Full Description
This collection of essays by an international group of authors explores the ways in which law and legal institutions are used in countries coming to terms with traumatic pasts and, in some cases, traumatic presents. In putting to question what is often taken for granted in uncritical calls for reconciliation, it critically analyses and frequently challenges the political and legal assumptions underlying discourses of reconciliation. Drawing on a broad spectrum of disciplinary and interdisciplinary insights the authors examine how competing conceptions of law, time, and politics are deployed in social transformations and how pressing demands for reconstruction, reconciliation, and justice inform and respond to legal categories and their use of time. The book is genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on work in politics, philosophy, theology, sociology and law. It will appeal to a wide audience of researchers and academics working in these areas.
Contents
List of Contributors, Introduction, 1 The Time of Reconciliation and the Space of Politics, 2 Reconciliation and Reconstitution, 3 The Risk of Reconciliation, 4 Reconciliation as Domination, 5 'Spatialising History' and Opening Time: Resisting the Reproduction of the Proper Subject, 6 Reconciliation: Where is the Law?, 7 Transnational Law and Societal Memory, 8 Sacrum, Profanum and Social Time: Quasi-theological Reflections on Time and Reconciliation, 9 Reconciliation as Therapy and Compensation: A Critical Analysis, 10 Feminism and the Ethics of Reconciliation, 11 Constitution as Archive, 12 The Time of Address, Index
