Challenging the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice – How to Think the Irrevocable: Bevernage’s History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence

When it comes to the theorisation of transitional justice, contributions from historians are conspicuous in their absence. If anything, the ‘turn to history’ of societies wishing to come to terms with their violent past is perceived as an encroachment on or a distortion of academic historiography. However, Berber Bevernage’s book ‘History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence’ is proof that such an engagement is pertinent to both the field of transitional justice and history as a discipline. On the one hand, Bevernage’s analysis of truth commissions and their practical use of history sheds light on the ‘politics of time’ (15) that are at work in transitional justice practices. Relying on a modern concept of continuous and homogenous historical time, he argues, truth commissions do not accommodate for victims’ and survivors’ experiences of an ‘irrevocable past’ (a term adopted from Vladimir Jankélévitch) as something that continues to persist in the present (4). Rather, truth commissions perform a break between the past and the present by which injustices become relegated to the past. On the other hand, understanding the ‘transitional justice dilemma’ as a conflict between different notions of historical time questions the political neutrality of the ‘ontological priority of the present’ and its ‘self-contemporeity’ as construed by modern historical discourse (170–171).

This twofold interest in the practical use of history and its relevance for a philosophy of history (ix) is reflected by the book’s division into two parts. The first one comprises three case studies on local resistance against notions of modern historical time imposed by truth commissions in Argentina, South Africa and Sierra Leone (chapters 2–4). In the second part Bevernage explores alternative concepts of time in an attempt to accommodate the ‘irrevocable past’ in historical thinking. After a recap of the central dimensions of a modern understanding of historical time (chapter 5), and a brief look at the – in the opinion of Bevernage unconvincing – work of some of its western critics (namely Fernand Braudel, R.G. Collingwood, Ernst Bloch and Louis Althusser, chapter 6), he suggests that Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality (chapter 7) and mourning (chapter 8) ‘serves as a good intellectual basis from which we can begin to conceive the more inclusive historical perspective that we look for’ (111). Both parts seem to follow their own thrust and mutual references are scarce. It is the overarching question regarding the relationship of time and justice, raised in the introduction and resumed in the conclusion that connects the two parts to each other.

The issue at the heart of the book, then, is the ‘temporal orientation of ethics and justice’ (168). Instead of plunging into a broad discussion on historical justice, Bevernage frames the problem as one of different notions of time, namely a ‘time of history’ and a ‘time of jurisdiction’ (2–3). While ‘the traditional discourse of jurisdiction with its logic of guilt and punishment generally works with a reversible time in which crimes can be annulled or redressed as if they were still fully present’ (168), history imposes the irreversibility of time in which the past is always already absent and distant (2). The problem with this time of history, as the case studies show, is that it cannot grasp the experience of a ‘persisting or haunting “presence” of the past and its injustices’ except as a logical inconsistency (3). This is probably best exemplified by Bevernage’s Argentinean case study. The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo – Línea Fundadora were declared mad for demanding the living reappearance of their disappeared children, a demand which challenged the idea that the past could be ‘left behind and subordinated to the interests of the present and the future’ (41). In a similar vein, Bevernage holds, the claim expressed by the Khulumani group in South Africa that ‘the present is in the past’ epitomises a conception of historical...