C 2004) Social Justice Research, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2004 (
DOI: 10.1007/s11211-004-2060-4

Review Essay

Addressing Historical Injustice Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices. Edited by John Torpey. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Lanham, Maryland, 2003. Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Justice. By Janna Thompson. Blackwell Publishers Inc., Maiden, Massachusetts, 2002. James L. Gibson1

The problem of addressing and possibly compensating for injustices from the past has elbowed itself onto the world stage during the past decade. Inspired by the successes of the Holocaust claimants, every manner of group in most corners of the world is pressing claims for dealing with unfair treatment in the past. As John Torpey (p. 1) quotes the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka: “[T]he world does appear to be caught up in a fin de mill´enaire fever of atonement.” One should not be surprised, therefore, to find that scholars of many different types of training and intellectual persuasion are grappling with the problems of historical injustice. In the work of Janna Thompson we find a sophisticated and comprehensive treatment of the moral philosophy of historical justice. In the chapters of the book edited by John Tropey we discover that sociologists, historians, anthropologists, policy analysts, psychologists, and political scientists also have something to say about historical injustice. A truly multidisciplinary field has emerged to investigate this set of perplexing socio-political problems. These two books, different in many if not most important ways, provide numerous valuable insights into the issues of historical justice. Janna Thompson puts forth a provocative thesis—a “diachronic theory”—that in a nutshell asserts that our obligations to the past are best defined by our expectations about what we are entitled to from our forebears. Her normative objective is unequivocal: The purpose of the book is to defend historical obligations and entitlements. Crucial to 1 All

correspondence should be addressed to James L. Gibson, Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, 219 Eliot Hall, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899. Gibson also holds the position of Fellow, Centre for Comparative and International Politics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. 421 C 2004 Plenum Publishing Corporation 0885-7466/04/1200-0421/0


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her argument is the idea of an “intergenerational community”—“groups capable of making and keeping transgenerational commitments.” The continuity of a nation defines the boundaries of historical obligations. She expands this simple principle of transgenerational commitment throughout the book, addressing such important questions as whether a “statute of limitations” defines our relationship to the past (it does not), whether the living should be held accountable for the deeds of the dead (they should), and whether newcomers to a society assume the historical debts and obligations of that society (they do). On the basis of the ten chapters in this short but dense book, Thompson concludes that general contemporary principles of justice apply to historical disputes with full force, and that, so long as a nationstate remains intact, most claims of historical injustices are in principle legitimate and consequently obligations (moral and legal) which cannot be dismissed. The singlemindedness of the Thompson volume is matched by the stunning diversity of the Torpey book. Politics and the Past is divided into three parts: “Historical and Theoretical Considerations on the Spread of Reparations Politics,” “Reparation Politics: Case Studies,” and “Judging the Past.” The fourteen chapters of the book (counting the introduction) cover a panoply of issues relevant to historical justice, ranging from relatively straightforward descriptive chapters about the nature of the historical disputes in particular places, to an ambitious effort to calculate the costs of slavery, to discussions of the role of historians in litigation over the past. The issues addressed by these authors are of enormous practical importance and the range of disputes considered is stunning. The Holocaust, Japanese “Comfort Women,” the rights of indigenous peoples in the New World, slavery, the reclamation of art and treasure acquired in the past, human rights abuses, and genocide are just some of the contentious issues investigated in these various works. Claims from the past are indeed ubiquitous. Not every issue of historical injustice is addressed—notable is the nearly total lack of discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian land conflicts—but one comes away from this volume with a deep appreciation of how salient and significant issues of historical injustices are throughout the world. There are few instances in which the chapters of the Torpey book overlap with the concerns of Thompson. However, particularly fecund exceptions include Conley’s chapter (#5) on slavery reparations and the Howard–Hassman chapter (#9) on reparations for the dismal condition of Africa today. Conley notes, for instance, that a majority of the white population in the United States is descended from people who came to the U.S. after 1870. For some, this fact might seem to ameliorate blame for reparations for slavery. Whether one agrees with her argument or not, Thompson provides an unambiguous justification for making the contemporary majority accountable for the sins of people to whom they have no historical relationship. And while one might often be uneasy with the largely intuitive and occasionally polemical justifications for reparations offered by the Torpey authors, one can find in Thompson a much more carefully worked out and explicitly stated logic for reaching essentially the same conclusions. That these

