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By Zinaida Miller, The Impossible Necessity of Racial Justice in Transitional Justice, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 18, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 150–161, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijae011
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Extract
To write about race and transitional justice begins in many ways from a point of radical impossibility. There is no plausible repair for the transatlantic slave trade. There is no apology available for apartheid. There is no amount of money, prison time, truth or apology that could possibly address either the atrocities of slavery and colonialism or the brutally unequal afterlives they have wrought. Despite the inevitable incommensurability of any forms of justice with the practices of violence they address, justice must nonetheless be pursued. The three works discussed here, along with many other important recent contributions, grapple admirably with both the horrific scope of the problems and the difficult, unsatisfying work of repair.
The foundational question of how to understand or to remember – let alone to redress – ‘historical’ harms reverberates throughout work on race and transitional justice. Both the transitional justice enterprise and the study of constructions of race, racialization and racism require a Janus-faced approach to time, looking simultaneously forward and backward. Transitional justice has always been caught between accounting for the past and establishing basic guarantees for the future.1 While one impulse lies in the desire to discover what has happened in the past – and, if possible, to hold someone or some state/institution accountable for it – the future-oriented impulse relies on negotiation, compromise and pragmatism in order to smooth the way for those on opposite sides to survive together.
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