This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

This is the first of three chapters which present ‘mini-studies’ of dignity. If, as the book argues, abstract discussion of dignity elides much of what we need to know about the concept, these mini-studies are designed to illustrate how a more contextualised treatment can take us further. Each of the mini-studies is concerned with dignity at a particular time, in a particular place, and with reference to a particular object. In the case of this chapter, the object is a series of photographs taken of Trucanini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman once (erroneously) said to be the ‘last of her race’. The chapter explores dignity at the intersection of colonial photography and Victorian race science.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the psychosocial literature on personal narratives, in general, and in connection to genocide and war, in particular. We begin with the concept of societies’ master narratives, emphasizing their long-term impacts on people’s personal narratives of genocide and war. We then look at the main characteristics and uses of personal narratives in psychosocial research. From there, we briefly present and discuss archives of personal narratives of survivors of gross human rights’ violations and their use in different truth commissions, followed by usages of personal narratives in research of genocide and war in different places in the world. Our focus in this chapter is mainly (though not exclusively) on the contexts of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian/Arab–Jewish conflicts.

In this chapter, the second of the book’s mini-studies of dignity, we turn to early twentieth-century India. Here the object is cloth, and the focus is on Gandhi’s campaign for the manufacture and use of homespun cloth (khadi). The language of dignity was a striking feature of that campaign; Gandhi appealed to Indians to ‘realise their dignity’ by discarding their foreign cloth and renewing their home textile industry. Yet while he made that appeal, the great Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar insisted that dignity could not be achieved for all Indians without social transformation, including the dismantling of the Hindu system of caste.