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The Healing of Nations
The Promise and Limits of Political Forgiveness
Authors:
Publisher:
2004
Summary
How does one forgive an international political transgression as deep as genocide or apartheid? Forgiveness is often conceived of as an element of personal morality, and even at that it is difficult. This book argues that it is also an essential part of political ethics, especially when dealing with collective wrongdoing by political regimes. In the past, a retributive justice demanding prosecution and punishment of all past offenses has kept the international community away from moving on to the next step in regime change. Here, Mark R. Amstutz takes a restorative justice approach, calling for nations to account for crimes through truth commissions, public apology and repentance, reparations, and ultimately forgiveness and the lifting of deserved penalties. The distinctive feature of forgiveness is the balance it strikes between backward-looking accountability and forward-looking reconciliation. The Healing of Nations combines a theory of the role of forgiveness in public life with four key case studies that test this ethic: Argentina, Chile, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Amstutz uses the hard cases to illustrate the promise and limits of forgiving without forgetting.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2004
ISBN-Print
978-0-7425-3581-7
ISBN-Online
978-1-4616-4425-5
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
283
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Preface No access
Introduction No access Pages 1 - 16
1 Confronting Human Rights Abuses: Approaches to Transitional Justice No access Pages 17 - 40
2 The Nature and Purpose of Forgiveness No access Pages 41 - 65
3 The Possibility and Promise of Political Forgiveness No access Pages 66 - 90
4 Justice, Reconciliation, and Political Forgiveness No access Pages 91 - 113
5 Retributive Justice and the Limits of Forgiveness in Argentina No access Pages 114 - 138
6 The Quest for Reconciliation through Truth Telling in Chile No access Pages 139 - 163
7 Intractable Politics without Truth or Forgiveness: The Case of Northern Ireland No access Pages 164 - 186
8 The Promise of Reconciliation through Truth and Some Forgiveness in South Africa No access Pages 187 - 210
9 Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Political Forgiveness No access Pages 211 - 233
