Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 13, Issue , 1999, Pages 43-64

  Crocker, David A ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85008504999     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.1999.tb00326.x     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. The best multidisciplinary collections on transitional justice are Neil J. Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995)
2. Naomi Roht-Arriaza, ed., Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
3. A. James McAdams, ed., Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).
4. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Truth About Dictatorship,” New York Review of Books 45 (February 19, 1998), p. 35.
5. For these broader issues, see Ash's essay and Juan E. Méndez, “Accountability for Past Abuses,” Human Rights Quarterly 19 (1997), pp. 256–58
6. “In Defense of Transitional Justice,” in McAdams, ed., Transitional Justice, pp. 22–23, n. 4.
7. Seth Mydans, “Under Prodding, 2 Khmer Rouge Apologize for the Reign of Terror,” New York Times, December 30, 1998, p. A1
8. “Cambodian Leader Resists Punishing Top Khmer Rouge,” New York Times, December 29, 1998, pp. A1, A8.
9. See Steven R. Ratner and Jason S. Abrams, Accountability for Human Rights and Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)
10. Aryeh Neier, War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice (New York: Times Books, 1998).
11. Ruth Wedgwood, “Fiddling in Rome,” Foreign Affairs 77 (November-December 1998), pp. 20–24.
12. Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (New York: Pantheon, 1990)
13. Roy Gutman, Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993)
14. Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism (New York: Random House, 1995)
15. “Defending the Indefensible,” New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1998, pp. 45–69
16. David Rohde, Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre since World War II (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997)
17. Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)
18. Roger Cohen, Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (New York: Random House, 1997)
19. Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998)
20. Bill Berkeley, “Aftermath: The Pursuit of Justice and the Future of Africa,” Washington Post Magazine, October 11, 1998, pp. 10–15, 25–29
21. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).
22. See, for example, the essays by the following authors, in Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice, vol. 1, who took part respectively in attempts to reckon with past wrongs in El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile: Thomas Buergenthal, Carlos Nino, and José Zalaguett.
23. See McAdams, ed., Transitional Justice
24. Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1997).
25. See Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. xxvii.
26. See, for example, Donald Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
27. Pablo De Greiff, “Trial and Punishment, Pardon and Oblivion: On Two Inadequate Policies for the Treatment of Former Human Rights Abusers,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 12 (1996), pp. 93–111
28. “International Criminal Courts and Transitions to Democracy,” Public Affairs Quarterly 12 (1998), pp. 79–99
29. Lyn S. Graybiil, “South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Ethical and Theological Perspectives,” Ethics & International Affairs 12 (1998), pp. 43–62.
30. One exception to this judgment is Ash, “The Truth About Dictatorship.” Although he neither clarifies nor defends his ethical assumptions and although his particular assessments can be disputed, Ash insightfully considers four general measures-forgetting, trials, purges, and historical writing-with lots of variations and examples, especially from East and Central European countries.
31. David A. Crocker, “Transitional Justice and International Civil Society: Toward a Normative Framework,” Constellations 5 (1998), pp. 492–517
32. “Civil Society and Transitional Justice,” in Robert Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming)
33. “Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, and Civil Society” (paper presented at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Conference, World Peace Foundation, Somerset West, South Africa, May 28–30, 1998).
34. My list of objectives has benefited from the work of Méndez and Zalaquett as well as from that of Margaret Popkin and Naomi Roht-Arriaza, who formulate and employ four criteria in “Truth as Justice: Investigatory Commissions in Latin America,” Law and Social Inquiry 20 (1995), pp. 79–116, especially pp. 93–106.
35. Crocker, “Transitional Justice and International Civil Society,” pp. 495–96.
36. Svetozar Stojanović, The Fall of Yugoslavia: Why Communism Failed (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997), pp. 77–78; see also pp. 89–92.
37. Alex Boraine, “The Societal and Conflictual Conditions That Are Necessary or Conducive to Truth Commissions” (paper presented at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Conference, World Peace Foundation, Somerset West, South Africa, May 28–30, 1998).
38. Rohde, End Game, p. 226.
39. End Game, pp. 230–31.
40. For investigations of what the United States and other Western powers could and should have done to prevent the Holocaust, see Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999)
41. Istvan Deak, “Horror and Hindsight,” a review of Official Secrets by Richard Breitman, The New Republic, February 15, 1999, pp. 38–41.
42. For consideration of the same issues with respect to the failure of the United States, the UN, and the European Union to intervene militarily in Croatia and Bosnia in 1991–95, see Mark Danner, “The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe,” New York Review of Books 44 (November 20, 1997), pp. 56–64.
43. See my “Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, and Civil Society.”
44. See, for example, Patrick Ball, Who Did What to Whom? Planning and Implementing a Large Scale Human Rights Data Project (Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1996).