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two books overlap so little requires more work for the reader in synthesizing and cross-referencing arguments; nonetheless, the raw material in both volumes is entirely sufficient, and sufficiently rewarding, for such an effort. As with all edited volumes, the chapters in the Torpey book vary considerably in rigor and quality. For instance, the just-mentioned Conley and Howard–Hassman chapters differ in the care with which they address various issues of reparations. Conley’s calculations seem far from rigorous; instead, they seem like the sort of figures one might come up with on the back of an envelope while having drinks with friends in a bar. The Howard–Hassman analysis is more detailed and more carefully thought out, but it too seems to suffer from lack of rigor and clear explication and defense of all assumptions. Perhaps few are willing to put the detailed and concentrated effort into calculating real figures since the political feasibility of paying reparations is so low. Or perhaps the bottom line estimates vary wildly depending upon minor variations in assumptions. It is not clear to me that anyone profits from presenting poorly justified figures on an issue that is at present so contentious. Nonetheless, though there is less internal consistency (and consistency of quality) in the Torpey book as compared to the Thompson volume, readers interested in a broad introductory course in historical justice will find the Torpey book quite valuable; advanced and more specialized students will enjoy grappling with the complex philosophical issues raised by Thompson. In general, the contributions of these two volumes to the burgeoning literature on historical injustices are enormous. With such breadth of material on the table—the contributions range from descriptions to polemics to what might be called analytical narratives (although surprisingly sparse in this body of work are efforts at hypothesis testing and systematic empirical analysis)—it is difficult to know how to organize one’s thoughts about these two books. Since I am a political scientist, it should surprise few readers that my most general complaint concerns the sparse attention paid to politics by nearly all of the authors in these two books. Beyond this critique, I also raise a handful of additional issues and unanswered research questions arising from the analyses of these authors. THE ROLE OF POLITICS IN JUSTICE CLAIMS Notably absent in these various works is sustained attention to the politics of justice claims (even though Brooks notes in Chapter 4 of Torpey that the politics of redress often overshadow the merits of redress, p. 107). Janna Thompson’s analysis is explicitly abstract, philosophical, and normative, so perhaps she should be forgiven for paying so little attention to the practical politics of historical justice claims. Still, Thompson’s arguments occasionally rest upon intensely political judgments and assessments. She asserts, for instance: “As members of nations we are responsible for keeping the commitments made by our predecessors (all things

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being equal); we have an obligation to make reparation for their injustices to other nations and to family lines. We are obliged to fulfill their just demands” (p. 153). Unfortunately, in politics all other things are rarely equal. More important, the justness of demands is rarely uncontested; it is the essence of politics to disagree over what is just and what is not (and what is just to whom). Like judges who always follow precedents that were rightly decided, discretion in judging the fairness of claims reduces philosophical arguments to the hustle and bustle of street-level politics. Nor is this an isolated lapse. She also asserts: “Those who enter such negotiations [over reparations] are likely to have different views about what is just. Reconciliation is a process of mutual accommodation that presupposes the acceptance of moral conditions and objectives. Nations and individuals ought to establish relations of respect (except when there is good reason to believe that the other is not worthy of respect, either in a particular context or in general)” (p. 52, emphasis added). The exception allowed by Thompson is so enormous and so subjective that the principle itself is deprived of any practical meaning and consequences. One might think that a book entitled Politics and the Past would be vastly more sensitive to the political dimensions of justice claiming, and indeed many of the chapters in the book describe the politics of efforts of historical claimants to demand restitution and reparations (e.g., the Ratner, Carroll, and Woolford chapter on Canada). But what I find missing from virtually all of the chapters is a willingness to treat historical claimants as similar to other interest groups seeking benefits from corporations and governments, and therefore to use the analytical tools of contemporary theories of interest group politics. One might be interested, for instance, to know whether American Indian Tribes are active in the money politics of the United States. All issues of this sort seek to mobilize (or neutralize) public opinion, primarily through issue framing. Have historical claimants employed the tools of modern political causes, and if so, to what effect, and if not, why? It is certainly possible to imagine that contemporary Holocaust claimants pay as much attention to media strategy as they do to legal doctrine (or to legal forum shopping). To be fair, politics is interwoven through many of the chapters, but few authors explicitly treat historical claimants as a political movement, subject to all the normal processes of interest group politics. Intra-Group Politics One issue of politics is touched on by some authors, although with insufficient emphasis for my liking. That is the issue of intra-group conflict over reparations claims. Especially intriguing, for instance, is the fragmentary evidence of intense internal conflict among aboriginal groups in Canada. For instance, Ratner, Carroll and Woolford inform us (p. 235), almost as an afterthought, that “30 percent of the First Nations [in Canada] have chosen to boycott the negotiations” with the government. They also report that community groups have been “peripheralized”

