Europe in the Age of Apology
In the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in selfcritical awareness of past injustice and mass atrocities around the world. “No peace without Justice” has become a new motto of the post-conflictual history of reconciliation. As Nelson Mandela declared, “True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past.” This means that transitional justice cannot be successfully realized without new, just memory and without collective, trans-national, rememberance of the tragic past. According to Jennifer Lind, “this view is bolstered by many scholars of transitional justice, who argue precisely that within states, truth-telling and legal prosecutions for human right abuses promote democratic consolidation and post conflict stability.”
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