The question of how to provide a reckoning for large-scale state wrongs has been at the forefront of the efforts of the international human rights movement for decades. In the latter half of the 1980s and in the 1990s, despite such disasters as the genocidal conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, it appeared there was a global trend toward democratization and greater respect for rights. The Soviet empire collapsed; military regimes in Latin America and parts of Asia were forced to yield power; and apartheid in South Africa came to an end. Efforts to secure accountability accompanied democratization. National and international tribunals and investigative commissions led to the punishment of the perpetrators of atrocities in Latin American countries such as Argentina and Chile, African countries such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in the European countries of the former Yugoslavia. They also contributed to democratic reforms in several such countries. Also, in a few countries, including Morocco and Canada (where an investigative commission addressed abuses against the country’s Indigenous population), the state has paid reparations to victims and their survivors.
Yet it is also the case that many of those most deeply involved in promoting accountability have experienced a high level of frustration. Many consider that what has been accomplished falls far short of what they anticipated. Autocratic leaders now dominate many states, including some that preserve the trappings of democracy but not its substance. The prospect of a reckoning has not tempered the behavior of the leaders of powerful states such as Russia, China, the United States, Brazil, or India, or the leaders of secondary powers, such as Turkey, Israel, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. Holding officials to account for great crimes—in the wars in Syria and Yemen; the mass incarceration of China’s Uighur minority; the slaughter of thousands of suspected drug users in the Philippines; the genocidal attacks against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar—seems almost a forlorn cause.
In her new book On the Judgment of History, Scott examines three attempts to secure a historical reckoning for great crimes: the Nuremberg trials of the top Nazi leaders following World War II; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which examined the crimes committed under apartheid; and the demand in the United States, which began several decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, that slaves and their descendants should be given reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. What did these movements achieve, and what did they leave undone? How do you keep the most hateful acts and ideologies out of politics for good?