Abstract
This chapter surveys prior scholarship about transitional justice, with an emphasis on studies about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It marshals this research to make the case that the development of the field of transitional justice has given rise to a rhetorical tradition that provides those working in the field with a series of “enabling constraints.” It highlights the specific argumentative devices of the rhetorical tradition, such as the ideograph of reconciliation, truth commissions’ means of establishing ethos, and the genre of the truth commission final report. This discussion provides the necessary background for the rhetorical analyses in subsequent chapters, which explore how the elements of the tradition discussed here were reaccentuated by the members of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission to meet the contingent demands of their own context.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Olsen, Payne, and Reiter (2010) restricted their analysis to “the five main mechanisms most commonly recognized by scholars and practitioners as transitional justice: trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and lustration” (p. 805).
- 2.
I define “patterns” as regular or reoccurring forms, sequences, or arrangements of rhetorical features that are found in, and often across, particular rhetorical situations or contexts.
- 3.
According to the NGO staff member, “The [SATRC’s] approach to reconciliation is very vague… It lacks an organized strategy to reach out to communities and involve them. Victims do not know what to expect and they are absent from any participation in the policy process” (van der Merwe, 2001, p. 99).
- 4.
Hamber and Van der Merwe (1998) commented on the term’s connections to ideology as well, referring to reconciliation’s “hegemonic ideologies” (para. 18). Other scholars have, however, offered a more sympathetic analysis of reconciliation’s ambiguity. Verdoolaege (2008), for one, contended that such ambiguity was intentional, allowing for a more inclusive process (p. 167).
- 5.
About this point, VanAntwerpen (2010) wrote, “[T]he extensive usage of the word ‘reconciliation’ continues to hide a great diversity of meaning… The wonder of reconciliation is not an absence of definitions but an abundance of meanings” (p. 46).
- 6.
While much of the scholarship surveyed in this chapter is more consistent with McGee’s (1980) notion of synchronic analysis, there are scholars who have analyzed reconciliation diachronically. Jonathan VanAntwerpen (2010), for example, investigated reconciliation’s meaning over time and beyond the South African context, and he contended that there “has been a trend towards the attempted ‘liberalization’ and ‘secularization’ of reconciliation discourse, especially among elite international actors, the globetrotting cosmopolitans who occupy influential positions within global civil society” (p. 34). Such findings are consistent with Teitel’s (2002) observations about the liberalizing trajectory of transitional narratives (p. 252).
- 7.
Chapter 3 provides a more thorough analysis of ubuntu and its connotations.
- 8.
Doxtader (2009) has explored other ways that reconciliation was used rhetorically as well. Analyzing the 1995 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, which established the SATRC, Doxtader noted, “Among some 30 others, reconciliation was cast as a way to open up the past, close the book on history, establish the truth of individual experience, support the catharsis of confession, exorcise evil, account for the nation’s collective responsibility, engender ubuntu, revive moral conscience, rejoin law and morality, spur voluntarism, redress motivations for violence, undertake human reconstruction, heal victims, liberate institutions, support transition, and contribute to the development of democracy” (p. 270).
- 9.
Cole (2010) is one of many scholars who have commented on Tutu’s importance to the Commission: he was, she wrote, “the unquestioned master of ceremonies, a brilliant showman. Without his talents, it could be argued, the commission would surely have broken down at several particularly fraught junctures. His ability to stage-manage, to orchestrate contending forces, to shift abruptly the tone, style, language, and mood of the proceedings kept the audience and all participants slightly off guard” (pp. 16–17).
- 10.
For more on the ethos that Tutu established for the SATRC, see Beitler (2012).
- 11.
I discuss these subject positions in greater detail in Chap. 4.
- 12.
Mack (2012) has highlighted additional genres associated with the SATRC, including the novel and the photographic essay (p. 6).
- 13.
The evidence Gready (2011) provided to support this claim included “the failure [in the report] to integrate testimonies and statistical analysis; the need to relate things treated separately (time periods, regional profiles, categories of abuse, parts of individual stories); and the treatment of sector hearings and related structural issues in a separate volume…To this list should be added the decision to begin, and therefore frame, the whole report with a chairperson’s foreword (genre: sermon)” (p. 50).
- 14.
Nunca Más, the final report of Argentina’s truth commission, was an exception to this rule: an abbreviated version of the report was a best seller in the country (Gready, 2011, p. 35). Most final reports do not enjoy this sort of public reception.
- 15.
It is worth noting, for example, that the rhetorical tradition has been performed in other types of texts than the ones surveyed in this chapter. Salazar (2002) explored the rhetorical aspects of rituals (such as Tutu’s dance accompanying the public delivery of the SATRC’s Final Report to Mandela), South African newspaper inserts and advertisements, South African voting ballots, Elle magazine covers, and geographic spaces like Robben Island.
- 16.
With regard to meta-narratives, Teitel (2002) reflected on the patterns that circulate in the field of transitional justice. He wrote, “Transitional narratives follow a distinct rhetorical form: beginning in tragedy, they end on a comic or romantic mode” (p. 252). Unlike “classic” tragic tales in which the revelation of knowledge foretells the demise of one or more characters, in narratives of transition “the revelation of knowledge actually makes a [positive] difference. The country’s past suffering is…reversed, leading to a happy ending of peace and reconciliation” (p. 252). There has typically been a liberalizing political shift implicated in this narrative trajectory; that is, transitional narratives have often told the stories of nations and societies that transition from authoritarian or totalitarian regimes toward democratization (Teitel, 2000, p. 5). Teitel’s arguments lend support to the presupposition that, in the activities and inquiries that comprise the field of transitional justice, there are patterned ways of using language.
While there are undoubtedly many reasons why the emphasis on liberalization that Teitel described has become commonplace in the field of transitional justice, Kritz’s (1995) field-defining compilation—Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes—may have been a contributing factor. As Charles D. Smith (1995), the former Director of the Rule of Law Initiative for the United States Institute of Peace, noted in the Introduction to Kritz’s anthology, “These volumes are limited, as the subtitle indicates, to the way that emerging democratic societies address the legacy of their repression of their own people. This approach has excluded consideration of non-democratic successor states (for example, the transition from the Pahlavi to Khomeini regimes in Iran, or from Somoza to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua) It has also excluded most material on the transitional policies of occupation authorities (such as post-World War II Japan)” (p. xvi). For more on liberalization within the field of transitional justice, see Ní Aoláin and Campbell (2005, p. 173).
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Beitler, J.E. (2013). The Rhetorical Tradition of Transitional Justice. In: Remaking Transitional Justice in the United States. Springer Series in Transitional Justice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5295-9_2
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