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[sic], by which they mean that their interests have been removed to the periphery of the negotiating arena. This suggests considerable conflict among the native complainants, that some interests have predominated over others, and that those who speak for the broader community may lack authority to do so, as well as means of internal accountability to their constituents. The internal politics of the formation of complainant groups is surely a story worth telling.2 MOVING BEYOND THESE VOLUMES These books raise, but do not exploit, a host of interesting theoretical and substantive questions that require some additional reflection and investigation. Why Now? All of the authors agree that demands for redress of historical injustices have mushroomed in recent times. Why this has happened, however, is not well explained. For instance, the question is explored in Chapter 1 by Olick and Coughlin. While quite critical of analytical approaches to understanding the rise of transitional justice institutions and processes, they unfortunately produce few insights into the answer to this question, putting forth instead an account emphasizing “the postmodern demise of legitimating narratives” (p. 45). As one without a postmodern bone in my body, I found the argument largely inaccessible, and whatever hypotheses might emerge from the chapter essentially untestable. It is clear, however, that Olick and Coughlin do not accept that the rise of historical justice claims is associated with the triumph of a liberal universalism associated with Western individualism and the hegemony of Western democracies in the world today. I am not so certain. With the growing pluralism of the world, in which many contrasting ideological positions have acquired a voice, and with more stringent enforcement of international norms brought about by globalization (a point argued by Cairns in Chapter 2), the hypocrisy of particularism (in which individual violations of human rights are excused if the ends are sufficiently valuable) has been clearly exposed. All parties must now justify their positions and actions within some universalistic framework. In most parts of the world, justifications for atrocities such as those put forth by Serbian nationalists do not attract many adherents, just as American military tacticians are today coupled with lawyers aiming to ensure that international law and norms are respected while waging war. Of course, I offer no theory of how universalism came to hold such broad moral and legal sway (beyond perhaps a theory of the dispersal of power in the context of world pluralism), but every justice claimant surely seeks to frame 2 As

reported in the Mail & Guardian, the land claim process in South Africa’s Limpopo province is making very slow progress, not owing to the intransigence of right-wing whites, but rather due to conflicts between competing tribal chiefs (sama Yende and Arenstein, 2004, 10).

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her or his position within universal principles of justice. Those who subscribe to the view that “to the victor go the spoils” have diminished dramatically in number. Liberal universalism seems to be hegemonic today.3 Perhaps I am wrong about this. But what is missing from the debate, and what is very badly needed, is rigorous empirical evidence and analysis of the prevalence of and causes of justice claims worldwide. Collective Memory Tied up in these debates is the concept of collective memory, by which most authors mean some sort of shared understanding of the past. Unfortunately, however, collective memory is not a concept that typically is assigned much rigorous content. What is a collective memory, and most important what is collective about it and how do we know that any given memory is in fact collective? In the absence of any clear evidence that a particular set of beliefs is consensually shared, I find it more useful to think of narratives and ideologies simply as one of many entrants in the marketplace of memory. Moreover, precisely how do collective memories legitimize or delegitimize justice claims and claimants? Perhaps in ancient times, a collective memory of colonial peoples included the belief that aboriginal cultures contained no meaningful concept of land “ownership,” and perhaps that viewpoint has in fact dissipated and been replaced by a new understanding of the meaning of ownership. I do not know—no evidence is adduced on the state of collective memories. But I do consider many important questions of collective memory open questions much in need of rigorous, empirical analysis of the sort not reported in the Torpey book. What Factors Give Rise to Widespread Atrocities? Several of the authors argue that all cultures have a capacity for evildoing (e.g., Brooks, Chapter 4), and I guess at some level this may be true. But the important question, one entirely unanswered by the authors of these chapters, is what factors activate these latent tendencies and produce repression, massacres, and genocides? Platitudes about the banality of evil should at some point be replaced with rigorous analysis of what causes outbreaks of social turmoil. Mentions of scapegoat theory, realistic group conflict, and other explanations of intergroup violence and repression are much too rare in these analyses. 3 And

has most likely been influential for some time now, just as the defense of democracy in World War II made the subordination of American blacks illegitimate after the war. The articulation of a universal principle for judging others often leads to the domestic use of that principle for the disaffected.

