The Emergence of the ‘Dealing With the Past’ Agenda: Sociological Thoughts on its Negative Impact on the Ground

Abstract

In this short piece, I trace the emergence of the ‘dealing with the past’ agenda which entered the public sphere from the 1970s, briefly describing how it has gradually disseminated worldwide. Consequently, the ‘dealing with the past’ approach, where remembering was intimately tied to a preventative vision of ‘never again!’, became deeply embedded in human rights-led memorialization processes around the world. However, though this approach gave voice to long-silenced historical injustices and mass human rights abuses from the past, the erroneous assumption that ‘proper remembrance’ can heal nations also produced numerous troubling ‘side-effects’: the application of Western(ized) medical diagnostic categories of mental illness; hierarchies of victimhood; and new social inequalities, which are briefly discussed in the second part of this article.