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Emotions and the Transnational Movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation—A Partial Argument

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Die Ambivalenz der Gefühle

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Abstract

In this text I would like to briefly sketch out what one can see as the emerging transnational movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation (TJ&R)—a part of a larger movement for human rights, to then pose the question of what feeling rules have accompanied its emergence. The transnational movement for TJ&R is only about 20–30 years old. It harks back to, even posits as exemplary, the reconciliation processes which supposedly took place in West Germany after World War II following the Nuremberg Trials. The movement sets itself highly ambitious moral goals. Although its promoters are aware of the inherent contradictions between its prime goals, and not all would subscribe to them simultaneously, the movement taken as a whole has as its main aims to reveal the truth about the past atrocities, to administer justice, punishing the perpetrators of these atrocities, and to achieve a new understanding of the past.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Each author adopts another term as appropriate to label the emotion that should be felt with respect to distant human suffering: Boltanski speaks of the politics of pity dividing the world into those who suffer and those who do not; and argues that suffering can be addressed politically; he defines compassion as an apolitical practice (Boltanski 1999, p. 3–7); others reject pity and sympathy as implying superiority of the person feeling it towards their object; Sontag uses sorrow, compassion, pity, etc. interchangeably. Not even two authors can agree on the meaning and implications of the concept of compassion. This is a fairly typical state of discussions about emotions. Since it is not my goal to explore one or more emotions and key psychologists argue that they come in bundles anyway, I adopt compassion and indignation as the two generic concepts or labels, without engaging in a long discussion of their history, meanings and implications. They are only interesting to me insofar as one calls for feeling with and for the victim while the other calls for the emotional rejection/condemnation of the perpetrator.

  2. 2.

    See Minow (1998, p. 5, 14, 18, 66–70, and explicitly p. 147) for the need to seek truth (history), forgiveness (theology), justice (punishment, compensation, deterrence), therapy (healing), art (commemoration) and education (learning lessons). She believes in the “restorative power of truth-telling” (1998, p. 66–70). Minow neither sees the problem of joining the therapeutic with the legal-moral nor that of remembering and yet forgetting/seeking closure.

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Acknowledgements

The present text constitutes a modified excerpt from a longer article which appeared in 2013 in “Emotions and Power—Special Issue of the Journal of Political Power,” guest edited by Jonathan G. Heaney and Helena Flam. The ideas were presented for the first time at the midterm conference of the European Emotions Network which took place at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin in October 2012. I would like to thank Jonathan G. Heaney for his thought-prompting questions and correcting my English, and Katarina Ristic and Jochen Kleres for their comments. Thank you to Yvonne Albrecht for soliciting this version for this volume.

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    Helena Flam

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  1. Universität Göteborg, Göteborg, Sweden

    Jochen Kleres

  2. Universität Kassel, Kassel, Germany

    Yvonne Albrecht

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Flam, H. (2015). Emotions and the Transnational Movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation—A Partial Argument. In: Kleres, J., Albrecht, Y. (eds) Die Ambivalenz der Gefühle. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-01654-8_9

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