Abstract
This is a book about ‘state redress’. Here are four examples:
Between 1929 and 1972, the Canadian Province of Alberta forcibly sterilized approximately 2800 residents it decided were unfit to reproduce. Authorized by the Alberta Sterilization Act (1928), the procedures targeted those with physical and mental disabilities. As part of a 1999 settlement, the Alberta government offered a ‘statement of regret’ and agreed to a redress package paying approximately C$142 million in compensation to about 860 survivors.1
You are Parzival! Tell me, how have you fared with regard to the Graal?
—Wolfram von Eschenbach
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena, eds., Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth Versus Justic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule, ‘Transitional Justice as Ordinary Justice’, Harvard Law Review 117, no. 3 (2004); Christine Bell, ‘Transitional Justice, Interdisciplinarity and the State of the “Field” or “Non-Field”’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 1 (2009): 5–27.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition), trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 32f.
Even those who advocate including established democracies within the theory sometimes argue these processes ‘take[] place in the absence of a fundamental political transition’. Thomas Obel Hansen, ‘Transitional Justice: Toward a Differentiated Theory’, Oregon Review of International Law 13, no. 1 (2011): 25.
The quotation comes from, Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2002), 17.
See also Rosemary Nagy, ‘Transitional Justice as Global Project: Critical Reflections’, Third World Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2008): 281.
Paige Arthur, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice’. Human Rights Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2009): 362.
Andrew Woolford, ‘Transition and Transposition: Genocide, Land and the British Columbia Treaty Process’, New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 4, no. 2 (2011); Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘Cunning of Recognition: Real Being and Aboriginal Recognition in Settler Australia’, Australian Feminist Law Journal 11, no. 3 (1998); Damien Short, ‘Australian “Aboriginal” Reconciliation: The Latest Phase in the Colonial Project’, Citizenship Studies 7, no. 3 (2009); Andrew Schaap, ‘Reconciliation as Ideology and Politics’, Constellations 15, no. 2 (2008); Courtney Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools: Transitional Justice for Indigenous People in a Non-Transitional Society’, in Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies, ed. Paige Arthur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Robert Sparrow, ‘History and Collective Responsibility’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2000).
Hakeem Yusuf, ‘The Judiciary and Constitutionalism in Transitions: A Critique’, Global Jurist 7, no. 3 (2007). Yusuf cites Teitel, but Teitel is on record as denying that transitional justice is categorically distinct. Ruti Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 93.
Ruti G Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 223.
Robyn Green, ‘Unsettling Cures: Exploring the Limits of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 27, no. 1 (2012): 129 Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 17..
E.g. Richard Wilson, ‘Justice and Legitimacy in the South African Transition’, in The Politics of Memory and Democratization, ed. Alexandra Barahona De Brito, Carmen Gonzalez Enriquez and Paloma Aguilar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Paul Gready, The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), 29.
Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 48–50.
John Searle, ‘What Is a Speech Act?’, in The Philosophy of Language, ed. J.R. Searle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Danielle Celermajer, The Sins of Nation and the Ritual of Apologies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Janna Thompson, ‘Apology, Justice, and Respect: A Critical Defence of Political Apology’, in The Age of Apology, ed. Mark Gibney, et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 38.
Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2006), 10–11.
For a membership theory, see: Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
For a distributive theory see, Randall Robinson, The Debt — What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
By denying this claim, the argument is a contribution to the rehabilitation of liberal theory in the face of historic injustice. For other contributions, see Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Jeff Spinner-Halev, Enduring Injustice (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Tommie Shelby, ‘Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 35, no. 2 (2007)
Michael Freeman, ‘Historical Injustice and Liberal Political Theory’, in The Age of Apology: Facing up to the Past, ed. Mark Gibney, et al. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
Mark Walters, ‘The Jurisprudence of Reconciliation: Aboriginal Rights in Canada’, in The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Eg. Di Bretherton and David Mellor, ‘Reconciliation between Aboriginal and Other Australians: The “Stolen Generations”’, Journal of Social Issues 62, no. 1 (2006): 94–95
Alexander Hirsch, ‘Introduction’, in Theorizing Post-Conflict Reconciliation. Agonism, Restitution & Repair, ed. Alexander Hirsch (Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2012), 1.
Kris Brown, ‘“What It Was Like to Live through a Day”: Transitional Justice and the Memory of the Everyday in a Divided Society’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice 6 (2012): 445.
Eric P. Kaufmann, Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press 2004), 2f.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Stephen Winter
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Winter, S. (2014). Introducing State Redress. In: Transitional Justice in Established Democracies. International Political Theory series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316196_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316196_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33038-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31619-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political Science CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)