transitional justice and memory: exploring perspectives

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Transitional Justice and Memory:Exploring PerspectivesAlexandra Barahona de BritoPublished online: 08 Dec 2010.

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Transitional Justice and Memory:Exploring PerspectivesAlexandra Barahona de Brito

This article suggests that the study of transitional justice could benefit from the insightsof memory studies, and proposes that transitional justice is a first step in ongoing‘memory cycles’, and that the politics of memory after state violence is qualitatively

different from that which occurs in times of peace and normality. It illustrates some of thelimitations of abstract normative approaches, and discusses how these and historically

grounded and context-specific perspectives may be mobilised as two partial ways oflooking at the same reality. It suggests Wilber’s framework as a useful device to think in a

multi-perspective and multi-disciplinary way about the topic.

Keywords: Transitional Justice; Social Memory; Politics of Memory; Universalism;

Relativism

Whereas the natural and the cultural or hermeneutic sciences are capable of living inmutually indifferent, albeit more hostile than peaceful co-existence, the socialsciences must bear the tension of divergent approaches under one roof, for in themthe very practice of research compels reflection on the relationship betweenanalytical and hermeneutic research methodologies. (Habermas 1967, p. 3)

For the most part, studies of transitional justice, which are part of the comparative

politics and political science family, and memory studies, that emerge from sociology,cultural studies and psychology, have not crossed paths.1 In this essay I suggest someways in which the study of transitional justice could benefit from more systematically

exploring the insights offered by memory studies, to add historical and contextualdepth to our understanding of the topic and thereby minimise some of the limitations

inherent to more abstract normative approaches.I start by clarifying the concepts and then highlight three ways in which memory

studies can enrich political science perspectives on the topic by exploring the collectivedimension of social memory, mnemonic communities and institutions of memory.

I then propose that transitional justice is a first step in endless ‘memory cycles’punctuated by what Alexander Wilde (1999) has described as ‘irruptions of memory’.

I also suggest that we should see ‘post-authoritarian’ social memory-making—what

ISSN 1360-8746 (print)/ISSN 1743-9612 (online) q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13608746.2010.513599

South European Society and Politics

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I have called ‘the politics of memory’ (Barahona de Brito 2001a; 2001b)—asqualitatively different from that which occurs in times of peace and normality, as a

disjuncture in the always ongoing process of social memory-making.In the next section, I illustrate some of the limitations of abstract normative

approaches to the study of transitional justice. This is followed by a discussion of howabstract normative (‘universalist’) and historically grounded and context-specific

(‘relativist’) perspectives may not be as diametrically opposed as may initially appear.They can both be mobilised as partial ways of looking at the same reality. Explicit

admission of partiality may be the first step to developing a multi-perspective andmulti-disciplinary focus that yields a much more rounded picture of the object ofanalysis. I end with an outline of Wilber’s framework (2001), suggesting it may be

useful to combine various different ‘viewpoints’ when examining the issue oftransitional justice and memory.

Clarifying Concepts

‘Transitional justice’ is an umbrella term that covers a range of disparate practices(truth commissions, trials, compensation policies, amnesties, purges) to address a

violent past in a period of regime transition and to establish a moral and politicalbreak with a repressive non-democratic past (Barahona de Brito 1997). The word

‘transitional’ is problematic because experience shows these policies may originateduring a transition but persist—and even be initiated—well after the ‘transitional’

period is over (hence the emergence of the term ‘post-transitional justice’ in thepolitical science literature). ‘Backward-looking truth and justice or accountability’might be a better—albeit more long-winded and less appealing—label, but I retain

that popular shorthand usage here (Barahona de Brito 1997).The policies of ‘transitional justice’ are only a small part of the process whereby a

society interprets and appropriates its past in a post-authoritarian context. This I havecalled the ‘politics of memory’ (Barahona de Brito 2001a; 2001b). The latter is

intertwined with transitional justice policies but differs from them qualitatively andtemporally. The ‘politics of memory’ refers to the various ways that political elites,

social groups and institutions reinterpret the past and the breakdown of civility andpropagate new interpretative narratives about the ‘what happened’ to legitimate a newpolitical dispensation and develop a new vision of the future for the polity. In contrast

with transitional justice, which consists of policies and actions with relatively clearlydefined outlines and that are more temporally limited, the politics of memory is

connected with much broader processes of socialisation and identity formation. Thepolitics of memory involves important shifts in the way societies view their past. This

has been observed in post-communist societies: ‘major changes in the way we view thepast usually correspond to major social transformations that affect entire mnemonic

communities’ (Szacka 1997, p. x). The politics of memory represents a particularlyintense kind of social memory-making, the key mark of which is to shift the

boundaries, and patterns, of social and political inclusion and exclusion, thus marking

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new social and political continuities and discontinuities. With it, the voice of thevictims is legitimated, repression is condemned, democrats become the new winners,

and old repressors become pariahs.The politics of memory thus understood is, in turn, an aspect of a broader process

of social memory-making, a process in which societies continually engage.2 The socialmemory of ‘memory studies’ is not that of neuroscience, but the social or collective