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By What Mechanism and Institutions are Justice Claims Best Pursued? Many authors accept the view (some more explicitly than others) that truth commissions are an effective way of bringing about justice (e.g., Cairns, Ch. 2, Brooks Chapter 4, Howard–Hassman, Ch. 9).4 But the causal models employed by various authors are unsupported at best and suspect at worst. Brooks (p. 111) claims that in South Africa: “Without amnesty, not only would there have been little unveiling of the truth and much collective amnesia among the perpetrators, but there certainly would not have been any forgiveness by the victims, and hence, no reconciliation and no democracy.” Thus, the preferred model seems to be Perpetrator amnesty → event truth → victim forgiveness → societal reconciliation → institutional democracy This may be a correct model, but many of the presumed linkages are unclear, as in whether forgiveness is a necessary condition for reconciliation. An alterative viewpoint is that the minimal condition of reconciliation (especially insofar as democracy is concerned) is tolerance (see Gibson and Gouws, 2003), not forgiveness, that tolerance does not require forgiveness and may not even require truth. Democracies require that we put up with our enemies; nothing more. Greater care must be exercised in unpacking the nature of the causality involved in these various processes, in mobilizing relevant extant literature, in generating testable hypotheses, and in marshaling empirical evidence.5 Social Movements and Political Entrepreneurs The success of the Holocaust complainants has clearly been a stimulus for aggrieved groups throughout the world to mobilize and advocate their claims. Unfortunately, we learn from these works little about the processes of diffusion of this innovation. It seems likely that one element of the story has to do with international 4 Not

all authors believe in the effectiveness of truth commissions. Lean asserts (Chapter 8, p. 170): “While truth commissions play an important fact-finding role in national reconciliation processes, current evidence suggests that the ability of truth commissions to put the past to rest by making it a matter of public record is illusory.” Unfortunately, she cites no evidence whatsoever in support of that view. For a systematic assessment of the effectiveness of South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process (see Gibson, 2004a; 2004b; 2004c). 5 And I note that, depending on the precise meaning of the assertion, Brooks is probably wrong when he asserts on page 113 that “apology and reparations for apartheid [were made] an absolute precondition to moving forward democratically.” Those who wrote the law on amnesties in South Africa considered whether to make apologies from perpetrators obligatory, but rejected the idea under the theory that mandatory apologies would rarely be judged to be sincere. Evidence from my survey research in South Africa suggests that apologies can be an influential means of overcoming the “retributive justice deficit” created by amnesty, but that sincerity is most likely crucial, and is something not easily achieved (Gibson 2004a, Chapter 7).

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cause lawyers; another is surely connected to the worldwide spread of NGOs. But important and not at all explored is the function of individual entrepreneurs within claimant groups. Presumably, mounting a group claim is something like organizing a social movement. Leaders instigate the process and seek a variety of forms of political capital to propel their movement forward. They seek to mobilize similarly situated citizens, to shape public opinion, to influence political elites, and to generate legislation favoring their interests. Unfortunately, these processes are largely unexplored in various works under consideration in this review. The Ideologies of Claimants A related issue has to do with the nature of the interests seeking historical remedies. As I write this review, the news reports the story of the conflict over the fate of Luna, the killer whale living in Nootka Sound, near Vancouver Island (Canada). Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans believes that the whale ought to be removed from the Sound and reunited with its pod. Members of the Mowachaht–Muchalaht tribe believe otherwise, claiming that the whale is the reincarnation of Ambrose Maquinna, a chief who died shortly before the appearance of the whale. To the whale’s great misfortune, he/she turned up in the sound a few days after the death of the chief. Thus, the interests of believers in reincarnation clash mightily with those of environmentalists. It seems possible that many groups advocating for the past against the future would substitute a conservative traditionalism for progressive modernism. This is a question that must be explored in greater detail. As a further example of this issue, Ratner, Carroll, and Woolford argue that Indian tribes in British Columbia seek to maintain traditional values against the onslaught of neoliberalism and that “the construction of [tribal] self-government under neoliberalism, which entrenches the values of private ownership and individualism, is ‘tantamount to cultural genocide’ and the state becomes a totalizing [sic] instrument in re-subordinating the Aboriginal lifeworld and traditional subsistence economy to the forces of continued capital accumulation” (p. 239, footnotes omitted). These authors also quite rightly note that the leadership of the aboriginal side under-represents young people, women, elders, and those who do not accept that chiefs speak for their interests, and over-represent the interests of traditionalism, lineage, family (p. 234), and, I might add, hierarchy and male domination. Thus, at least in some contexts, those seeking reparations for the past are also seeking the restoration of inequality, gender discrimination, autarchy if not authoritarianism, and oppressive collectivism. In general, it seems reasonable to advance as a hypothesis that the least progressive members of a subordinate group are the most likely to advance claims of historical injustice. I raise these issues in part to suggest that one ought not to associate claims for repairing historical injustices with any particular ideological point-of-view.

