Commissioning the Past

Commissioning the Past PDF

Author: Deborah Posel

Publisher: Wits University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13:

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This work includes the uncensored voices of survivors of human rights abuses who testified before South Africa's Truth and Reconcilation Commission and in whose name the hearings were undertaken. The views of three groups with different perspectives are reported: academic scholars, commissioners and researchers and people who related stories of victimization perpetrated on themselves or a family member. The emerging dialogue between "outsiders" and "insiders, " and between national, local, and individual experiences is a distinguishing feature of the book.

Commissioning and Contesting Post-Apartheid's Human Rights

Commissioning and Contesting Post-Apartheid's Human Rights PDF

Author: Ulrike Kistner

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9783825862022

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The essays compiled in this book take issue with some of the directions of human rights politics in the immediate post-apartheid period. They look at the relationship between different sets of rights within the political contestations in South Africa. To the terms of social struggles for rights and justice, this book brings perspectives from narrative, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and medical history; and from the history of national liberation struggles, nationalism and citizenship.

Truth Commissions

Truth Commissions PDF

Author: Greg Grandin

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780822366744

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This special issue of Radical History Review looks at the different kinds of history produced by truth commissions organized to investigate political violence, state terror, and human rights violations around the globe and examines how these histories elide or confront social inequality and political violence. The essays consider the tensions implicit in the multiple mandates of truth commissions: to establish historical truths, to recognize the experiences of victims, to effect social and political reconciliation, and to reestablish the legitimacy of the nation-state at a time of market-driven globalization. The issue also addresses difficulties faced by the commissions, such as limitations on the use and nature of evidence, oral testimony, and archival documentation. Comparative in nature, this collection includes essays on Chile's long history of amnesties, pardons, and commissions organized to uncover past episodes of political violence; the dissemination and use of the historical findings of the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification; and internal tensions in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to recover the memories of the victims of apartheid. Several shorter essays offer reflections on U.S. commissions related to the country's history of racial violence, Cold War imperialism, and Vietnam War atrocities and on the findings of the 9/11 Commission report. Contributors. Felipe Aguero, Sally Avery Bermanzohn, Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar, Grant Farred, John J. Fitzgerald, Greg Grandin, Thomas Miller Klubock, Elizabeth Lira, Brian Loveman, Mary Nolan, Elizabeth Ogelsby, Paul Ortiz, Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Charles Walker

Unsettled History

Unsettled History PDF

Author: Leslie Witz

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 047212255X

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Unsettled History examines South African society and the construction and presentation of its public pasts, from Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup ®. Conventionally represented as a time of rectifying the silences and distortions of settler history through inclusion and recovery, the focus here instead is on the shifts in processes and locations of historicizing and the unsettled state of categories of framing history in post-apartheid South Africa. This era saw fundamental transformations in the order of knowledge: from the academy to the public; from popular history to public history; from history-as-lesson to history-as-forum. Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, and Ciraj Rassool take the reader to sites of historical production in which complex ideas about pasts are invoked, and navigate a path toward understanding the agencies of image-making and memory production. This volume is the outcome of the authors’ intensive collaborative research and engagement over twenty-five years on questions including the production and performance of apartheid history; the cultural politics of social history; South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and practices of orality; tourism as an arena of image-making and historical construction; museums as sites of heritage production for a new South Africa; photographs, archival meanings, and the construction of the social documentary; and the centenary commemorations of the South African War and the making of race. The authors not only witnessed many of these instances of history-making but were also participants in their constitution.

Restorative Justice, Reconciliation, and Peacebuilding

Restorative Justice, Reconciliation, and Peacebuilding PDF

Author: Jennifer J. Llewellyn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-04-17

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0199364885

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All over the world, the practice of peacebuilding is beset with common dilemmas: peace versus justice, religious versus secular approaches, individual versus structural justice, reconciliation versus retribution, and the harmonization of the sheer number of practices involved in repairing past harms. Progress towards resolving these dilemmas requires reforming institutions and practices but also clear thinking about basic questions: What is justice? And how is it related to the building of peace? The twin concepts of reconciliation and restorative justice, both involving the holistic restoration of right relationship, contain not only a compelling logic of justice but also great promise for resolving peacebuilding's tensions and for constructing and assessing its institutions and practices. This book furthers this potential by developing not only the core content of these concepts but also their implications for accountability, forgiveness, reparations, traditional practices, human rights, and international law.

Violent Accounts

Violent Accounts PDF

Author: Robert N. Kraft

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014-03-21

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1479821608

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Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff—the foot soldiers—who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

Contemplating God Changing the World

Contemplating God Changing the World PDF

Author: Mario L. Aguilar

Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1596272112

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“Mario Aguilar skillfully, elegantly, and clearly presents the life and thought of some of the major spiritual forces of our time as a starting point for his own compelling reflections on the relationship between contemplation and politics... We need more books like this one.” —Professor Ivan Petrella, University of Miami Contemplation and political action defined the lives and work of six of the most inspiring Christian leaders of the twentieth century: Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal, Daniel Berrigan, Sheila Cassidy, Desmond Tutu, and Mother Teresa. Each one embraced a silent, purposeful life of prayer, contemplation, and conversation with God, which the author contends was the very foundation for their public activism. Aguilar profiles these outstanding religious figures, illustrating how their contemplation of God gave them courage and understanding not just to grow in personal holiness, but to become one with God through responding to the needs of others. It was their spiritual life that gave them the energy, commitment, and strength to help feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and liberate the oppressed, even in the darkest, most difficult times. Yet, as Aguilar shows, it is not just a chosen few who are called to combine prayer with political action: through the regular contemplation of God, all Christians can be empowered to work toward social transformation and a just world.

The Oxford Handbook of Oral History

The Oxford Handbook of Oral History PDF

Author: Donald A. Ritchie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 019533955X

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'The Oxford Handbook of Oral History' brings together 40 authors on five continents to address the evolution of oral history, the impact of digital technology, the most recent methodological and archival issues and the application of oral history to both scholarly research and public presentations.

Commissioning

Commissioning PDF

Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Health Committee

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780215543028

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Commissioning : Written Evidence

Beyond Collective Memory

Beyond Collective Memory PDF

Author: Cullen Goldblatt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-14

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1000195201

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Beyond Collective Memory analyzes how two African places became icons of collective memory for certain publics, yet remain marginal to national and continental memory discourses. Thiaroye, a Senegalese location of colonial-era massacre, and District Six, a South African neighborhood destroyed under apartheid, have epitomized a shared "memory" of racist violence and resistant community. Analyzing diverse cultural texts surrounding both places, this book argues that the metaphor of collective memory has obscured the structural character of colonial and apartheid violence, and made it difficult to explore the complicit positions that structures of violence produce. In investigating the elisions of memory discourses, Beyond Collective Memory challenges the dominance of collective memory, and calls attention to the African pasts, metaphors, and imaginaries that exist beyond it.