‘summoning the past as past’, the ‘knowing ordering or the narrative organisation ofthe past’ by societies or social groups (Mitzal 2003, p. 10). Social memory generates

meaning and constitutes the ‘already existing meaning’ within which actors operateand enables individuals to form identities over time. It is therefore a ‘meaning-makingapparatus’ (Schwartz 2000, p. 17), but it is also a ‘membership-making apparatus’ at

the core of the creation of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). Social memoryshapes the present and the future. The stuff of social memory is the past, but it is

‘strategic in character and capable of influencing the present’ (Mitzal 2003, p. 13).It ‘reflects programs and frames the present’ (Schwartz 2000, p. 18). Memory defines

the scope and nature of action, reorders reality and legitimates power holders.Historical memories and collective remembrances can be instruments to legitimate

discourse, create loyalties and justify political options. Social memory also shapesfuture options. What and how societies choose to remember and forget largelydetermines their future options (Barahona de Brito 2001a; 2001b). To the extent that

this is true, all politics can be said to be underlain by social memory-making.In sum, we can view transitional justice as a component of the politics of memory,

and we can see the politics of memory in the aftermath of authoritarianism as aparticular kind of social memory-making. This ‘places’ transitional justice in a broader

historical context and to examine it resorting to the sociological, psychological andcultural perspectives that one finds in the discipline of memory studies. Below

I suggest some ways in which those insights can be applied to the study of transitionaljustice.

The Insights of Memory Studies

Generating Meaning and Structuring Action

Insights about how memory generates meaning and structures social action remind usthat we exist in a world in which political actors are not just strategic bargaining

entities making cost–benefit calculations, but human beings living in a many-layeredmeaning-laden world that is not of their creation and the plasticity of which is

determined by the actions and memories of various different groups.One of the puzzles in the study of memory is working out the links between

individual and collective memory. Some have argued that only individuals canremember and have memories and so there is no such thing as a collective memory

(which calls to mind Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there is no society, onlyindividuals). However, while remembering is an activity that can be undertaken only

by individuals, because such memories are socially communicated and socially and

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historically embedded, we can speak of social or collective memory. Collectivememories are ‘inter-subjectively constituted results of shared experience, ideas,

knowledge and cultural practices through which people construct a relationship to thepast’ (Mitzal 2003, p. x). We should ‘avoid both theories rooted in social determinism

(which subordinate individuals totally to a collectivity) and visions of anindividualistic, atomised social order (which deny the importance of communicative

relations between people and their social embeddedness)’ (Mitzal 2003, p. 10).As Mitzal evocatively summarises it, the relation between individual and collective

memory is similar to that between what Saussure called speech ( parole) and language(langue).

Memory is ‘social’ or ‘collective’ for a number of reasons and in a number of ways.

First, collective memory is ‘quite different from the sum total of the personalrecollections of its various individual members, as it includes only those that are

commonly shared by all of them’ (Zerubavel 1997, p. 96). Second, it is social because ‘itis society that ensures what we remember and how and when we remember it’ (Mitzal

2003, p. 11) and determines which events are considered ‘memorable’ and which are‘forgettable’. Third, memory is social because remembering ‘does not take place in a

vacuum’: it ‘exists through its relations with what has been shared with others:language, symbols, events, and social and cultural contexts’ (Mitzal 2003, pp. 11–12).Fourth, memory is social because it requires transmission, articulation and

cooperative actions. Memory ‘can be social only if it is capable of being transmitted,and to be transmitted a memory must first be articulated’ (Fentress & Wickham 1992,

p. 47). Social memory is ‘interactive, promoted by cultural artefacts and cues employedfor social purposes and even enacted by co-operative activity’ (Schudson 1997). It is

constituted not simply by what individuals actually remember from their pastexperience, but by ‘concentrated’ and ‘packaged’ memories transmitted by cultural

forms and institutions, including enactment through commemorative ceremonies(Connerton 1989). Individual memory ‘piggybacks on the social and cultural practise

of memory’, and collective memory combines what we actually remember and a‘constructed past which is constitutive of the collectivity’ (Schudson 1995, p. 347).These insights can mitigate the ‘hyper-agency’ that is implicit in some abstract political

science perspectives on transitional justice.

Mnemonic Communities

Memory studies have also given us the useful heuristic device of the mnemonic

community. This can draw our attention to the coexistence of various memorieswithin a single society, and to the fact that people do not act only according to strategic

calculations, but in light of the memories and narratives they have adopted and thatmake sense to them as members of a particular ‘memory group’. The literature has

identified the nation as the main mnemonic community (i.e. Anderson 1983; Gellner1993; Hobsbawm & Ranger 1992), but also refers to ethnic groups and the family.

These different mnemonic groups ‘socialise us to what should be remembered and


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what should be forgotten. They affect the “depth” of our memory;’ they ‘regulate howfar back we should remember, which part of the past should be remembered, which

events mark the beginning and which should be forced out of our story’ (Mitzal 2003,p. 15). Each mnemonic group will have a different ‘cognitive bias’, and each group’s

memory will be linked to ‘places, ruins, landscapes, monuments and urbanarchitecture’ (Mitzal 2003, p. 16).