45. See Mark Danner, “Bosnia: The Turning Point,” New York Review of Books 45 (February 5, 1998), pp. 34–41, for a compelling argument that rejects Serb claims that it was Muslims themselves who were responsible for the mortar attack that killed 68 Muslims in a Sarajevan market on February 5, 1994.
46. Suzanne Daly, “In Apartheid Injury, Agony Is Relived But Not Put to Rest,” New York Times, July 17, 1997, pp. A1, A10.
47. “Aftermath: Genocide, the Pursuit of Justice and the Future of Africa,” Washington Post Magazine, October 11, 1998, pp. 14, 28.
48. See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustration (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 304–27
49. Neier, War Crimes, pp. 229–45
50. Mark J. Osiel, “Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War,” California Law Review 86 (October 1998), pp. 943–1129.
51. Peter Quint, The Imperfect Union: Constitutional Structures of German Unification (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 194–215.
52. Cf. Anne Sa'adah, Germany's Second Chance: Trust, Justice, and Reconciliation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
53. Larry May and Stacey Hoffman, eds., Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
54. See Carlos Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 210–28
55. Neier, War Crimes, pp. 210–228
56. Peter A. French, ed., The Spectrum of Responsibility (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).
57. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial
58. “A Consensual Theory of Punishment,” in A. John Simmons et al., eds., Punishment: A Philosophy & Public Affairs Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 95–111
59. Malamud-Goti, “Transitional Governments in the Breach: Why Punish State Criminals?” in Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice, vol. 1, pp. 193–202.
60. See, for example, Simmons et al., eds., Punishment
61. Lawrence Crocker, “The Upper Limit of Punishment,” Emory Law Journal 41 (1992), pp. 1059–1110
62. Michael Moore, Laying Blame (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
63. David Luban, “The Legacies of Nuremberg,” in Legal Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 335–78.
64. Cf. Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1977), pp. 33–39.
65. See, for example, Stephen Holmes, “The End of Decommunization,” in Kritz, ed., Transitional Justice, vol. 1, pp. 116–20
66. Jon Elster, “On Doing What One Can: An Argument Against PostCommunist Restitution and Retribution,” in Transitional Justice, pp. 556–68.
67. Warren Hoge, “Law Lords in London Open Rehearing of Pinochet Case,” New York Times January 19, 1999, p. A1.
68. Report of the [South African] Truth and Reconciliation Commission, vol. 5, chap. 5, para. 27–28 and 85–93.
69. David A. Sanger, “Gold Dispute with the Swiss Declared to Be at an End,” New York Times, January 31, 1999, p. A1.
70. Roger Cohen, “German Companies Adopt Fund for Slave Laborers Under Nazis,” New York Times, February 17, 1999, p. A1. Cohen observes that “since World War Two the German government has paid out about $80 billion in aid, most of it to Jews who survived concentration camps or fled.”
71. New York Times.
72. See Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), especially chaps. 8, 17, and 18
73. Larry A. Diamond, “Democracy in Latin America: Degrees, Illusions, Directions for Consolidation,” in Tom Farer, ed., Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 52–104.
74. See, for example, David A. Crocker, “Development Ethics,” in Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 39–44
75. Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds., Women, Culture, and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
76. Charles Villa-Vicencio, “A Different Kind of Justice: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Contemporary Justice Review (forthcoming).
77. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law, p. 17, n. 22; see also pp. 47–51; 204, n. 136; 263–65.
78. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions” (paper presented at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Conference, World Peace Foundation, Somerset West, South Africa, May 28–30, 1998).
79. See David Little, “A Different Kind of Justice: Dealing with Human Rights Violations in Transitional Societies,” in this volume.
80. See Susan Dwyer, “Reconciliation for Realists,” in this volume.
81. See Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, “In South Africa, Much Truth Yields Little Reconciliation,” Baltimore Sun, July 30, 1998, p. 12
82. Phylicia Oppelt, “Irreconcilable: The Healing Work of My Country's Truth Commission Has Opened New Wounds for Me,” Washington Post, September 13, 1998, pp. C1, C4.
83. See James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996)
84. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
85. Seth Mydans, “20 Years On, Anger Ignites Against Khmer Rouge,” New York Times, January 10, 1999, p. A1.
86. See, for example, Priscilla B. Hayner, “The Past as Predator: The Role of Official Truth-Seeking in Conflict Resolution and Prevention,” in National Research Council, International Conflict Resolution: Techniques and Evaluation (Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, forthcoming).
87. Manuel Formosa, “La alternativa: Repensar la revolucion,” Seminario Universidad, Universidad de Costa Rica, Octobcr 23, 1987, p. 5.