Dealing with Wars and Dictatorships
Legal Concepts and Categories in Action
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Beschreibung
The 20th century saw an unprecedented number of major wars, conflicts, and massive human rights violations. From each emerged the desire to make sense of the recent past (and present) by imagining new ways of dealing with such events. In order to prevent new forms of violence, or to punish the persons responsible of past horrors, various solutions have been imagined, deployed, implemented, and discussed, at different levels.
This book is a reflection on the social and historical construction, appropriation, and circulation of categories, norms, and savoir-faire related to the ways social groups and institutions—state, judiciary, professional organizations—confront traumatic events. Even if there is a robust literature on purges and other mechanisms intended to deal with an authoritarian or violent past, written by authors belonging to numerous disciplines and exploring different periods and topics with a variety of theoretical and methodological backgrounds, our goal was to propose a more sociologically oriented model of analysis. Far from being only an intellectual frenzy, this orientation appears to be less normative than most “post-transitional” approaches and potentially more general than strictly monographic approaches. In doing so, our objective is not only to provide a critical approach, but also to sustain a more realistic view of this highly political and moral domain.
Democratic ‘transitions’ in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South Africa, often studied under the conceptual rubric of ‘transitional justice’, have involved the formation of public policies toward the past that are multifaceted and often ambitious. Recent scholarship rarely questions the concepts and categories transposed from one country to another. This is true both in the language of political life and in the social sciences examining past-oriented public policy, especially policy toward ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the line between the language of political practice, legal analysis, and scholarly discourse has been quite porous. This book examines how these phenomena have been described and understood by focusing recent processes, such as the advent of international criminal justice, in relation to previous postwar and recent purges. By crossing disciplinary approaches and periods, the authors pay attention to three main aspects: the legal or political concepts used (and/or the ones mobilized in the academic work); the circulation of categories, know-how, and arguments; the different levels that can shed light on transitions.
Examines what is today uncritically called “transitional justice” and how it has been described and understood since World War Two Focuses on the legal and political concepts used in everyday life and/or the ones mobilized in the academic work Examines the circulation of categories, know-how, arguments, among countries and periods Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Autor*in
Liora Israël
Themen in »Dealing with Wars and Dictatorships«
Human Rights Violations International Criminal Justice Purges, ethnic cleansing Transitional justice Épuration