We can usefully extend this concept to include other groups in our study oftransitional justice. ‘Victims’ and ‘perpetrators’, political parties, trade unions or

churches can be seen as mnemonic communities and not just as strategic actors,opportunity-maximising individuals, as ‘hardliners,’ ‘soft-liners’ or ‘opportunists’(to deploy the transitional terminology developed by O’Donnell and Schmitter

[1986]). They may be all of that, but our understanding of their actions gains greatdepth if we see they are not just that but also the bearer of particular constellations of

memories and particular meaning-engendering social narratives. Thus, a politicalparty that opts to address the issue of past repression will be coloured as much by the

varying memories and narratives of the past of its constituent members as by theirneed to make ‘strategic’ calculations in the context of an uncertain transition to

democracy. Soldiers, colonels and generals in the armed forces can also be seen as amnemonic community (or even subdivided into different ones), with differentmemories of their role in repression, different justificatory discourses and different

psychological traumas resulting from their participation in and responsibility foratrocities. Similarly for victims, human rights activists and other groups. This

illustrates how a category used in memory studies can broaden our understanding ofwhat shapes the choices and actions of different individuals and groups.

Institutions and Memory

Another major contribution of memory studies is the analysis of institutions ofmemory, including courts, schools, universities, museums and the media. ‘Within the

public domain, not only the recording of the past, but active reworking of the past ismore likely to be transmitted if it happens in high-prestige, social consensual

institutions than if it happens at or beyond the edges of conventional organisations’(Schudson 1995, p. 359). We know how the struggle to define the content ofschoolbooks is a characteristic of authoritarian regimes: controlling which narratives

children learn in school and the meaning of what they are taught to remember is acrucial aspect of establishing ‘hegemony’. New democracies may engage in a similar

exercise, making the reading of ‘truth reports’ a part of school curricula. So we canlook at truth commission reports, one aspect of transitional justice, not just as

accounts of ‘what happened’, or as springboards for prosecution, but also as part of abroad process of political socialisation—how teachers transmit and youths adopt new

‘narratives’ about the past informed by democratic values. Mark Osiel (1991) hasbrilliantly illustrated how the legal system and trials in particular can generate

opportunities for political theatre, offering a public lesson in the utility and raison


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d’etre of legal justice, and indicating what is ‘moral’ and ‘beyond the pale’ in any givensociety. Thus, we can enrich our understanding of transitional justice politics by seeing

trials not just as signs of a ‘successful’ transitional justice policy narrowly understood,but as socialising political theatre. There is a vast literature on museums and

commemorative structures and the struggles waged over content and meaning in such‘sites of memory’. We can use that literature to examine the struggles waged over sites

of memory to deepen the more time limited analysis of transition type or the balanceof power between incoming democratic and outgoing authoritarian elites.

Memory Cycles and the Politics of Memory as a Disjuncture in SocialMemory-Making

Memory studies can therefore help us to re-frame transitional justice. Here, I wouldlike to propose that transitional justice can be seen as part of a disjuncture in what is a

continuous process generating ongoing cycles of social memory-making.The political science literature tends to see transitional justice as the one-off set

of policies adopted by new democratic regimes that serve to break with the past andre-insert a country into the ‘moral family of democracies’. This perspective is clearly

the best for understanding truth and justice policies as a part of the politics oftransition, but it is less useful for understanding how transitional justice efforts fit with

broader ongoing social efforts to establish an ‘imagined community’.As we saw above, memory studies stress that memory-making is a process that is

happening all the time. During times of peace, societies may take for granted thatthere is a consensus on fundamental values binding the community together, so‘memory-making’ does not have to stress founding values—they are simply there. And

although there may be latent conflicts, these may remain largely unexplored or‘unspoken’ in mainstream memory-making. By contrast, when consensus breaks down

and violence ensues, foundational values need to be restated and reworked in anexplicit way, not least because people need to understand the latent fault lines that led to

the breakdown of civility, and come to terms with the breakdown of the fundamentalvalues that underpinned a pre-existing consensus of what constituted ‘the good society’.

Trials and truth commissions come into play because a previously established socialconsensus has broken down. They help to generate a new ‘official history’ about themeaning of past repression and establish a new consensus. This need becomes

particularly intense when one group in a society is criminalised, its rights systematicallyabused or there is an attempt to physically eliminate it. Such events constitute a

violation of ‘natural law’ or ‘natural order’ and call for a restoration of dignity, throughtruth, justice and even revenge. The truth of the truth commission is one that reclaims

the voice of the victim, delegitimises the justificatory narrative of repressors andattempts to restore the moral legitimacy of the (previously criminalised) state.

By officially confessing to the crimes committed in the name of the nation, truthreports and the complementary ‘politics of apology’ thus mark a break with the past, a

return to ‘civility’ and the restoration of a new social contract of sorts.


