Law, ‘presentist’ agendas, and the making of ‘official’ memory after collective violence

Abstract

This article interrogates how law is used to make ‘official’ memory in transitional justice (TJ) contexts. It posits that law performs three key roles in the ‘making’ of memory after conflict and authoritarianism: visibility, definition, and judgement. Using insights from existing academic literature that has addressed TJ processes and mechanisms across geographical sites and time frames, it argues that law is central to memory making by rendering certain harms, victims, and victimizers either ‘seen’ or ‘unseen’, by categorizing certain actors and timeframes into binary groupings, and by judging particular actors and actions to be either morally good or morally bad. The decisions that law makes on each of these fronts, it is argued, are ultimately determined by how the prevailing post-conflict state wishes to have the divisive past understood in the present.