Download or read book The Provocations of Amnesty written by Erik Doxtader and published by New Africa Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's amnesty was a unique experiment. A path that lay 'between a Nuremberg option and total amnesia, ' the amnesty process was designed in the heat of a remarkable and complex transition to constitutional democracy
Download or read book Amnesty After Atrocity written by Helena Cobban and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A compelling read." Richard J. Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor of the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda "A very important contribution." Princeton N. Lyman, Council on Foreign Relations "A powerful reminder that dealing with the legacy of wartime atrocities is not simply a matter of bringing perpetrators to justice. It also means overcoming the divisions within the society and healing the victims." Marina Ottaway, Senior Associate, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace In Amnesty after Atrocity? veteran journalist Helena Cobban examines the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with the aftermath of genocide and violence committed during intergroup conflicts. She traveled to Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa to assess the various ways those nations tried to come to grips with their violent past: from war crimes trials to truth commissions to outright amnesties for perpetrators. She discovered that in terms of both moving forward and satisfying the needs of survivors, war crimes trials are not the most effective path. This book provides historical context and includes interviews with a cross-section of people: community leaders, victims, policymakers, teachers, rights activists, and even some former abusers. These first-person accounts create a rich, readable text, and Cobban's overall conclusions will surprise many readers in the West.
Download or read book Why the Humanities Matter written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging study of the influence of postmodernism on contemporary culture offers a trenchant and uplifting defense of the humanities. Is there life after postmodernism? Many claim that it sounded the death knell for history, art, ideology, science, possibly all of Western philosophy, and even the concept of reality itself. Responding to essential questions regarding whether the humanities can remain politically and academically relevant amid this twenty-first-century uncertainty, Why the Humanities Matter offers a guided tour of the modern condition, calling upon thinkers in a variety of disciplines to affirm essential concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty. Through a lens of “new humanism,” Frederick Aldama provides a liberating examination of the current cultural repercussions of assertions by such revolutionary theorists as Said, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, as well as Latin Americanists such as Sommer and Mignolo. Emphasizing pedagogy and popular culture with equal verve, Aldama presents an enlightening way to explore what “culture” actually does—who generates it and how it shapes our identities—and the role of academia in sustaining it.
Download or read book Amnesties Accountability and Human Rights written by Renée Jeffery and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the last thirty years, documented human rights violations have been met with an unprecedented rise in demands for accountability. This trend challenges the use of amnesties which typically foreclose opportunities for criminal prosecutions that some argue are crucial to transitional justice. Recent developments have seen amnesties circumvented, overturned, and resisted by lawyers, states, and judiciaries committed to ending impunity for human rights violations. Yet, despite this global movement, the use of amnesties since the 1970s has not declined. Amnesties, Accountability, and Human Rights examines why and how amnesties persist in the face of mounting pressure to prosecute the perpetrators of human rights violations. Drawing on more than 700 amnesties instituted between 1970 and 2005, Renée Jeffery maps out significant trends in the use of amnesty and offers a historical account of how both the use and the perception of amnesty has changed. As mechanisms to facilitate transitions to democracy, to reconcile divided societies, or to end violent conflicts, amnesties have been adapted to suit the competing demands of contemporary postconflict politics and international accountability norms. Through the history of one evolving political instrument, Amnesties, Accountability, and Human Rights sheds light on the changing thought, practice, and goals of human rights discourse generally.
Download or read book Historical Justice in International Perspective written by Manfred Berg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes a valuable contribution to debates on redress for historical injustices by offering case studies from nine countries on five continents. The contributors examine the problems of material restitution, criminal justice, apologies, recognition, memory and reconciliation in national contexts as well as from a comparative perspective. Among the topics discussed are the claims for reparations for slavery in the United States, West German restitution for the Holocaust, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge's mass murders in Cambodia and the struggles of the indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand. The book highlights the diversity of the ways societies have tried to right past wrongs as the demand for historical justice has become universal.
Download or read book Intersections of Law and Memory written by Mirosław Michał Sadowski and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book elaborates a new framework for considering and understanding the relationship between law and memory. How can law influence collective memory? What are the mechanisms law employs to influence social perceptions of the past? And how successful is law in its attempts to rewrite narratives about the past? As the field of memory studies has grown, this book takes a step back from established transitional justice narratives, returning to the core sociological, philosophical and legal theoretical issues that underpin this field. The book then goes on to propose a new approach to the relationship between law and collective memory based on a conception of ‘legal institutions of memory’. It then elaborates the functioning of such institutions through a range of examples – taken from Japan, Iraq, Brazil, Portugal, Rwanda and Poland – that move from the work of international tribunals and truth commissions to more explicit memory legislation. The book concludes with a general assessment of the contemporary intersections of law and memory, and their legal institutionalisation. This book will be of interest to scholars with relevant interests in the sociology of law, legal theory and international law, as well as in sociology and politics.
