Book Review: Between Vengeance and Forgiveness

Those new to the field of transitional justice may find some of the concepts to be philosophically complex at best and morally inflammatory at worst.  This was particularly the case in the late 1990s, when the international attention paid to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought the process into the mainstream.  As such, it was a rich period for literature on the subject.

One of the finest primers on transitional justice, published in 1998, is Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence by Martha Minow.  Minow, a Harvard law professor, puts her extensive understanding of existing research on display here, as the notes comprise one-quarter of the book and provide a representative sampling of the best work in the field at publication time.  Organized around different potential components of the transitional justice process – Vengeance and Forgiveness, Trials, Truth Commissions, and Reparations – Minow’s work is measured in tone and works diligently to explore these controversial issues from multiple angles.

Here are five nuggets I took from Between Vengeance and Forgiveness:

1) “What responses do or could lie between vengeance and forgiveness if legal and cultural institutions offered other avenues for individuals and nations?” (21) – There is a temptation to fall into simple dichotomies when considering these issues.  Minow calls for more creativity in developing strategies that address critical components of both vengeance and forgiveness.

2) “Privately, then-Chief Justice Stone of the United States Supreme Court labeled the [Nuremberg Trials] a ‘high class lynching party’” (30) – In introducing her chapter on trials, Minow traces the historical development of international courts, going back to their origins at Nuremberg.  While generally taken for granted as a clear act of justice today, the trials were clearly highly controversial at the time.

3) On Rwanda: “A genuine possibility, then, is that leaders tried by the International Tribunal will receive term sentences while those influenced by or ordered by them will receive death sentences” (41) – As highlighted here, one of the challenges in applying international law to domestic conflicts is the potential gap that develops between those tried by the different judicial arenas.

4) “Tina Rosenberg…finds parallels between truth commissions and the therapeutic process that helps individual victims deal with post-traumatic stress disorder… She adds, ‘If the whole nation is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, this process would be appropriate for the whole nation’” (62) – In South Africa, the Legacy Project spent a great deal of time examining the issues of trauma, secondary trauma, and national trauma.  Rosenberg’s claim, echoed here by Minow, is an interesting one – but hardly conclusive.

5) “The self-image of the Swiss as neutral actors, free of blame for the Nazi horror, contributed to their current leaders’ failures of response.  Those very failures in turn triggered a spreading disbelief in the possibility of neutrality toward mass atrocity… too often being neutral provided a pretext for avoiding moral considerations” (111) – Using the classic example of Swiss bankers during the Holocaust, Minow raises the question here of whether neutrality is possible in the case of mass human rights violations, along with the tension between neutrality and morality in certain circumstances.