Abstract
Why do some countries in transition collapse into violence while others try to forget the past? Why have yet others, especially in recent transitions, adopted a strategy of legal redress and truth-telling?
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Notes
Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 20, 505–508.
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 163–164.
Dick Howard, “Toward a Politics of Judgement,” Constellations, 1, 2 (1994): 290.
Kay Trimberger, Revolution from Above: Military Bureaucrats in Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, and Peru (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978), 2.
See also Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
George J. Szablowski and Hans-Ulrich Derlien, “East European Transitions, Elites, Bureaucracies, and the European Community,” Governance, 6, 3 (July 1993): 308. The degree to which the Romanian revolutionary leadership ultimately reshaped society is quite debatable, however.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 215–216, 228.
Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen Gonzalez-Enriquez, and Paloma Aguilar, The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratizing Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11–14; Huntington, The Third Wave, 228.
Vera Tolz, “New Situation for CPSU and KGB Archives,” Radio Liberty, 3, 38 (September 28, 1991): 1–4, and Carla Thorson, “Has the Communist Party Been Legally Suspended?” Radio Liberty, 3, 40 (October 4, 1991): 4–8.
This is the approach adopted by Barahona de Brito in an important comparative study of transitional justice in Uruguay and Chile. She examines how several political factors affected the outcomes in those countries: the nature and strength of human rights movements; the relationship between the opposition party and the human rights organizations; the degree of opposition party unity; and the role of the democratically elected executive. She argues that a series of complex interactions among these factors yields the different outcomes in the two countries she studies. See Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Kathryn Sikkink, “Human Rights, Principled Issue-Networks, and Sovereignty in Latin America,” International Organization, 47, 3 (Summer 1993): 416.
Ibid., 438–439, and Susan E. Waltz, Human Rights and Reform: Changing the Face of North African Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 21–30.
Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 49, emphasis in original.
Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review, 51, 2 (April 1986): 278.
Paul Chilton and Christina Schaeffner, “Discourse and Politics,” chap. 8 in Discourse as Social Interaction (London: Sage Publications, 1997), vol. 2, Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Teun A. Van Dijk, 214–222. Teun A. Van Dijk, “Discourse as Interaction in Society,” chap. 1 in Discourse as Social Interaction (Lond: Sage Publications, 1997), vol. 2, Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Teun A. Van Dijk, 214–222. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” chap. 7 in Language and Politics, ed. Michael J. Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 116. Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 13–16.
Ludwig Wittgenstein also makes an analogy between language and a toolkit. See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 36–37.
Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicag: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 12; John A. Robinson and Linda Hawpe, “Narrative Thinking as a Heuristic Process,” chap. 6 in Narrative Psychology: The Stoned Nature of Human Conduct, ed. Theodore R. Sarbin (New York: Praeger, 1986), 113.
Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991).
Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 5.
Walter R. Fisher, “Narrative, Reason, and Community,” chap. 14 in Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 314.
Seyla Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy,” Constellations, 1, 1 (1994): 32–33.
In Poland, commentators frequently use phrases like “coming back to normal” or “borrowing from the tested models” to describe their country’s embrace of liberal democratic norms. See Wojciech Sokolewicz, “The Relevance of Western Models for Constitution-Building in Poland,” chap. 11 in Constitutional Policy and Change in Europe, ed. Joachim Jens Hesse and Nevil Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250.
Adam Przeworski calls democracy a “system for processing conflicts without killing one another.” See his Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95.
Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); see also Przeworski, Democracy and the Market.
See Jon Elster, ed., The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Mansoor Moaddel, Class, Politics and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 272.
Stephen Holmes, “Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy,” chap. 7 in Constitutionalism and Democracy, ed. Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 195.
Andrew Arato, From New-Marxism to Democratic Theory: Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-Type Societies (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 298–303.
Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and the Redemptive Power of Narrative,” chap. 5 in Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 127.
Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 19. A caveat is in order because while we can easily verify whether or not a particular policy has been adopted as a matter of law, we might still disagree on whether the policies were implemented and whether they had significant consequences.
See Ole R. Holsti, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969) and Martha Cooper, Analyzing Public Discourse (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989).
Giuseppe Di Palma, To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 109.
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© 2004 Noel Calhoun
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Calhoun, N. (2004). The Politics of Transitional Justice. In: Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe’s Democratic Transitions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07453-9_2
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