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Thus, transitional justice is intertwined with and embedded in the politics ofmemory, which represents a qualitative shift (disjuncture) in a process of memory-

making that is always going on, by establishing new patterns of inclusion and exclusion.We can also see transitional justice as a first step in what are always ongoing memory

cycles. The first post-authoritarian cycle is usually about restoring a balance by bringinginto the fold the victims of the last political dispensation (although, as we have seen,

transitional justice policies can be delayed until after the transition is over). In thisprocess, new democrats emerge as the big winners, and old authoritarians as the new

pariahs. But short- to medium-term political change, as well as longer-termgenerational change, will give rise to new policy options and new nuances in patterns ofinclusion and exclusion: in other words, they generate new cycles of memory. One

political or generational cohort may opt for amnesia; another may decide it is time topursue justice. Spain provides an excellent example of this. One cohort may judge the

perpetrators harshly; another may be more accepting, depending on the zeitgeist andpolitical conditions in that moment. Defeated repressors may be silent for a long while

and then begin to reclaim the legitimacy of their perspective with the publication ofmemoirs or even in defence summations in open court (as in Argentina). Political

parties or trade unions may weave a particular ‘heroic’ narrative of resistance about thepast that is legitimated for a time, but then challenged and modified later. Ongoing‘cognitive battles’ over memory highlight that there is not one ‘truth’ but various

competing ‘truths’ that will compete to gain ascendancy, and the dominance of one‘narrative’ over another may shift with the passage of time (Zerubavel 1997, p. 12).

These cycles will be punctuated by Alexander Wilde’s ‘irruptions of memory’—intenseevents that spark off new battles over memory—and may initiate a new cycle of memory.

Contextualising Normative Abstraction

The underlying thrust of the arguments above is that combining the insights of other

disciplines (in this case memory studies) can help mitigate the problems of overlyabstract normative views of transitional justice. Here I highlight some of those

problems.3

The ‘Norms Cascade’

One influential perspective on transitional justice proposes that such efforts are amanifestation of a ‘justice cascade’, which is in turn an example of a ‘norm cascade’

(Lutz & Sikkink 2001) In this context, truth commissions and domestic as well asinternational human rights trials signal a global trend towards greater accountability

for human rights violations. It is undeniably the case that human rights norms havebecome denser, that new human rights and justice institutions have been created, that

new actors have emerged with a capacity to pursue human rights violators and thathuman rights discourse is now a part of the political landscape as never before.

However, a historical and context-specific analysis would lead one to less


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homogeneously optimistic conclusions than a general survey permits (Sikkink &Booth Walling 2006). We cannot know in the abstract, for instance, whether human

rights records improve because there are trials, or whether the ability to hold humanrights trials is evidence the human rights situation has already improved and has done

so for other reasons. Similarly, there is no general abstract answer to the question ofwhether trials are a deterrent or whether other historical factors play the determining

role in deterring future violations.In the abstract, all ‘truth commissions’ seem to be equal; but the ‘truth’ of some

commissions may be very partial, and in some cases ‘truth reports’ may remainpractically unknown to populations and so their impact is limited. Likewise, all trialsmay seem to promote ‘individual criminal accountability’ and ‘publicise the new

norms’, but examining each case reveals not all trials will publicise equally, and not allwill publicise the same lessons (some may legitimise legalised revenge). Only

contextual and historicised analysis will distinguish between trials that serve aspositive ‘political theatre’, educating people about the value of the judiciary and

justice, and those that do not. Rather than seeing all transitional justice efforts asevidence of a growing culture of human rights, embedding transitional justice in the

broader context of social memory-making in particular contexts, we can begin todistinguish between those efforts that are more likely to affirm the values of democracyand tolerance and produce what Paul Ricoeur (2004) has called ‘happy memories’ that

establish a basis for future democratic coexistence with greater respect for humanrights, and those that may be conducive to future violence and lead to the ‘frozen’

politics of victimhood emerging from a fixation upon past suffering.The norms cascade view exemplifies a ‘liberal optimistic’ vision that emerges from

what Bernard Williams (2005) called the ‘ahistoricism’ of liberalism, whereby liberalvalues are used as a yardstick to judge past and present ‘other’ societies. However, he

argued that liberalism should accept ‘that like any other outlook it cannot escape startingfrom what is at hand, from the kinds of life among which it finds itself ’ (Williams 2005,

p. 25). Like other political projects, liberalism is conditioned by background intellectualconditions and ‘as a matter of empirical realism’ by historical circumstances, and there is‘no way in which theory can get all the way ahead of practise and reach the final

determination of what can make sense in political thought: it cannot ever, in advance,determine very securely what direction might count as “ahead”’ (2005, pp. 25–26).

For Williams the key was to ask what is actually going on, and how it is to be interpreted.Philosophers might encourage us to view the world sub specie aeternitatis (under the

aspect of eternity) but, in his view, ‘for most human purposes that is not a very goodspecies to view it under’ (Williams & Smart 1973, p. 118). The politics of memory is one

aid in efforts to contextualise our normative analyses.

The ‘Due Process’ Debate

Another example of an influential abstract normative view is that which proposes that,

because trials are so problematic from a due process perspective, the best solution


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is not to try anybody (Elster 1992; 1998). Clearly, very serious due process problemswere rife in the retroactive justice measures in the post-war and post-communist

European context, including collective guilt, violation of the nulla poena sine lege (no

punishment without law) principle, and the selection of exemplary cases (violating theprinciple of equality before the law), among others. However, as noted elsewhere, this

conclusion is only possible from a highly abstract perspective. If one were to acceptthis argument, then one would have to concede that it would have been best to allow

the Nazi leaders to remain at large in democratic Germany (Barahona de Brito &Whitehead forthcoming).

