Volume 3, Issue 2

This special issue explores the intersection between transitional justice and public history. It presents some of the key claims, concerns, and debates within the field. As a key component of the “reparations pillar” within the transitional justice milieu, critiques of the concept of memorialization as public history are reviewed from both academia and field examples. Particular attention is paid to current debates within the field on truth-telling, erasure, revisionism, and manipulation of historical narratives to legitimize emerging political ideologies in transitional settings. While previous edited special sections of the journal may have provided more rigorous theorizations of public history as a discipline, this issue focuses on a critical conceptual examination of where public history collides with reconciliation, reparation, peacebuilding, and justice issues. It includes contributions on the praxis of localized processes of memorialization, historical revisionism, personal and political experiences, and populist ideologies, in order to explore more clearly the use of public history in contexts currently identified with “transitional justice.”

This essay argues that public historians and transitional justice experts need one another’s input in at least two crucial tasks facing nations after episodes of mass violence. In challenging the silence that typically envelopes post-war situations, the faithful recording of lived experiences of victims after violence is both a necessity and exceedingly complex. Here, oral history initiatives can significantly assist forensic investigations to develop a fuller picture of the suffering and crimes committed, but also to turn truth-telling into a healing experience for victims who often find forensic truth-telling on its own re-traumatizing. Conversely in efforts to memorialize wars, periods of oppression and struggles of liberation, public historians will do well to take seriously the testimonies of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and other truth-telling fora in order to ensure that any exclusionary narratives which may arise after the conflict are themselves disrupted, even as a social consensus is fostered on the need to realize all the necessary guarantees of non-recurrence to avoid a return to a bad past.

In 2011, twenty-six years after the end of the military dictatorship, the Brazilian government took the initiative of implementing the right to memory and to the truth, as well as promoting national reconciliation. A National Truth Commission was created aiming at examining and shedding light on serious human rights violations practiced by government agents from 1946 to 1985. It worked across the entire national territory for almost three years and established partnerships with governments of other countries in order to investigate and expose the international networks created by dictatorships for monitoring and persecuting political opponents across borders. This article analyzes the relationship between historians and the National Truth Commission in Brazil, in addition to the construction of dictatorship public history in the country. In order to do so, the Commission’s relationship with the national community of historians, the works carried out, as well as historians’ reactions towards its works, from its creation until its final report in 2014, will be examined.

In this work I reflect on a new figure that has been gaining presence in trials for crimes against humanity since 2005: the “context witness,” a specialist – usually coming from social sciences – who is presented as a witness and whose contribution is taken as testimonial evidence. I rely on my participation in the oral and public trial “Operation Independence,” in which I testified about my doctoral research on the experience of conscripts in southern Tucumán, Argentina between 1975 and 1977. My argument is that social sciences can provide meticulous reconstructions of the logic of repression, helping us to understand how state terror was possible.

How does public history correlate with issues of transitional justice and democratization? What are the roles and functions of professional historians during revolutionary moments and in the building of democratic culture and the pursuit of accountability and justice? On the basis of examples from three former Soviet republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during the past three decades, the essay reflects on these and other questions. It stresses the need for de-centralizing public engagement with the past and cautions against trends across the Central and Eastern European region to link processes of historical knowledge production with claims for justice and redress.

Drawing on the meaning of memorialization with examples from South Africa, this article argues that given the racist history of the USA, the meanings and function of memorials to the past should be subverted to continue the dialogue about freedom, justice, and equality in the country.

Historical consciousness is a decisive factor in Sri Lanka with regards to the relationships between Sinhala and Tamil ethnic communities. It functioned as a great divide between these two communities. It was also used as a “charter of right” in order to impose one community’s claim on the other. This has become increasingly problematic in the post-war context after the violent hostilities between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil insurgents ended in 2009. Sinhala-Buddhists, who were politically dominant and identify themselves as the legitimate possessor of the island, desire to consolidate their dominance in the Tamil North and reckon historical knowledge as an effective tool for that end. The historical narrative that Sinhala Buddhists endorsed beginning in the early 20th century proved to be insufficient in countering the rising power of a Tamil counter narrative. Attempts have been made since the mid-1980s to produce a new historical narrative that is capable of challenging Tamil political claims. Although this effort was not fully successful, partial success was achieved during and after the war between the Sinhala dominated state and Tamil insurgents. The new historical consciousness that emerged out of this process proved to be extremely problematic in the context of the growing need for transitional justice for the war-affected Tamils in the North.

Seventy-seven years after gaining independence and 11 years after the end of a long civil war, Sri Lankan public discourse is still searching for a broadly accepted concept of national identity and struggling to find constructive ways of dealing with the past. In this interview the former president of Sri Lanka (1994–2005) Madam Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga reflects on deeply rooted conflicts in society, the various outbreaks of violence, political mistakes made in the past, and her own role in the peace process and in reconciliation.

Public history in New Zealand since the 1990s has been often dominated by the need to acknowledge New Zealand’s colonial past. Included in the British Empire by treaty in 1840 between the British Crown and its indigenous tribes, New Zealand’s European population has often idealized the country’s race relations. In recent decades, Māori assertiveness has led to a greater recognition of the damage done to Māori communities as New Zealand increasingly became a settler society. Inquiries into New Zealand’s colonial history since the 1980s have led to new settlements between Crown and iwi (tribal authorities). Demands that New Zealand’s colonial history be part of the school curriculum have also increased over this time. New Zealand’s decentralized social science and social studies curricula have been largely non-prescriptive, meaning that most children get little grounding in New Zealand’s history. In September 2019, the government announced that New Zealand history would become compulsory by the beginning of the 2022 school year. Defining this curriculum poses significant challenges to the country in a short period of time, challenges compounded by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.