sorry! the politics of apology: all articles

The anniversary of Kevin Rudd's apology to Australia's aboriginal community has come and gone. What difference has it made?

The new prime minister's official apology to the "stolen generations" of indigenous Australians may have made a political trap for itself

The successful transition to democracy in South Africa could be an inspiration to Iraqis struggling with their own legacy of violence and dictatorship, says David Mikhail.

The language and politics of “reconciliation” have begun to stall the search for justice and rights for Australia’s indigenous people, says Mark Byrne.

Respect for the interred human body is shared across human cultures from prehistoric time. It involves not just attachment to the consolations of memory, but responsibility across generations. This, says Ken Worpole is “the ethical politics of ‘the long now’”.

The return of human remains by museums and cultural institutions to the indigenous communities who claim them represents not just an assault on scientific research, but a faltering belief in human progress itself.

Sierra Leone, torn apart by a decade of brutal civil war, desperately needs the catharsis that truth and reconciliation can bring. But the attempt to establish this process has encountered problems - confusion about the role of the two different commissions, a lack of public engagement and the non-compliance of critical witnesses. What can the international community do to help?

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa has been widely praised as a crucial mechanism of reconciliation in the post-apartheid era. But has its reputation been gained at the cost of a collective evasion? Recent lawsuits against US companies allegedly supportive of apartheid highlight South Africa’s still-open wounds, and suggest that ‘reconciliation’ is intimately linked to ‘reparation’ – and imply that without the latter, South Africa can find neither justice nor closure.

Does the worldwide concern with public apology represent a turning of society’s face towards the past, one that closes the possibility of imagining a better future?

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission inspired the artist Madelaine Georgette to embark on her own creative journey of redemption.

Can society’s need for healing override the search for justice? The apartheid system that murdered Gillian Slovo’s mother faced its crimes not in a courtroom, but in a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearing. In making her experience part of South Africa’s search for the truth of its past, she explains how the country’s innovative TRC helped reconcile it to its devastating wounds.

Truth and reconciliation commissions are one of the innovative institutions that have emerged in the search for social healing after violent conflict. In Chile, South Africa and the Czech Republic, three very different stories and styles of truth-telling have unfolded. How have they helped to bring social justice, national reconciliation, and to repair damaged lives?

In the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa, the country’s pioneering Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a key medium of national catharsis. Did it allow the society to face honestly, and thus move beyond, its violent past? The ambiguous story of Mkleyi Henry Khanliye, an ANC political activist and convicted child-killer, suggests that the answer lies in the process as much as the outcome.

The theme of ‘apology’ is in the air: governments are saying it to former colonial subjects, or to political prisoners in post-dictatorships; former terrorists to their targets; banks and businesses to looted or polluted clients; churches and cults to victims of abuse. Why are they doing it? In her approach to today’s latest ‘political enthusiasm’, we accompany Marina Warner – novelist, critic, and subversive anatomist of myth and the collective subconscious – on a sparkling tour of the literature of apology over twenty-five centuries. This article is the first in a series of six published on openDemocracy.

In which the archetypal figure of human heroic suffering meets the persecuted eternal feminine. Before history invented public apology, was there any solace?

In which, in the moment of confession, two figures emerge: the apologist and human self-portraiture. From the very beginning self-scrutiny is a danger zone.

In which forgiveness, and human recognition work their magic. But how well, and for how long? Maybe, nothing short of revolution will do?

In which many kinds of truth…and reconciliation, are investigated. Sometimes only a deep pychic process can effect healing. Where does the personal end and the political begin?

In which apology comes to play a necessary part in our modern world, contributing to the revisioning of national history and the shaping of group identities. But do we fully understand what we have done?