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I sense a tendency in some of these works to romanticize those making claims for past injustices, completely suspending any judgment about the fairness of the demands made by various groups and the consequences of their success. Along the same lines, the chapter by Howard–Hassmann on reparations for Africa represents a hardheaded attempt to assess responsibility for Africa’s dismal state of affairs. Howard–Hassmann addresses some big issues—whether European colonialism is responsible for the dreadful state of Africa today— and makes some controversial claims: “In Ghana and in other parts of Africa, without colonialism the result might have been agriculturally and technologically stagnant economies well into the twentieth century” (p. 196, emphasis added). She goes on to argue that “false assumptions about the relationship between colonialism and underdevelopment renders problematic any call for material redistribution” (p. 197). I cannot judge whether many of the important empirical claims made by Howard–Hassman in this chapter are correct,6 but it is refreshing to find an author who does not begin by postulating that claims from the past are legitimate and worthy of serious consideration, including reparations.7 Justice Theory No clear theory of justice emerges from these two books. Thompson advocates the “basic meta-ethical principle that ‘like cases should be treated alike,”’ as well as equally general principles such as “agreements ought to be honored,” but she devotes little attention to how conflicts among basic principles ought to be resolved. For instance, she asserts: “When you make an agreement and fail to keep it without having an adequate excuse, then you must accept a responsibility for reparation” (p. 27, emphasis added). In my view, the “adequate excuse” defense represents a gaping hole in the theory, especially since no discussion is provided of the concept “adequacy” (and how different views of “adequacy” might be adjudicated). Justice conflicts often implicate more than a single principle of justice, and these works provide little guidance for understanding how these conflicts get adjudicated either in principle or practically. 6 Despite

the absence of empirical data, many empirical assertions are made by the various authors. Thompson, in particular, is often willing to make assertions about what people believe, expect, will accept, judge, etc., always without reference to any empirical evidence. She typically hedges her assertions by saying “some” believe, and of course the assertion that a view is held by “some” is virtually always true, whatever the belief. Nonetheless, many of these assertions cry out for empirical investigation. 7 In the end, Howard–Hassmann argues that reparations for Africa raises exceedingly complex issues, issues that might profit from some sort of international truth commission that would focus on “acknowledgment by both sides of moral responsibility for slavery and underdevelopment” with an eye toward “building an international moral community in which the various sides trust each other in a relationship based on solidarity rather than merely on interest” (p. 210). This sort of argument resonates well with Thompson’s position.