Reference to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism is useful for highlighting the limitationsof this argument. Value pluralism, he claimed, is not relativism (the inability to judge

or criticise), but is rather the result of the recognition that values clash: ‘Some among

the Great Goods cannot live together’ (2003, p. 13). Justice may not be compatiblewith mercy, or liberty with equality. From this it does not follow that some must be

true and others false, but it does follow that we are ‘doomed to choose’ (2003, p. 13).Different societies choose differently, make different trade-offs and establish different

hierarchies: ‘rules, values, principles must yield to each other in varying degrees inspecific situations’ (2003, pp. 18–19). Thus, while ‘no more rigorous moralist than

Immanuel Kant has ever lived . . . even he said, in a moment of illumination, “Out of

the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”’ (2003, p. 48). Berlininsisted that we must entrare (imaginatively ‘enter into’) other cultures,4 each with ‘its

own gifts, values, modes of creation, incommensurable with one another’, andunderstand each one ‘in its own terms’ (2003, p. 9).

So where does this leave us with respect to transitional justice? I would suggest thereare competing values at stake in transitional justice, that societies choose to emphasise

one or another depending on historical local conditions, and that the results are nevereasy, comfortable or remotely perfect (it is never an ‘open or shut’ case). So one may

agree that selective retroactive justice violates the principle of equality before the law,

but one may also grant that one would violate democratic principles if one didnothing in the face of citizens’ expressed need to address past injustice through the

courts. Equality before the law may clash with democratic values and ‘doing nothing’may therefore seem appealing. But doing nothing is usually not a real-life option

when significant numbers of people call for some form of ‘justice’. Further, suchconflicts cannot be resolved in the abstract; they are addressed by reference to the

specificities of real-life situations. The abstract normative view may be that there is

‘one’ right answer about how to establish a hierarchy between these rights, but a morecontext-sensitive response is that some societies may choose to give precedence to

selective punishment (even if the right to equality before the law is violated) andothers may prefer amnesty (even if the right of the victim of a crime against humanity

is violated).It is worth remembering in this context that laws are not written in stone. They

come about as a result of specific historical developments and change in accordancewith new ethical visions and new ways of conceiving the ‘good society’. Jurisprudence


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changes and sets new precedents. Such shifts are not unproblematic and are often thesource of injustices, since changing ‘the rules of the game’ changes the distribution of

costs and benefits. But were such changes never to occur, the law would becomeirrelevant as an expression of our moral sensibilities. The choice is not between doing

something that is eternally ‘right’ in the abstract sense, and doing nothing: ‘justice’ isabout finding a balance, based on a historical consensus of what is appropriate at that

time and in that place. This is not to say that anything goes: clearly, the term‘transitional justice’ ceases to be appropriate if measures to deal with the past massively

violate individual rights.

Retributive Emotions

One final example of the limits of a popular abstract view is that which claims there are five‘retributive emotions’ that ‘map into distinct legal and administrative reactions’ to the

issue of past human rights violations (Elster 2004). This perspective does not reflect thereal-life emotional density and complexity of human beings and so posits a predictabilityof outcome that is not realistic.5 Varied emotions coexist in one person, generating

different feelings and thoughts about ‘what is to be done’ about the past: desire for revengemay coexist with the wish to forgive (for religious reasons, say). Psychological studies

show that we may consciously pursue one outcome, but we may also unconsciously wishfor contrary ones, and we may be riven by inner conflict as a result of conflicting desires

and needs. This view also imagines the individual as having a rather static nature.It is useful to refer to Michael Oakeshott’s reflections on human conduct here. He

argued that a person ‘has a “history” but not “nature”—he is what in conduct hebecomes’ (Oakeshott 1991, p. 41). A victim or a perpetrator has a history but not a

specific ‘nature’ or fixed ‘mindset’. He further reminds us ‘interest’ never specifies aperformance: the number of possible ‘choices’ is ‘virtually unlimited,’ as ‘acting ismaking a bargain with an imperfectly imagined future’ (1991, p. 44). Inner feelings

also cannot specify action: ‘Spite, greed, jealously or benevolence do not specifyactions’: one can kill out of hatred or compassion. To ‘understand a substantive

performance is to understand a substantive performer’ (1991, p. 77).6 Thus, tounderstand human goings-on we have to move from the abstract to the concrete, from

‘generic’ to ‘specific’ people. While the idea of exploring links between emotions andtransitional justice is an exciting and worthwhile task, we need an approach that is

more ‘contextual’. In this particular instance we would have to resort to the richliterature in psychology and to the intersection between studies of individualpsychology and the collective dimension that is present in some memory studies.

