Overcoming Historical Injustices is the last entry in Gibson's 'overcoming trilogy' on South Africa's transformation from apartheid to democracy. Focusing on the issue of historical land dispossessions - the taking of African land under colonialism and apartheid - this book investigates the judgements South Africans make about the fairness of their country's past. Should, for instance, land seized under apartheid be returned today to its rightful owner? Gibson's research zeroes in on group identities and attachments as the thread that connects people to the past. Even when individuals have experienced no direct harm in the past, they care about the fairness of the treatment of their group to the extent that they identify with that group. Gibson's analysis shows that land issues in contemporary South Africa are salient, volatile, and enshrouded in symbols and, most important, that interracial differences in understandings of the past and preferences for the future are profound.
Offering a nuanced, historically grounded, and critical perspective, this book presents a multidisciplinary exploration of the growing public controversy over reparations for historical injustices.
A critical catalogue of how lawyers use history - as authority, as evocation of lost golden ages, as a nightmare to escape and as progress towards enlightenment.
Should contemporary citizens provide material redress to right past wrongs? There is a widespread belief that contemporary citizens should take responsibility for rectifying past wrongs. Nahshon Perez challenges this view, questioning attempts to aggregate dead wrongdoers with living people, and examining ideas of intergenerational collective responsibility with great suspicion. He distinguishes sharply between those who are indeed unjustly enriched by past wrongs, and those who are not. Looking at issues such as the distinction between compensation and restitution, counterfactuals and the non-identity problem, Perez concludes that individuals have the right to a clean slate, and that almost all of the pro-intergenerational redress arguments are unconvincing. Key Features *Unique in claiming past wrongs should not be rectified *Analyses pro-intergenerational material redress arguments *Case studies include court cases from Australia, Northern Cyprus, the United States and Austria, and political and social movements from the US, Palestine and Arab countries
How do societies at the national and international level try to overcome historical injustices? What remedies did they develop to do justice to victims of large scale atrocities? And, even more important, what have we learned from the implementation of these so-called instruments of transitional justice in practice? Lawyers, socials scientists, and historians have published shelves full of books and articles on how to confront the past through international criminal tribunals, truth commissions, financial compensation schemes, and other instruments of retributive/punitive and restorative justice. A serious problem continues to be that broad interdisciplinary accounts that include both categories of measures are still hardly available. In this volume, a group of international experts in the field endeavors to fill this gap, and more. By alternating historical overviews with critical assessments, this volume does not only offer an extensive introduction to the world of transitional justice, but also food for thought concerning the effectiveness of the remedies it offers to face the past successfully. (Series: Series on Transitional Justice, Vol. 21) Subject: Human Rights Law, Criminal Justice]
This book explores the recent spread of political efforts to rectify past injustices. Although it recognizes that reparations campaigns may lead to improved well-being of victims and to reconciliation among former antagonists, it examines the extent to which concern with the past may depart from the future orientation of progressive politics.
One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.