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Justice is perhaps most fruitfully understood as a multidimensional concept, as in distributive justice, retributive justice, procedural justice, and restorative justice (to mention only a few of the most relevant distinctions). Moreover, different aspects of justice are often in conflict with one another. Neither philosophy nor empirical social science has made much progress in determining whether a hierarchy of justice concerns exists (or can be created). How do people judge conflicts in which all sides in the controversy are able to mobilize strong justice arguments? Is it possible that getting more of one form of justice can compensate for getting less of another form of justice? At what rate do different forms compensate for each other? These issues are entirely absent from the discussions of Thompson and the Torpey authors. For instance, Thompson acknowledges the issue of how to adjudicate conflict among various different justice considerations (e.g., compensating for the past versus helping the needy in the present), but in the end she offers few guidelines for resolving or managing such conflict. While writing this review, a fine exemplar of the type of value conflict involved in historical justice claims was reported in the mass media. It turns out that in July 2004, the “socially responsible” company Benetton was charged with having unfairly expropriated the land of Argentina’s Mapache Indians. Despite the fact that Benetton had purchased the property in 1991 from a company holding legal title to the land since the 1890s—and without any direct challenge to the legality of the 1991 contract or land transfer—Benetton’s effort to expel a family of Mapache Indians who had built a house and had begun cultivating the land has been strongly criticized for violating the ancestral rights of the Mapache Indians. The basis of the land-grabbers’ claim to Benetton’s land is that the property was improperly acquired in 1896 after the British military had cleared the area of its occupants. Because Benetton had legally purchased land that was said to be illegally (or unethically) expropriated from the Mapache, some have argued that Benetton has an obligation to return the land to its original owners.8 The Benetton/Mapache dispute stands as a classic example of an intractable justice conflict. On one hand, Benetton’s chairman asserts that “we have simply followed the economic rules we believe in” (Hooper, 2004, p. 13)—by which he largely means the rule of law—and there can be little doubt as to the technical legality of the land transfer. On the other hand, the Mapache argue that their rights to the land cannot be abrogated by the Benetton contract. Like a pawn broker who unwittingly buys stolen goods and is then later obliged to return them to their rightful owner, without compensation, Benetton is said to have an obligation to return the land to its rightful owners. Which position is more just? 8 For

the sake of this argument, it is not necessary to address the specific circumstances of the squatter, the Mapache family. A wide variety of due process and other issues surely militate against their specific claim to the Benetton land. Nonetheless, it is not difficult to imagine that a relatively more “clean” set of circumstances could produce a claim against Benetton with considerably greater ethical legitimacy.

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As I read Thompson’s analysis, I find her insensitive to the fact that strong justice claims are often made by all parties in a dispute over historical injustice, that few principles exist that would allow the adjudication of competing justice claims, and that, ultimately, low politics rather than high philosophy provides the only realistic basis for conflict management. 9 I do not necessarily argue (or hope) that a political resolution will always work against the historical claimant, as the politics of Holocaust claiming so well attest. But I fear that philosophy is silent—as is empirical social science—when it comes to prioritizing competing justice claims of equal or nearly equal validity. The Views of Bystanders Most of these studies, and the transitional justice literature in general, focus primarily on victims and perpetrators, which of course makes sense in light of concerns for the justice of reparations and retribution. But the problem of historical injustice has consequences far beyond victims and perpetrators, especially since these two groups often (if not always) constitute minorities of the total population. Just as important are the consequences of historical injustices for bystanders, for members of the society not present during the injuries, and for society at large. Historical injustice implicates and involves more than just victims and perpetrators. People often care about injustices done to others with whom they have no personal connection. These strong feelings of injustice may be aroused by sympathy with the person or group who is victimized, based on sharing an identity with the victim.10 But they may also be a more general reaction to the socio-legal system, with some viewing victimization as a violation of the “social contract” between the individual and the state (and hence Tyler et al., 1997 refer to this as the “relational model”). Central to this contract is a set of normative assumptions about how citizens ought to be treated, which is of course the basic building block of a polity based on the rule of law (Vidmar, 2001, p. 42). The offense against an individual is sometimes generalized to an offense against a group or a community, a violation of the contract. To the extent that this occurs, the systemic relevance of individual injustices is vastly multiplied. Thus, impersonal justice has a large role to play in the politics of justice claiming, and this literature would do well to pay more attention to the broader social consequences of justice claiming. 9 The mere fact that the claim is made against Benetton, rather than the previous owner, speaks volumes

about the political nature of such land disputes. group identities of the weakest sort—e.g., women, a group with enormous internal diversity— can be mobilized in justice politics, as in the concerns of Western women for how the Taliban treated women in Afghanistan, or with efforts to ban female genital mutilation. Justice matters in part because one does not necessarily have to be a party to a dispute to care about the fairness of its outcome—people care about injustices done to others.

