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Human Wrongs and the Tragedy of Victimhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Extract

No serious student of victimhood and injustice can fail to appreciate their complicated origins and problematic legacies. For individuals and societies emerging from communal violence, oppression, and atrocity, the quest for moral regeneration–through acknowledgment, understanding, and transformation–is as difficult and perplexing as it is pressing. Challenging moral questions abound in the aftermath of human wrongs that admit no easy answers. Indeed, the ethics and politics of transition have been widely contested in theory and practice, by people who share the same basic moral/political concerns to redeem the suffering of victims and to forge a future that never again repeats the violations of the past.

Type
Debate
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2002

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References

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4 By crookedness, I mean a condition of disjointedness, where the moral reality on the ground eludes the grasp of settled and coherent moral and political perspectives.

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14 From the text of the statement issued by the Irish Republican Army in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, New York Times, July 17, 2002, p.A3.

15 As Nelson Mandela remarked after his release from prison,“I could not wish what happened to me and my people on anyone.”Quoted in Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, “The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions,”in Truth v.Justice, p.42.

16 See Helena Cobban,“The Legacies of Collective Violence: The Rwandan Genocide and the Limits of Law,” Boston Review, April/May 2002; available at bostonre view.mit.edu/BR27.2/cobban.html.

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