Download or read book From Apartheid to Democracy written by Katherine Elizabeth Mack and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided people and facilitating the construction of South Africa’s new democracy. Other books on the TRC and deliberative rhetoric in contemporary South Africa emphasize the achievement of reconciliation during and in the immediate aftermath of the transition from apartheid. From Apartheid to Democracy, in contrast, considers the varied, complex, and enduring effects of the Commission’s rhetorical wager. It is the first book-length study to analyze the TRC through such a lens. Katherine Elizabeth Mack focuses on the dissension and negotiations over difference provoked by the Commission’s process, especially its public airing of victims’ and perpetrators’ truths. She tracks agonistic deliberation (evidenced in the TRC’s public hearings) into works of fiction and photography that extend and challenge the Commission’s assumptions about truth, healing, and reconciliation. Ultimately, Mack demonstrates that while the TRC may not have achieved all of its political goals, its very existence generated valuable deliberation within and beyond its official process.
Download or read book Constitutionalism and Transitional Justice in South Africa written by Andrea Lollini and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last fifteen years, the South African postapartheid Transitional Amnesty Process – implemented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – has been extensively analyzed by scholars and commentators from around the world and from almost every discipline of human sciences. Lawyers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists as well as political scientists have tried to understand, describe and comment on the ‘shocking’ South African political decision to give amnesty to all who fully disclosed their politically motivated crimes committed during the apartheid era. Investigating the postapartheid transition in South Africa from a multidisciplinary perspective involving constitutional law, criminal law, history and political science, this book explores the overlapping of the postapartheid constitution-making process and the Amnesty Process for political violence under apartheid and shows that both processes represent important innovations in terms of constitutional law and transitional justice systems. Both processes contain mechanisms that encourage the constitution of the unity of the political body while ensuring future solidity and stability. From this perspective, the book deals with the importance of several concepts such as truth about the past, publicly shared memory, unity of the political body and public confession.
Download or read book Current Issues in Transitional Justice written by Natalia Szablewska and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-27 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is an inter-disciplinary scholarly resource bringing together contributions from writers, experienced academics and practitioners working in fields such as human rights, humanitarian law, public policy, psychology, cultural and peace studies, and earth jurisprudence. This collection of essays presents the most up to date knowledge and status of the field of transitional justice, and also highlights the emerging debates in this area, which are often overseen and underdeveloped in the literature. The volume provides a wide coverage of the arguments relating to controversial issues emanating from different regions of the world. The book is divided into four parts which groups different aspects of the problems and issues facing transitional justice as a field, and its processes and mechanisms more specifically. Part I concentrates on the traditional means and methods of dealing with past gross abuses of power and political violence. In this section, the authors also expand and often challenge the ways that these processes and mechanisms are conceptualised and introduced. Part II provides a forum for the contributors to share their first hand experiences of how traditional and customary mechanisms of achieving justice can be effectively utilised. Part III includes a collection of essays which challenges existing transitional justice models and provides new lenses to examine the formal and traditional processes and mechanisms. It aims to expose insufficiencies and some of the inherent practical and jurisprudential problems facing the field. Finally, Part IV, looks to the future by examining what remedies can be available today for abuses of rights of the future generations and those who have no standing to claim their rights, such as the environment.
Download or read book When Political Transitions Work written by Fanie du Toit and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The peaceful end of apartheid in South Africa was a monumental event in late twentieth century history. A racist regime built upon a foundation of colonialist exploitation, South Africa had become by that point a tinderbox: suffused with day-to-day violence and political extremism on all sides. Yet two decades later it was a stable democracy with a growing economy. How did such a deeply divided, conflicted society manage this remarkable transition? In When Political Transitions Work, Fanie du Toit, who has been a participant and close observer in post-conflict developments throughout Africa for decades, offers a new theory for why South Africa's reconciliation worked and why its lessons remain relevant for other nations emerging from civil conflicts. He uses reconciliation as a framework for political transition and seeks to answer three key questions: how do the reconciliation processes begin; how can political transitions result in inclusive and fair institutional change; and to what extent does reconciliation change the way a society functions? Looking at South Africa, one of reconciliation's most celebrated cases, Du Toit shows that the key ingredient to successful reconciliations is acknowledging the centrality of relationships. He further develops his own theoretical approach to reconciliation-as-interdependence-the idea that reconciliation is the result of an integrated process of courageous leadership, fair and inclusive institutions, and social change built toward a mutual goal of prosperity. As Du Toit conveys, the motivation for reconciliation is the long-term well-being of one's own community, as well as that of enemy groups. Without ensuring the conditions in which one's enemy can flourish, one's own community is unlikely to prosper sustainably.