Abstract Normativity (Universalism) versus Historical and Context Sensitivity(Relativism)

It may seem that by calling for more historical and context sensitivity, one paints

oneself into a relativist corner and loses the ability to judge what is normatively


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preferable. In the field of human rights, this problem has been extensively discussedand labelled the ‘universalism versus relativism’ debate.7

The critique of the overly abstract normative view as reprised above is that it ignorescontext and history and tends to commit the sin of template (one measure fits all, a

measure that is established by reference to liberal Western practice, underlying which

is liberal ahistoricism). Communitarians have argued, for instance, that there is no‘minimal and universal moral code’ (Walzer 1987, p. 24) and that abstract standards

would have to be ‘considered in terms so abstract that they would be of little use inthinking about particular distributions’ (Walzer 1983, p. 8). Thus, instead of one

‘eternal’ standard there are a variety of standards arising from real-life historical andcultural conditions. The ‘universalist’ counter-argument is that there are universally

shared values beyond culture and context, and that by appealing to context specificity

and history the relativists lose the ability to judge and to condemn gross violations ofhuman rights that may be justified on cultural grounds.

If we are to accept that each society will find its own solutions—solutions that ariseorganically and historically from specific and varying contexts—how are we to retain a

capacity to judge and determine what is better or worse? My sympathies lie with bothpoints of view, and so my instinct has been to attempt a synthesis of what are usually

portrayed as mutually exclusive views. I believe these perspectives are not necessarilyantagonistic and can (indeed, must) both be deployed as long as both admit to their

partiality.

It helps to realise that universalists have made concessions to relativists and thatrelativists are prone to use universal yardsticks of one sort or another. Rawls, for

instance, initially argued there was an original Archemedian point from which to judgea society ‘from the perspective of eternity’ (1971), but later recognised his theory

might only work in liberal democratic contexts (1993), and then further conceded itmight not be possible to export liberalism everywhere, and that ‘decent, well-ordered’

non-aggressive societies with a shared conception of justice, reasonable mechanisms of

consultation, and respect for some basic rights might be the best one could hope for(1999). Conversely, Berlin and Williams, who can both be considered critical of the

Platonic and Kantian perspectives, despite their ‘relativising’ or ‘historicising’ thrust,reveal a ‘creeping Kantianism’, so to speak, when they introduce a minimal universal

standard to enable them to say something about human societies. Berlin’s positivepluralism proposed liberty as a universal value, his lowest common denominator

transcending time and place. Williams proposed the ‘basic legitimation demand’(BLD) as a kind of universal yardstick with which to measure the performance

of different societies or regimes. So, if by his own admission Rawls’s universal

yardstick does not work globally, Berlin’s and Willams’s relativising also has its limits.This need to establish a universal and abstract yardstick seems to suggest that the

context-oriented arguments of relativism do not work. However, I would argue thatthe universalism versus relativism dilemma is partially a false one.

Clearly there is a kind of relativism and a type of universalism that cannot bereconciled: radical relativism leaves no room for manoeuvre, and even shoots itself


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in the foot (the ‘performative contradiction’); while universalism of the kind thatequates the ‘good society’ with a very particular and often ill-defined set of Western

values (for instance, ‘the American way of life’) leaves no space for variation, istheoretically poor and violates the very principle it claims to defend (freedom—in this

case the freedom of different societies to organise their polities as they choose).However, there is vast middle ground where some integration is possible.8

The condition for this to work is that each viewpoint is recognised as partial and as oneof two ‘ways of seeing’ that are inherent in the way human beings relate to the world. One

way to recognise partiality is to note that, while the starting position of these twoperspectives differs, the ‘end game’ is the same. The universalist moves from the general tothe particular (establishes a measure of, say, freedom, and looks at reality to see if it is being

met), while the relativist moves from the particular to general (looks at how things aredone locally, notes great variability and derives conclusions). However, for both the end

game is to ensure all people are protected from arbitrary state power and live in conditionsof dignity. We may need some minimal measure of what is necessary for dignity, but the

scope for variation is great. The key point here is that we do not have to side with one orthe other view, but that we can (and do) exercise both faculties with an awareness of the

limitation of each.A reconciliation of the two views is also possible if we admit they are two sides of the

same coin: two ways of seeing that are intrinsically human ways of seeing. We are carriers

and practitioners of both perspectives. We can speak about trees in general, about this orthat tree in particular, and we may hold an image of an archetypal Tree. We are able to see

things from the inside out (from our point of view), step into the shoes of others and evenadopt the ‘non-viewpoint’ of Sidgewick that Williams poked fun at. We experience

universality and relativism and see things through their dual lens in our everyday lives(music versus a Chopin sonata or an Indian raga; mathematics versus a particular

application; the archetypal ‘mother’ or cultural variations on her [Demeter, Kwan Yin orDurga] versus mothers; the experience of ‘oneness’ in meditation versus a culturally

bounded experience of divinity). These are not antagonistic: they are interdependent.These are two constant and interplaying perspectives we deploy in our attempts tounderstand (and judge) human ‘goings-on’ as Oakeshott would say (including our own,

of course).To return to transitional justice and memory studies, just as universalists and relativists

in the human rights debates have more in common than appears at first glance and wouldbenefit from combining their insights and admitting their partiality, the most abstract and

normative views would benefit from greater grounding in local realities.

Adopting a Multi-disciplinary Perspective

As the above demonstrates, the broader argument I wish to make is not that abstract and

normative theorising should be eschewed, but rather that it works best when a morepluralistic, historicised and context-sensitive approach is also deployed. A parallel point is

that we should be more inter-disciplinary.


