Meta-tasks after atrocious violence
Today, I got back seriously into doing what I should have been doing for ALL of the past year: writing my book about post-atrocity policies with special reference to three countries in Africa. Here is a link to the project of which this book will be the principal product.
All this Middle East stuff has been WAYS too distracting.
I have all this great material from the work I've done on the Africa book. Today I organized and fussed around with all the material I have for the Mozambique chapter, so tomorrow I can start writing it.
The more I have thought about this book, the more I have decided that the list that Harvard Law Prof. Martha Minow produced in 2000, of "meta-tasks" that societies struggling to escape from atrocious violence need to prioritize among, should form a major organizing principle for it. Not that I totally agree with Martha's list. I would have drawn up a slightly different list (and probably shall, in the "Conclusion" to the book.)
But hers is an excellent starting point, a good object for the book's interrogation. In the hope that some of you folks out there who read JWN might have your own experiences of having lived in post-atrocity societies, maybe some of you have some ideas on the value of her list?
Here it is:
- After mass violence, a nation or society needs to address at least eight goals:
1. Overcome communal and official denial of the atrocity; gain public acknowledgment.
2. Obtain the facts in an account as full as possible in order to meet victims' need to know, to build a record for history, and to ensure minimal accountability and visibility of perpetrators.
3. Forge the basis for a domestic democratic order that respects and enforces human rights.
4. Promote reconciliation across social divisions; reconstruct the moral and social systems devastated by violence.
5. Promote psychological healing for individuals, groups, victims, bystanders, and offenders.
6. Restore dignity to victims.
7. Punish, exclude, shame, and diminish offenders for their offenses.
8. Accomplish these goals in ways that render them compatible rather than antagonistic with the other goals.*
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* Martha Minow, "Hope for Healing" in Rotberg, Robert I., and Dennis Thompson, eds., Truth v. Justice : The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), p. 253.