Download or read book Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice written by Nanci Adler and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-22 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s, an array of legal and non-legal practices—labeled Transitional Justice—has been developed to support post-repressive, post-authoritarian, and post-conflict societies in dealing with their traumatic past. In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice, the contributors analyze the processes, products, and efficacy of a number of transitional justice mechanisms and look at how genocide, mass political violence, and historical injustices are being institutionally addressed. They invite readers to speculate on what (else) the transcripts produced by these institutions tell us about the past and the present, calling attention to the influence of implicit history conveyed in the narratives that have gained an audience through international criminal tribunals, trials, and truth commissions. Nanci Adler has gathered leading specialists to scrutinize the responses to and effects of violent pasts that provide new perspectives for understanding and applying transitional justice mechanisms in an effort to stop the recycling of old repressions into new ones.
Download or read book Religion and Conflict Resolution written by Megan Shore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ambiguous role that Christianity played in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It has two objectives: to analyse the role Christianity played in the TRC and to highlight certain consequences that may be instructive to future international conflict resolution processes. Religion and conflict resolution is an area of significant importance. Ongoing conflicts involving Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Hindus, and even radical Islamic jihadists and Western countries have heightened the awareness of the potential power of religion to fuel conflict. Yet these religious traditions also promote peace and respect for others as key components in doing justice. Examining the potential role religion can play in generating peace and justice, specifically Christianity in South Africa's TRC, is of utmost importance as religiously inspired violence continues to occur. This book highlights the importance of accounting for religion in international conflict resolution.
Download or read book An Introduction to International Criminal Law and Procedure written by Robert Cryer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International criminal law has developed considerably in the last decade and a half, resulting in a complex and re-invigorated discipline. This has impacted directly on the popularity of the study of the subject, particularly on postgraduate law degrees. This textbook serves these courses by providing an introduction to the principles of international criminal law and processes. Written by four international lawyers with experience of teaching international criminal law, it is accessible yet sophisticated in its approach. It covers substantive international criminal law, the institutions designed to enforce it and their procedures, and the international law applicable to domestic prosecutions of international crimes. It will be essential reading for students and teachers of international criminal law. In addition, practitioners and researchers in the field (and in related fields such as criminal law), students of international law and international relations will find this introduction invaluable.
Download or read book Carrots and Sticks written by Jeremy Sarkin and published by Intersentia nv. This book was released on 2004 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the South African amnesty process. Many of the most well-known cases are investigated. The content of many of the amnesty decisions are investigated to see how the Amnesty Committee applied the amnesty law and whether the decisions were fair and consistent.
Download or read book Reconciliation Discourse written by Annelies Verdoolaege and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-02-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a traumatised post-conflict society. The book is unique on several levels: TRC discourse is explored in-depth on the basis of personal stories from TRC testifiers; a combination of Poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches form the theoretical foundations; and an extensive bibliography provides an impressive database of TRC publications.
Download or read book Amnesty in the Age of Human Rights Accountability written by Francesca Lessa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-28 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume brings together well-established and emerging scholars of transitional justice to discuss the persistence of amnesty in the age of human rights accountability. The volume attempts to reframe debates, moving beyond the limited approaches of 'truth versus justice' or 'stability versus accountability' in which many of these issues have been cast in the existing scholarship. The theoretical and empirical contributions in this book offer new ways of understanding and tackling the enduring persistence of amnesty in the age of accountability. In addition to cross-national studies, the volume encompasses eleven country cases of amnesty for past human rights violations: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Uganda and Uruguay. The volume goes beyond merely describing these case studies, but also considers what we learn from them in terms of overcoming impunity and promoting accountability to contribute to improvements in human rights and democracy.
Download or read book Justice and Reconciliation in Post Apartheid South Africa written by François Du Bois (jurist.) and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An assessment of the transitional processes aimed at creating a stable and just society in South Africa.