10 Even

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The Consequences of Reparations One further issue must be raised: What are the consequences of reparations? It is far from clear that paying reparations always generates social goods,11 that reparations are capable of remediating extant problems and deficiencies, or that reparations today will “settle” accounts forever, forestalling complaints in the future. These issues are much too complicated to address in this essay, so I mention them only briefly. Some Africanists, for instance, believe that the problems of Africa are essentially intractable. For many reasons (some acknowledged by Howard–Hassman), it is completely unclear that reparations will have their intended salutary effects. Moreover, reparations may have only very limited short-term consequences, and effects limited only to individuals, not to society. In South Africa, many land claims today are being settled by cash pay-outs. The sums paid are sufficient to buy housing or land, but only in the poorest areas, and the pay-outs hardly seem capable of lifting the dispossessed class out of its historical poverty and misery. Even largescale restitutions, like returning farm land to dispossessed communities, are failing for lack of infrastructural support (e.g., capital and technology) for what is, afterall, a risky, capital intensive, and demanding business.12 Finally, it seems highly likely that many in the next few generations will inherit little from these attempts at reform, and that dissatisfaction will reemerge, with fresh charges of “sell-outs” and demands for a new round of restitution.13 To follow up on these analyses, it would be quite useful to ask specialists in particular policy areas (e.g., African poverty and unemployment) to assess, in a strictly analytical fashion, whether reparations are an optimal (or even minimally effective) means of addressing the problem, and how reparations stack up against alternative policy options. 11 For

example, in South Africa two small tribes of South Africans have become fantastically rich through the restoration of their mineral rights (platinum and diamonds). Since the South African government has interests in both the platinum and diamond extraction companies, the state treasury has been badly depleted by the court decisions restoring these rights. Should South Africa allocate an enormous amount of resources to a small number of people who experienced a terrible dispossession a hundred years ago, or should it instead address the needs of the millions of South Africans who today live in dire poverty, suffer widely from HIV/AIDS, and who have little hope or possibility of any sort of decent life? 12 For those engaged in the details of various reparations and restitution schemes, the material under review will surely seem superficial and perhaps even ill-informed. Many efforts at addressing past injustices confront extremely difficult practical problems—as in South Africa, where land reform is foundering on the rocks of the “willing seller/willing buyer” principle. The Torpey chapters and the Thompson book are clearly not meant to be comprehensive assessments of restitution, but instead they make general moral, ethical, and political pleas in favor of such policies. 13 It should be noted that at least some dispossessions took place through agreements in which local leaders voluntarily exchanged land for objects of value. Surely some of these transactions were duplicitous, coercive, and so unfair as to be invalid. But surely some were not. And in some instances, local leaders worked against the interests of their communities. Charges of “selling out” are occasionally heard about the past, and they will most likely be heard again in the future. Phillips and Johnson (Chapter 7) discuss this issue (among others) in the context of repatriating art objects to aboriginal communities.

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SUMMARY Perhaps in offering these critical comments and suggestions for additional research I have under-expressed my admiration for these two volumes. The Thompson book is perhaps the most comprehensive and well articulated philosophical justification I have seen for honoring claims to redress historical injustices. The various chapters of the Torpey book provide a census of the practical circumstances surrounding justice claiming, as well as extremely useful descriptions of a number of contemporary conflicts over the past. That these two books raise such a panoply of important and interesting unanswered questions is very much to their credit. CONCLUDING COMMENT I cannot resist closing this essay by noting a very important principle of “justice” asserted by Blackwell Publishers, the publisher of Taking Responsibility for the Past. Blackwell asserts: “Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.” One might very well hope that Janna Thompson would devote some of her future thinking about the ethics of justice to the ethics of publication and the ethics of publishers in trying to strengthen their financial bottom-line. REFERENCES Gibson, James L. (2004a). Overcoming apartheid: Can truth reconcile a divided nation? Russell Sage Foundation, New York. Gibson, James L. (2004b). “The truth about truth and reconciliation in South Africa.” Unpublished manuscript, Washington University in St. Louis. Gibson, James L. (2004c). “The contributions of truth to reconciliation: Lessons from South Africa.” Delivered at the conference on Judging Transitional Justice: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on New Democracies’ Coming to Terms with Their Past, University of California in Irvine, October 30–31, 2004. Gibson, James L., and Gouws, Amanda (2003). Overcoming intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in democratic persuasion. Cambridge University Press, New York. Hooper, John (2004). “Benetton hits back in land rights row.” The Guardian, Wednesday July 14, 2004, p.13. sama Yende, Sizwe and Arenstein, Justice (2004). “Clans do battle over prime land.” Mail and Guardian, June 25 to July 1, 2004, Volume 20, No 26, p. 10. Tyler, Tom R., Boeckmann, R. J., Smith, H. J., and Huo, Y. J. (1997). Social justice in a diverse society. Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Vidmar, Neil (2001). “Retribution and revenge.” In Joseph Sanders and V. Lee Hamilton (ed.), Handbook of Justice Research in Law. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, pp. 31–63.