Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?

• Date: 01 January 2005
• Author: Yarbrough, Michael Y.
• Published date: 01 January 2005
• Author: Yarbrough, Michael Y.

Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation? by James L. Gibson Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation (2004) Price: $47.50

Law and legal institutions have always drawn heavily from their cultural contexts in formulating assumptions, interpretations, and normative standards. Similarly, legal institutions can effect large changes in cultural norms and structures that in turn can change popular notions of justice. Truth commissions, themselves part legal and part cultural institutions, have by their very nature always implicitly acknowledged this feedback loop. But South Africa made it explicit to a greater degree than had ever been done before. Its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), led by a cleric rather than a jurist, simultaneously intervened both in concrete questions around the legal status of individual actors from the apartheid regime and its opposition, and in more abstract questions about the role of that immediate history in the remaking of the country's values. The TRC thus explicitly tied questions of law to questions of culture as crucial to its role in instituting a human rights regime.

This explicit mission presents an unprecedented opportunity for a kind of social experiment: Did the TRC succeed in establishing a broadly-held human rights culture that can support the legal enforcement of those rights for decades to come? In his recent book Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?, (1) James L. Gibson concludes that it probably did. He presents data suggesting that many...