How, if at all, should we remember the histories of injustice and atrocity that haunt most modern states? Since World War II, it has become commonplace to suggest that properly responding to injustices requires societies to remember them, and to remember the experiences of those they touched. But what specific value might memory in this sense constitute in or contribute to the lives and societies of those coping with troubled history? This question raises two issues. The first is ontological: what does it mean to say that a society should remember in the first place? Is it to say that the individuals who make up society should each privately remember, or is to say that the society as a whole should somehow create or maintain a collective memory that is not reducible to the sum of individual cognitive processes? The second issue is normative: what exactly can memory so conceived do to ameliorate the undesirable legacies that historical injustices leaves on the world? How might remembering help us to move forward, or help us to lessen the pains we can’t leave behind? This study takes on both of these issues. On the first, I suggest that when we speak of societies remembering, we’re speaking of irreducibly social processes, by which individual memories are translated into publicly available traces of the past, which can then inform recollection by others, perhaps at some distance from the original event. On the second, I suggest that this sort of remembering can be valuable in the wake of injustice as a way of combating the legacies of persistent harm and exclusion that sometimes follow victims long after an injustice is over, and challenge their abilities to stand, participate, and identify as full members of the political community. Memory in this sense is crucial for re-negotiating the boundaries of membership, and for rebuilding a more inclusive public world.

Testimony flows from a story that originates long before the opportunity to be a witness about human atrocities occurs. And, ironically, testimony – the voice that is suppressed during times of state sanctioned terror – continues to flow long after the perpetrators fade from power. It is this ethereal and enduring paradox that raises the questions of what testimonial forms are, how they communicate, and whether they positively impact social justice as evidenced by enhanced communicative freedoms. The testimonial forms of this study are narratives about human rights atrocities which emerged from the 17-year military junta in Chile led by Augusto Pinochet. This project examines the development and uses of official and unofficial testimony surrounding times of transitional justice using a multi-modal analysis incorporating narrative and historical analysis, communication ethics, and critical theory which yields a meta-analysis of testimony and the context in which it functions. This research concludes that a life cycle of testimony exists that is organic and evolving. Furthermore, due to the unique circumstances of transitional justice periods, a theory of testimony ethics is called for to increase individual communicative freedoms that lead to enhanced social justice as well as to increase the success of truth commission communication processes.

There is a growing literature in political science that focuses on the impact that policies, or mechanisms, of transitional justice (e.g. tribunals, truth commissions, and amnesty laws) have on future human rights abuses and democratization processes. However, this literature fails to differentiate between having a policy on the books and having a policy which is actually implemented. My project attempts for the first time to measure and assess how well two distinct types of transitional justice policies, truth commissions and ad-hoc tribunals, are designed and how well they are implemented. Variation in terms of policy structure (or institutional design) and implementation are currently unknown; knowing what the level of this variation is will enable us to understand the impact these transitional justice policies have on state-level human rights behavior. To conduct this analysis, I first offer a derivation of principal-agent theory and then assemble a new dataset of measures culled from primary and secondary data sources on over 40 different courts and truth commissions. For the data on the institutional design of these transitional justice policies, I collected and translated the legal mandates which create courts or commissions. I then coded the power, authority, and resource allocations which are designated in these mandates. For the data on implementation, I collected primary commission and court reports as well as secondary analyses and tracked the various activities and forms of engagement which were utilized in the process of carrying out each policy. These data were then compiled with a full set of economic, political, and social context measures and analyzed to determine whether policies with (1) more allocated authority/power or resources or (2) better implementation produced greater improvements in respect for human rights or reduced the likelihood of having additional instances of rights violations. Overall, I find that design and implementation measures are not strongly related to greater rights improvements or the reduced likelihood of violations, indicating that whatever positive changes may exist are not likely due to transitional justice practices. However, the use of transitional justice policies following human rights abuses is correlated with more positive outcomes. The ultimate goal of this project was to determine whether these policies can deliver justice and to initiate a dialogue on whether domestic populations are well served by high-cost policies (such as courts or commissions) or whether these priorities should be tabled in favor of addressing more immediate needs of these groups. The results of this dissertation appear to support the latter claim although these findings remain preliminary.

This thesis examines the testimonies of victims related to the use of torture during the Pinochet dictatorship. It contends that the existence of a broad testimonial archive on torture, significantly produced by the victims themselves, points to a collective 'speech' by which victims have attempted to splinter the silence of the dictatorial state and, in the aftermath of the repression, to contest the 'official history' of the transitional state. The testimonies of torture victims, it will be argued, signify a specific mode of action, a 'doing' of memory, whereby the experience of torture is re-membered in an effort to bring accountability for the crimes committed and this, from the first days of the dictatorship up to today. This speech of victims moreover is seen to constitute the unifying link between the testimonies of torture victims that have emerged during the dictatorship itself and those that continue to emerge today.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-345).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-345).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Description based on Microfiche version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-345).

"It is noted that special measures are always necessary in post-conflict situations to bring about the restoration of normalcy to societies. Truth commissions have been identified as a key to uniting, reconciling and helping the people to confidently deal with their past. Whilst these are noble notions, practically, truth commissions face serious challenges. The dissertation shall seek to highlight these problems and offer recommendations. ... The dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is the general introduction. It gives a brief political history of Ghana and South Africa and their impact on the enjoyment of human rights. The chapter shall also discuss the need for national reconciliation in both countries. Chapter two discusses truth commissions in contemporary societies. It briefly discusses the establishment of national reconciliaton commissions and their mandates. Chapter three focuses on the laws establishing the TRC and NRC of South Africa and Ghana respectively. These legislation shall be considered in detail in order to analyse their objectives to know whether or not thet are achievable within their stated mandates. Chapter four discusses the challenges truth commission poses to international law and its implications on rule of law. The chapter shall discuss the issue of amnesty to perpetrators of gross human rights and the perpetuation of the culture of impunity in the light of international law. Chapter five considers the way forward and suggest recommendations." -- Chapter 1. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa))--University of Pretoria, 2003. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

MA (Political Science) / Department of Development Studies

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