16 research outputs found

    Healing Multiculturalism: Middle-Ground Liberal Forgiveness in a Diverse Public Realm

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    This article examines debates about political forgiveness in liberal, pluralist societies. Although the concept of forgiveness is not usually taken up by liberals, I outline a plausible conception by exploring two recent approaches. The first, ‘unattached articulation’, concept requires no real emotional change on the forgiver’s part, but rather a form of civic restraint. In contrast, the second version highlights a strong form of empathy for perpetrators. In spite of their advantages, each concept proves too extreme. The problems are revealed by focusing on the case of the Harkis, who fought for the French during the Algerian war. Often still marginalised in French society, their case helps to highlight the conceivability of a ‘middle-ground’ or moderate concept of political forgiveness. Its core rests on the forgiver’s care for the social world. While this concept brings considerable challenges also, and is not inevitable in any particular case, it entails a more plausible combination of emotional and rational shifts in the forgiver’s world-view. Although the article does not recommend forgiveness by any person or group, it observes, recalling Arendt’s idea of amor mundi or ‘love of the world’, that political forgiveness may sustain a viable connection between diverse citizens’ public and non-public lives

    Practicing Imperfect Forgiveness

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    Forgiveness is typically regarded as a good thing - even a virtue - but acts of forgiveness can vary widely in value, depending on their context and motivation. Faced with this variation, philosophers have tended to reinforce everyday concepts of forgiveness with strict sets of conditions, creating ideals or paradigms of forgiveness. These are meant to distinguish good or praiseworthy instances of forgiveness from problematic instances and, in particular, to protect the self-respect of would-be forgivers. But paradigmatic forgiveness is problematic for a number of reasons, including its inattention to forgiveness as a gendered trait. We can account for the values and the risks associated with forgiving far better if we treat it as a moral practice and not an ideal

    The interplay between collective memory and the erosion of nation states – the paradigmatic case of Belgium: Introduction to the special issue

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    The main goal of the special issue on ‘the interplay between collective memory and the erosion of nation states: The paradigmatic case of Belgium’ is to examine the erosion of the Belgian State as an exemplary illustration of the way memories of past events can influence current attitudes, emotions, representations and behaviours. We believe that the recent political crisis in Belgium, with no government for more than one year after the 2010 general elections, could be partly illuminated by the diverging and sometimes contradictory memories each linguistic group (Dutch- vs. French-speakers) in Belgium holds about the past. These issues will be examined through different disciplines from the social sciences and humanities: social psychology, history, psychoanalysis, political sciences, and literature.SCOPUS: ed.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

    Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?: social control and social suffering in Argentina

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    Contemporary debate about compensation for past wrongs turns on the assumption that state reparation benefits the victims of atrocity by acknowledging harm and ameliorating victim suffering. Indeed, much recent theoretical and practical work has concurred to establish reparation to victims of state crimes as a cornerstone of human rights. However, this article argues that reparation can also function to placate victim demands for criminal justice and to regulate the range of political and historical meanings with which the crimes of the past are endowed. This is most evident in transitional political contexts in which gestures of reparation are usually concomitant with the inauguration of new political orders, and formal investigations of past atrocity are conditioned by the balancing of the political demands of new and old regimes. This article argues that in such contexts, state reparation can work to control social suffering with the consequence that it sometimes intensifies rather than alleviates it. To evidence this claim, the article investigates the refusal of reparations by the victims towards whom it is addressed, with reference to Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo. This analysis of their refusal demonstrates how victim groups make important challenges to some of the core assumptions in the field, reveals internal inconsistencies within the analytical architecture of the scholarly and professional discourse, and indicates the ways in which reparations carry political, and not just palliative, significance

    Justice, emotions, and solidarity

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    This paper discusses Habermas’s argument that justice requires solidarity as its ‘reverse side’, whereby the former provides the necessary global framework for establishing intersubjective solidarity whilst the latter constitutes an important precondition for igniting social and political change in the direction of social justice. In this paper I argue that such a paradigm of reciprocity might be fruitfully complemented by a less apparent yet substantial nexus: that between solidarity and perceived injustice, which I contend also triggers the emergence of solidarity. Drawing from Arendt’s thematisation of solidarity as a principle that stems from human suffering and recent scholarship on transitional post-conflict justice, I analyse the negative and reactive aspect of solidarity and the role of negative emotions in its emergence
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