of collective memory. In doing so, they may be able to help heal wounds outside traditional justice tribunals – while at the same time providing essential assistance to these tribunals if and when legal proceedings do finally occur.
The art and politics of imagination: remembering mass violence against women
ABSTRACT This paper addresses the role of artistic memory in processes of redressing political violence and historical injustices. Combining philosophical reflection, insights from memory studies and examples of artistic practices, it focuses on how memory and imagination coalesce in problematising mass violence against women and resisting its ‘official’ oblivion. The argument is that artistic memory work can foster collective memories of the painful past in ways that overcome both individual and national representations. To this end, this paper aims to explore various contemporary art productions as new models of memorialization, which deal with the representation of violence against women in armed conflicts and under political repression. The academic literature on the role of art in processes of dealing with the past tends to examine literature, film, theatre, painting and other more traditional artistic media of commemorating the victims of mass violence. In contrast, this paper explores the political potentialities of new artistic models of memorialization, namely participatory and collaborative artistic practices. Unlike the traditional media, they can commemorate victims performatively and collaboratively, simultaneously catalysing transnational solidarity and new forms of politics ‘from below.’
The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice
I want to talk today about the spiritual dimension of social justice. And in that spirit, let me begin with an eloquent formulation by Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.”1 That’s one very beautiful way that Dr. King tried to capture the existential grace and recognition and affirmation that comes through the experience of justice and the work of justice in a culture. He also said famously that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”2 Both of these ways of talking about justice begin with the assumption that we are already connected, that we are anchored to each other in our common humanity, and that the work of law and justice is something like the work of a mountain climber, who throws his pick to the top of a mountain, pulls strongly on the rope of conviction that links us to a common vision—our common destination—and then finds his or her steps as a result of that anchorage in a future vision based on our already existing social bond. The foundation of that social bond is what I call the desire for mutual recognition. In our world as it exists, we all spend much of our lives encapsulated in private separate spheres, living out our private destinies in a kind of mutually imposed spiritual prison. But in reality we are always animated by the desire for an authentic mutual connection with another human being, or with many other human beings. Through the experience of mutual recognition, one can sense the other as a Thou, as Martin Buber famously put it in his book I and Thou.3 That is, we attempt to realize in human