(Re)Distributing Transition

International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2008

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Mo r t e n B e r g s mo , Cé s a r R o d r í g u e z -Ga r a v i t o , P a b l o K a l ma n o v i t z a n d

2020

The aim of this study is to critique ‘post-apartheid’ constitutionalism as a paradigm which fundamentally obscures historical injustice in all of its many dimensions – economic, epistemic, political, and cultural. The starting point of my critique on post￾apartheid constitutionalism rests on three signifiers of democratisation that I have identified. These three signifiers are reconciliation, reparation, and rights. I trace the continuance of the historical roots of injustice through the period of envisioned ‘transition’ as founded in the interim constitution of 1993 into the era of envisioned constitutional ‘transformation’ as founded in the constitution of 1996. I focus on critical responses to South Africa’s period of transition to interrogate how the emphasis on reconciliation obscured the exigency of historical justice, in that it preserved epistemic, political, economic, and cultural spheres of conquest. I draw on literature on reparations and reconciliation to explore what the concept of ‘reparations’ for historical injustice would entail, and I measure this against what the TRC’s project of reparation had delivered. I explore the limits of rights discourse, and in particular the limits of socio-economic rights discourse and consider whether, given the faulty ideological inheritance from our transitional period, socio-economic rights and the constitution can address historical conditions of oppression. What I set out to highlight in this study are that the three signifiers of ‘post-apartheid’ and the discourse which surround them fundamentally ignore beneficiaries of oppression and their legacy and culminate into an ideology which continues to shape South Africa as a product of conquest. These three signifiers amount to inadequate attempts at conceptualising a response to the many dimensions of historical injustice that exist and persist in ‘post’-apartheid South Africa.

The concept transitional justice promotes built-in denial. By conceptualising justice as 'transtemporal' enables us to take account of the complex interaction of past and present cultural, structural, physical and psychological violence to craft appropriate remedies for future peace. Transitional justice conflates political and knowledge boundaries which causes intellectual claustrophobia. 1 Blindness and complicit silence are normalised and remedies are limited. For example, the term 'postconflict' is applied to economically, socially and psychologically still violent societies. Dealing with visible violence within a limited period while ignoring transhistorical forms of invisible violence, is regarded as 'sustainable peace' in the field of transitional justice. Intergroup 'reconciliation' is sequenced before (instead of parallel with) economic 'reconciliation', and the longterm psychological and economic impact of colonialism and oppression are ignored.

Peace Review, 2000

International Journal of Law in Context, 2007

An attempt to distil what social justice means in the South African context; what is implied by the concept in long-term peacebuilding; and how the idea is deployed in restorative justice processing, These perspectives on social justice were considered, to find answers about what would constitute a socially and individually just restorative justice response that would advance long-term peacebuilding in unequal contexts. .

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016

This chapter examines the utopias called forth by the marriage of human rights accountability mechanisms on the one hand, and, on the other, arguments about the practical significance of these initiatives as preconditions for development, democracy, and political society. Transitional justice is seen to marry the ethical charge of the human rights field’s march against impunity, with an instrumental potential facilitating transition from the rule of violence into the rule of law. If the normative theories and agendas implicated by this marriage are advanced as being in the interests of justice, the accompanying instrumental theories and agendas are advanced in the interests of transition. Justice and transition operate here as allied and mutually reinforcing aspirations of and rationales for transitional justice institutions. Thus, this chapter identifies and analyses the stakes that attend this marriage of ‘ethics’ and ‘expertise’ in constituting the utopian political imagination of transitional justice.

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2022

This special journal issue (edited by Lukas Meyer and Timothy Waligore) has new critical assessments of Jeremy Waldron's supersession thesis, the idea that changing circumstances following historical injustice can alter what justice requires us to do today to remedy (or not) the past injustice. It includes new critical assessments of Waldron's later work on supersession of sovereignty, treaties, and group identity, as well as perspectives from Indigenous political thought, settler colonial theory, structural injustice theory, non-ideal theory, among others. It includes a reply by Jeremy Waldron. A substantive introduction by the Lukas Meyer and Timothy Waligore, the co-editors, is available open-access on the journal's home page: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fcri20/25/3?nav=tocList It has been republished a book, Rectifying Historical Injustice: Debating the Supersession Thesis (Routledge, 2023) 1. Superseding historical injustice? New critical assessments Lukas H. Meyer & Timothy Waligore 2. Colonialism and rights supersession: a Kant-inspired perspective Julio Montero 3. Superseding structural linguistic injustice? Language revitalization and historically-sensitive dignity-based claims Seung Hyun Song 4. The supersession thesis, climate change, and the rights of future people Santiago Truccone-Borgogno 5. Group agency and the challenges of repairing historical injustice Jeff Spinner-Halev 6. Supersession, non-ideal theory, and dominant distributive principles Burke A. Hendrix 7. Indigenous governance now: settler colonial injustice is not historically past Esme G. Murdock 8. The supersession of Indigenous understandings of justice and morals Gordon Christie 9. Supersession: A reply Jeremy Waldron