Book Review: ANTJE DU BOIS-PEDAIN, Transitional Amnesty in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 420 pp. ISBN-13 9780521878296), £60 (hbk). FRANÇOIS DU BOIS AND ANTJE DU BOIS-PEDAIN (eds), Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 334 pp. ISBN-13 9780521882057, £55 (hbk)
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663909348944 |
| Author | Claire Moon |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
ANTJE DU BOIS-PEDAIN, Transitional Amnesty in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007, 420 pp. ISBN-13 9780521878296), £60 (hbk).
FRANÇOIS DU BOIS AND ANTJE DU BOIS-PEDAIN (eds), Justice and Reconciliation in
Post-Apartheid South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 334 pp.
ISBN-13 9780521882057, £55 (hbk).
Two recent books contribute to the cross-disciplinary literature on transitional justice,
both taking South Africa – the simultaneously path-breaking and paradigmatic case
– as their focus. It is not, now, easy to make an original contribution to this field.
Much of the scholarly work conducted in its name has, arguably, already exhausted
its limits, moving in a short time from laudatory mode to one rightly critical of what
is now a veritable ‘reconciliation industry’ in scholarship and practice.
However, the first of these books, Du Bois-Pedain’s excellent Transitional Amnesty
in South Africa, is an especially important and much needed addition to the literature.
Surprisingly, there has been little in-depth scholarly analysis of the specifics of
amnesty. Rather, most discussions to date have been marked by platitudes and assump-
tions, rather than by rigorous engagement. The broad brush strokes with which
amnesty is often treated seem, erroneously, to suggest that amnesties are deployed
similarly, and to similar effect, in all transitional contexts in which they have been
invoked, from, for example, Chile to El Salvador and South Africa. Equally, we might
get the impression that the moral case for amnesty’s use in precarious political situa-
tions has been made categorically, and that it is broadly transferable from one context
to another. Against more generalized discussions, du Bois-Pedain puts forward a
finely detailed and comprehensive close-up of South Africa’s amnesty process, and
asserts anew the centrality of the mechanism of amnesty – rather than the discursive
drivers, truth and reconciliation – to the transitional political process. This book
confirms that amnesty was the single most important mechanism of the reconcilia-
tion process, and that it preceded the narration of South Africa’s transition in more
broadly symbolic (specifically, theological and therapeutic) terms. We need this
reminder of the pragmatic underpinnings of the process because it is the lexicon of
healing, forgiveness and reconciliation that has provided the enduring imaginative
legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and this sometimes
obscures its rather more prosaic and narrow mandate: to grant amnesty to perpetra-
tors of gross violations of human rights carried out with a political objective.
Transitional Amnesty in South Africa provides an exhaustive detour, in minute detail,
and through an empirical consideration of over 1000 cases, of the following topics: the
legislation establishing amnesty, the Amnesty Committee’s decision-making process,
its evaluation of the ‘political objectives’ of atrocity, the normative and practical
dimensions of ‘full disclosure’, the practical...
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