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In this final section, I lay out some basic elements of the framework proposed by Ken

Wilber (1998; 2001),9 which I believe is a useful device to deploy on various different

perspectives in the study of any given subject. Wilber undertakes two main tasks that are of

interest in this context.First he identifies three major value spheres and validity claims and calls for

analyses that integrate all three. The three main value spheres are those of morals

(the inter-subjective ‘we’ domain), science (the objective impersonal ‘it’ domain) and art

(the subjective ‘I’ domain), which mirror Karl Popper’s three worlds (the cultural, the

objective and the subjective), the Good, the True and the Beautiful in Plato, Kant’sCritique

of Practical Reason (morals), Critique of Pure Reason (science) and Critique of Judgment

(aesthetic judgment) and the concepts of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha in Buddhism.

The ‘we’ domain is concerned with justness, ethics and how people can interact in a fair

and decent way. The ‘it’ domain is concerned with objective truth, empirical and

reproducible truth. The ‘I’ domain reflects the aesthetic and expressive currents of each

subjective self. Each sphere has its associated validity claim. In first person ‘I’ domain,

which refers to individual thoughts, emotions, memories, states of mind and sensations,

the appropriate validity claim or standard of truth is subjective sincerity. In the third

person ‘we’ domain, which refers to shared values, language and culture, the appropriate

validity claim is inter-subjective fit or justness. For the ‘it’ sphere of science, which refers to

observable entities or bodies with simple location, the appropriate validity claim is

objective truth.

Second, Wilber argues that different domains of knowledge or approaches will have

much to say about one thing but nothing about the other. For instance, we can study the

brain (‘it’ domain), consciousness (the ‘I’ domain) and language and communication

(the ‘we’ domain) and each will require the deployment of different disciplines and

validity claims. This is because each domain has an interior and an exterior dimension

(there is the brain seen from the outside and experienced from the inside as consciousness,

there is consciousness as observed from the outside [e.g. in magnetic resonance imaging

(MRI)] and felt from within and there is language and communication as experienced by

the speaker and as examined in linguistics).10 To take Wilber’s example for the social

sciences, psychoanalysis tries to get at the interior individual experience, behaviourism

offers an exterior look at the behaviour of individuals, hermeneutics explores the inner

collective dimension (Gadamer, say), while Marxist theory looks at the external behaviour

of collective dimension (Wilber 1998; 2001).The key point is that the perspective from each sphere provides a partial view of the

whole (an MRI cannot get at the quality of your anger, but poetry won’t help you map

the brain), that each discipline looks at different aspects of a thing—namely from

within or from without—and that each discipline, or way of looking, has different

validity claims that will ascertain different things (you cannot use subjective sincerity

as a means to discover the speed of light, nor can you use objective science to unravel

compassion or mercy). So these different perspectives are complementary rather than

antagonistic as long as their proponents do not mistake the part for the whole.


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How is this relevant to the discussion of transitional justice and memory studies?Wilber’s sweep and goals are vastly more ambitious than mine. In this essay, the much

more modest argument is: (1) that we can benefit from inter-disciplinary communication(transitional justice and memory studies); (2) that historicising and context sensitivity

counterbalance the pitfalls of normative abstraction; and (3) that, as in the relativist anduniversalising perspectives in human rights debates, such approaches do not have to be

antagonistic but actually work best when deployed together when there is an admission oftheir partiality. Wilber’s scheme opens the field very much beyond these claims, but the

framework is useful because it forcefully highlights the uses of inter-disciplinarytreatment, the study of a subject from different viewpoints and using different validity

claims and the need to look at phenomena not just from the exterior but also from within.Thus, for example, the rational choice view (exterior third-person perspective) can be

complemented by examining the psychological literature (interior first- and third-personperspective) to give it greater depth; the liberal normative view (another kind of ‘exterior’

third-person perspective) can become more sensitive to local variations by looking atmore hermeneutic visions, local normative formulations and case-specific studies found

in work on memory, sociology and anthropology (to varying degrees—depending on theapproach—more ‘interior’ third-person perspectives).

Table 1 The interior and exterior of the subjective domains

Interior/exterior ‘I’ domain ‘We’ domain

Interior: subjective/inter-subjective;interpretative;hermeneutic

What we are looking at: Interiorindividual (how it is for me; how Iexperience it); thoughts, emotions,memories, states of mind,sensations

What we are looking at: Interiorcollective (how it is for us or howthings should be for us); sharedvalues, language, relationships,culture

Standard of truth: Interior:expressive or subjectivetruthfulness (sincerity, integrity,trustworthiness)

Standard of truth: Interior: justness(cultural fit, rightness, mutualunderstanding)

Approaches/disciplines: autobio-graphies and other first-handaccounts; artworks; literature;poetry

Approaches/disciplines: memorystudies; psychology; normative/ethical perspectives)

Exterior: mono-logical,empirical, positivistic,form

What we are looking at: Outwardlyobservable aspect of the individual

What we are looking at: Outwardlyobservable aspects of the collective

Standard of truth: Truth (corre-spondence, representation, prop-ositional).

Standard of truth: Functional fit(systems theory web, structural-functionalism, social systems mesh)

Approaches/disciplines: variouspsychology approaches

Approaches/disciplines: Variouspolitical science and social scienceperspectives

Source: Adapted from Wilber (1998; 2001).


