Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-7drxs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-17T18:29:51.317Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Reentering Histories of Past Imperial Violence

Kenya, Indonesia, and the Reach of Transitional Justice

from Part II - Postcolonial Statehood and Global Human Rights Norms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2020

A. Dirk Moses
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Marco Duranti
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
Roland Burke
Affiliation:
La Trobe University, Victoria
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the expansion of transitional justice from present violence to past violence. This has been called post-transitional justice. It considers cases where long neglected victims of colonial repression have reentered history as claimants in controversial legal cases about atrocities in Kenya and Indonesia. The UK High Court decision on compensation for Mau Mau victims of British colonial repression (2010) and compensation for widows of the Rawagede village massacre of 400 villagers in 1947 by Dutch colonial troops in East Java (2011), extended legal accountability for empires, and remedies for individuals. While the globalization of human rights discourse has created the transnational legal environment in which these claims were made possible, it has also exposed the tension between the compromises of national self-determination and individuated justice. By unstitching the problematic settlement of collective national independence, and revealing asymmetries of suffering, it reveals the difficulty of treating political transition as caesura, and the ongoing legacies of trauma which persist well after the departure of the imperial power.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×