Truth Commissions : : Memory, Power, and Legitimacy / / Onur Bakiner.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2015
• VerfasserIn: Bakiner, Onur,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2015]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2015
• Language: English
• Series: Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) :; 1 illus.

Since the 1980s a number of countries have established truth commissions to come to terms with the legacy of past human rights violations, yet little is known about the achievements and shortcomings of this popular transitional justice tool. Drawing on research on Chile's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and exploring the scholarship on thirteen other transitional contexts, Onur Bakiner evaluates the success of truth commissions in promoting policy reform, human rights accountability, and the public recognition of human rights violations. He argues that although political elites often see a truth commission as a convenient way to address past atrocities, the findings, historical narratives, and recommendations of such commissions often surprise, upset, and discredit influential political actors. Even when commissions produce only modest change as a result of political constraints, Bakiner contends, they open up new avenues for human rights activism by triggering the creation of new victims' organizations, facilitating public debates over social memory, and inducing civil society actors to monitor the country's human rights policy.Bakiner demonstrates how truth commissions have recovered basic facts about human rights violations, forced societies to rethink the violence and exclusion of nation building, and produced a new dynamic whereby the state seeks to legitimize its central position between history and politics by accepting a high degree of societal penetration into the production and diffusion of official national history. By doing so, truth commissions have challenged and transformed public discourses on memory, truth, justice, reconciliation, recognition, nationalism, and political legitimacy in the contemporary world.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I. Truth, Power, and Legitimation in Truth Commission Processes -- Introduction to Part I -- Chapter 1. Definition and Conceptual History of Truth Commissions: What Are They? What Have They Become? -- Chapter 2. Speaking Truth to Power? The Politics of Truth Commissions -- Chapter 3. One Truth Among Others? Truth Commissions' Struggle for Truth and Memory -- Part II. Zooming In: Political and Social Change Through Truth Commissions -- Introduction to Part II -- Chapter 4. Truth Commission Impact: An Assessment of How Commissions Influence Politics and Society -- Chapter 5. Explaining Variation in Truth Commission Impact (I): Chile and Peru -- Chapter 6. Explaining Variation in Truth Commission Impact (II): Evidence from Thirteen Countries -- Chapter 7. Comparing Truth Commissions' Memory Narratives: Chile and Peru -- Part III. Zooming Out: Coming to Terms with the Past Through Truth Commissions -- Introduction to Part III -- Chapter 8. Nation and (Its New) Narration: A Critical Reading of Truth Commissions -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments