“Righting the wrong”:A multicountry study on people’s perceptions of “making things right” in the wake of human rights violations.

More and more academics and policy makers advocate that countries ought to deal with past human rights violations. In this article, we explore whether people across the world agree with this normative expectation, and if so, what they think should be done to “make things right” and why. Our overarching objective was to see whether we can observe any universal patterns or common themes in this regard or whether people’s ideas and intuitions are primarily subject to cross-country variation. Through 283 interviews conducted in Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States, we found that people largely share the belief that countries should deal with past transgressions, and that they see this as a multidimensional process that includes multiple measures that help ensure security and stability, restore harmony and peace, as well as meet other collective economic, social, and moral needs. Our findings also suggest, however, that people’s ideas about the specific measures that should be part of this process are at least partially shaped by the local social, economic, cultural, and political context as well. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved

Argumentative strategies to evade state apologies:The Turkish example

Countries are often reluctant to publicly recognize and express regret for past wrongdoings despite urgent pressures or calls to do so, and in the past decades there have been numerous examples of states that have issued statements that evade an admission of wrongdoing or apology. Evading an apology requires politicians in authority to make argumentative maneuvers to steer the discourseto their own advantage. But what do such maneuvers look like? This paper sets out to address this question by drawing on a Turkish example and by analyzing President Erdoğan’s message of condolences addressed to the Armenian community in 2014, when he was the Prime Minister of Turkey. We utilized the pragma-dialectical notion of ‘strategic maneuvering’ in uncovering howhe exploited the topical potential, addressed the audience expectations, and chose from available presentational means to defend the standpoint that ‘Turkey should not be blamed for the events of 1915’. Our analysis suggests that even when political authorities evade an apology, they may still try to observe dialectically reasonable and rhetorically effective argumentation. The messagewe analyzed shows how this can be done by pairing evasive language about past atrocities with expressions of empathy with the victims and by highlighting the importance of dialogue, mutual tolerance, and compromise in establishing a common future

Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database

It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered

Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database

It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered