Narrating Political Reconciliation

Narrating Political Reconciliation offers a compelling approach to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It provides a critical theoretical account of how the TRC's reconciliation story came into being, and how it shaped and promoted the norms, practices and truisms central to the global 'reconciliation industry'. In particular, the book examines the material practices and rituals that underpinned the TRC. Claire Moon shows how the TRC narrated apartheid history as a sequence of gross violations of human rights perpetrated with a political objective, with the effect of transforming competing politico-moral claims into an 'objective' legal-technical discourse. She also shows how the TRC constructed victims and perpetrators as the key subjects of the new political order through ritual practices of confession, testimony, forgiveness and healing. Moon argues that, the TRC had multiple and divergent effects. Whilst it attempted to secure reconciliation, the TRC also generated new social conflicts around questions of justice, reparations and apartheid violence: it appeared to redeem those who profited from apartheid but did not directly perpetrate atrocities; it left unacknowledged the everyday suffering of thousands; it left undisturbed structures of material inequality within which political violence was made possible. Overall, Moon provides a unique approach to reconciliation and transitional justice in post-conflict and democratizing states, and this book serves as a challenging critical analysis of the field for students and scholars alike.

Narrating Political Reconciliation is an outstanding book. It presents a sharp analysis that cuts right through the usual platitudes that populate so much of the literature in transitional justice. Narrating Political Reconciliation promises to become an important reference point for those theoretically and politically engaged in the field. It is thoughtful, intelligent and engaging, and renews the tradition of critical thinking., …offers a much-needed sobering account of the TRC… Moreover it demonstrates how reconciliation is a thorough political practice rather than a purely moral or normative endeavor., The report of the South African TRC is one of the great moral texts of the Twentieth Century. The TRC quest for truth, justice and reconciliation in South Africa's extraordinary transition to democracy is a template for analyzing and evaluating the political morality of other post-conflict and democratizing societies. Claire Moon's valuable book goes even beyond these debates. Her application of critical thinking to the study of the post-apartheid discourse and 'industry' of reconciliation - its construction of 'victims' and its re-writing of history - is persistent, sceptical, but never cynical.", Narrating Political Reconciliation delivers what the title promises: a narration of the formation of the main ideological and political foundations of the TRC, as well as of the manner in which the TRC went about its ambitious aim of creating a reconciled nation., Recommended.

Claire Moon is lecturer in the sociology of human rights at London School of Economics and Political Science.