Book Review: Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict

by Nigel Biggar. Washington, DC. Georgetown University Press. ISBN: 0878403949.

In recent years, the topic of transitional states and justice has become quite fashionable. The amount of literature on the subject continues to grow considerably. At the same time, it remains a critical topic in a world where situations and questions of intra-state injustice, conflict, and transition persist.

In this context, a conference was held in September 1998 at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, England, with the title “Burying the Past: Justice, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation in the Politics of South Africa, Guatemala, East Germany, and Northern Oreland.” A collection of essays on subjects from the conference came out prior to this book. This 2003 edition expands and updates the essays.

Experts from around the world participated in the conference and the writing of chapters in the book. The chapters are organized into three overarching categories:

• fundamental ethical concepts
• significant dimensions or levels of burying the past
• different historical cases or experiences of injustice and transition.
  

In addressing issues of transitional justice, the overall aim in the book is to combine moral-philosophical deliberation with historical and social-scientific description, with particular emphasis on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Northern Ireland. To assist the reader, the book includes descriptions of the contributors and an index.

Essays in the Volume include:

• Making peace or doing justice: Must we choose?
• Where and when in political life is justice served by forgiveness?
• Politics and forgiveness
• The philosophy and practice of dealing with the past: Some conceptual and normative issues
• Innovating responses to the past: Human rights institutions
• National and community reconciliation: Competing agendas in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Putting the past in its place: Issues of victimhood and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’s peace process
• Does the truth heal? A psychological perspective on political strategies for dealing with the legacy of political violence
• Passion, constraint, law, and fortuna: The human rights challenge to Chilean democracy
• War, peace, and the politics of memory in Guatemala
• Restorative justice in social context: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• Rwanda: Dealing with genocide and crimes against humanity in the context of armed conflict and failed political transition
• Northern Ireland: Burying the hatchet, not the past
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Burying the past after September 11

Gregory Strong
March 2006