We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. By Bruce Ackerman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 432 pp. $35.00 hardcover.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12223
• Date: 01 September 2016
• Published date: 01 September 2016

The Impossible Machine is an incredibly significant contribution to the

literature on the South African Truth Commission, but also more

broadly, to the literature and object it is most interested in debunking:

Transitional Justice. Its critique will have to be seriously considered by

those working within that field. It takes as its target Transitional Justice’s

tendency toward conceptual and political amnesia in its repetition of

Eurocentric formulations and it is entirely persuasive in that effort. At

the same time, it is curiously less deft in taking into account another body

of work that has historicized Truth Commissions and Human Rights in

the post-Cold War world (see Moyn 2010). Oddly, Sitze also does not cite

one of the key critiques of SA’s TRC, written by the Ugandan scholar

Mahmood Mamdani in 2002. It would be interesting to consider these

two approaches alongside each other, as the latter critiques are interested

in historicizing (without consoling us) the political moments that shape

the constraints and possibilities within which political choices are made.

If both Sitze and Mamdani are critical of the TRC, the differences in their

critique are illuminating. Putting them into conversation would chal-

lenge Sitze to perhaps consider more seriously the question of the rela-

tionship between the epistemic field, the field of “thought” on the one

hand, and the temporality of political conjunctures on the other, more

carefully. The question that remains is can we think, or evaluate, the

TRC’s legacy outside of concrete politics even when we seek to show

the kind of tainted conceptual politics that sediments itself so quietly in

the celebratory choir of Transitional Justice’s hymns for the TRC?

References

Mamdani, Mahmood (2002) “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the

Report of Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC),” 32 Dia-

critics 3–4, 33–59.

Meister, Robert (2011) After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, New York: Columbia Univ.

Press.

Moyn, Samuel (2010) The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Univ.Press.

***

We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. By Bruce Ackerman.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 432 pp. $35.00

hardcover.

Reviewed by Megan Ming Francis, Department of Political Science,

University of Washington

Bruce Ackerman has produced a stunning achievement with his lat-

est book, We the People: The Civil Rights Revolution. The book is the

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