Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies Are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past

Abstract

For historians, ‘the Wrongs of the Past’ are natural products of the course of history and ‘Historical Justice’ remains an elusive concept. Categories such as right and wrong are discussed publicly from moral, religious, and political platforms; but, even when dealing with the aftermath of dictatorship, atrocities and mass violence, historians may feel hampered from a professional point of view in using such ideas as standards of judgement. At the same time, their professional expertise and scholarly insight are inevitably part of the various means that contemporary societies use in coming to terms with problematic issues from the past. The present volume offers valuable reflection on a broad range of matters related to the victimisation of groups of people by states, and subsequent acts of reparation, in some cases stretching over several generations. The focus of the book is on how states and rulers deal with responsibility for large-scale wrongdoing by their predecessors. Case-studies therefore discuss how nations have addressed historical injustices such as black slavery; colonial destruction of indigenous societies (Maori, Greenland Inughuit; aboriginal people in Australia); and state-organised racist or political persecution (Germany, France, Russia, Cambodia, and South Africa). Different national trajectories are analysed, while several essays compare strategies of ‘coming to terms’ with problematic pasts: transitional justice; official apologies; truth-finding directed towards reconciliation; and restitution of property and legal titles.