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Here I have limited myself to arguing for dialogue between political science transitionaljustice studies and memory studies, but there are obviously other fruitful areas for

dialogue, such as with various psychology disciplines (there is a vast literature on traumaassociated with the experience of state repression, for instance). Table 1 is adapted from

Wilber to illustrate broadly how these ideas might be deployed with regard to transitionaljustice and the politics of memory.

Such a scheme also serves as a useful reminder to the analyst that his or her perspectiveis always partial. We suffer from ‘inattentional blindness’ (Simons & Rensink 2005) and

tend to see only what we focus on, and what we see is coloured by our point of view.We suffer from the tendency to ascribe to our preferred framework of analysis the abilityto explain everything, so that we mistake parts for wholes and reify our selective vision.

We become enamoured of our analytical schemes; we tend to mistake the map for theterritory (Korzybski 1995). Awareness of this may allow us to adopt a framework that is

more flexible, pluralistic and more able to integrate various different perspectives. Whenwe admit the partiality of the perspective we adopt, the way is opened for dialogue and

synthesis between different views. By addressing the subjective and inter-subjectivedomains, we may also recognise that the line dividing observer and observed is blurred

and there is a relationship of mutual influence between the two. All this can broaden ourscope, make explicit what we include and exclude and lead us to admit that, while we havepreferred outlooks and antipathies to others, perhaps, at its appropriate level, each

perspective has its uses. Frameworks, including Wilber’s, are maps that approximate us tothe ‘territory’; but, just as there is an abyss of difference between the figures on a map and

reality, there is a similarly unimaginable gap between the reality we are looking at and theframeworks we create to pin it down. At the very least, we may become aware of this as we

examine our preferred realities: in this instance transitional justice.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jennifer Dixon for bringing some studies combining international theory withmemory studies to my attention.

Notes

[1] There is an extensive literature on post-1945 politics of memory, although most of it does notapply political science transitional justice perspectives. Two recent examples are Art (2006) andLebow et al. (2006). There are some studies combining international relations theory withmemory studies (Lind 2008; He 2009). Some key examples that deploy both transitional justiceand memory insights are Jelin (2003a; 2003b; 2003c), Olick (2003; 2007), Roniger & Sznajder(1999), Payne (2008; 2009) and Wilde (1999). The special issue of the Annals of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science also focuses on the politics of memory (AAPSS, 2008).

[2] There is overlap between the politics of memory and social memory-making, as the former isan example of the latter. The boundary between one and the other is not clear—it would behard to fix it temporally—and in terms of specific content, insofar as all social memory reflectson past injustices, it is also hard to fix it qualitatively. However, we can consider the politics ofmemory to be that which reflects on past injustice that is followed by regime change and thatmobilises transitonal justice strategies.


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[3] For further development of this section see Barahona de Brito & Whitehead (forthcoming).[4] Giambattista Vico’s term; see Berlin (2003, p. 10).[5] For a sensitive discussion of emotions and transitional justice, notably resentment and

indignation, see Mihai (2010).[6] This author’s emphasis.[7] These labels are somewhat misleading, since the theories proposed by the relativist are every bit

as universal in their ambitions as those proposed by the universalist, but I retain them hereanyway. For further development of the ideas in this section, see Barahona de Brito &Whitehead (2009).

[8] While I recognise there are much deeper epistemological and deontological issues at stake,I focus here only on the human rights aspects of this debate.

[9] I do not swallow whole Wilber’s integral perspective, and am frankly antipathetic to hisextrapolation to society and politics, in the form of states and stages of development and‘memes’ theory, of his studies of consciousness. However, I find his tripartite framework andhis ‘quadrants’ very useful devices for thinking about a subject more broadly and from a varietyof angles.

[10] Following Habermas and others, Wilber argues that the defining characteristic of modernity isthat it differentiates the three spheres so that each can pursue its ‘truth’ separately withoutdomination by the others. It separates the ‘we’ from the ‘it’ (freeing science from the Church),and the ‘I’ from the ‘we’ (freeing individuals from the collective). This constitutes ‘the dignityof modernity’. Its counterpoint is the ‘disaster of modernity’, the tendency to reduce the interiordimensions of ‘I’ and ‘we’ to exterior surfaces of objective ‘its’, so that objects without simplelocation (A.N. Whitehead) become invisible. This reduction of depth to surfaces has producedwhat Wilber terms a ‘flatland’ view of things, and he calls for a vision based on an integration ofall three spheres and making use of all three types of validity claims (Wilber 1998).

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Alexandra Barahona de Brito is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the LisbonUniversity Institute (ISCTE-IUL) and freelance researcher and editorial advisor, Cascais,Portugal. She was, formerly, senior associate researcher at the Institute of Strategic andInternational Studies (IEEI), Lisbon. She has a DPhil and MPhil from Oxford Universityand has published books and articles on transitional justice, human rights,democratisation and European–Latin American relations. She is the author of HumanRights and Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile (1997) and co-editor ofThe Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (with C. Gonzalez-Enrıquez and P. Aguilar Fernandez, 2001).


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transitional justice and memory: exploring perspectives

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