20 - Commentary on Memory, Ritual and Apology

Summary

The memory of the past is at the centre of the transitional justice project. Indeed transitional justice itself is a memory-making process, intending to right the wrongs of the past as well as to define the ways in which that past is remembered. Transitional justice endeavours seek to mobilise memories in various ways – by coming to terms with them, by acknowledging them, by neutralising their potency through holding the culpable accountable – so that they become useful tools in a present and future characterised by peace, rule of law and democracy.

However, memory is often something that refuses to be defined and confined in the ways imagined by discrete projects that seek to affect it. As those who study the politics of memory remind us:

…the temporality of memories is not linear, chronological, or rational. Historical processes linked to the memories of conflict pasts have moments of greater visibility and moments of latency, of apparent oblivion or silence. There are also transformations in the content of what is selected as the key elements of the past, and the “use” made of the past and of history.

This illusive, agential and unfixed nature of memory is often neglected in transitional justice practice and scholarship. The assumptions that the past can be uncovered, clarified, acknowledged, accounted for and overcome, and also that a coherent and agreed-upon narrative about that past is possible and will facilitate such processes, go largely unquestioned in transitional justice debates. Within the transitional justice project, memory is something to be harnessed, transformed and deployed.

The three chapters in this section question and probe these assumptions. Like other sections in this book, they push inquiry beyond the now familiar debates within transitional justice to introduce fresh questions. Instead of exploring whether to remember or to forget, these authors ask how state-sponsored approaches of remembering and forgetting affect the daily lives of those expected to engage in them. Instead of questions around victor's justice and imposed narratives, contributors explore issues of memory in situations where no clearcut victors and victims emerge.