Apology, reconciliation and the politics of memory

The chapter aims to assess the impact of the work of transitional justice concepts and mechanisms in allowing societies torn apart by conflict to emerge as ‘reconciled.’ It places these questions as key to the dynamics of transitional justice and looks at some of the jurisprudential implications of how countries have faced up to histories of extensive suffering, discrimination, human rights violations and other large-scale injustices. The chapter identifies a number of such problems in the context of political transitions, typically from authoritarian to democratic forms of government. In recent decades a theme has come to prominence in legal studies concerning the role of law and legal institutions in political transitions. The politics of memory are at once also the politics of forgetting, and it is to the latter in particular that the forging of a collective memory through legal means should always remain most attentive.