Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database
| Author | Marieke Zoodsma,Juliette Schaafsma |
| DOI | 10.1177/00223433211024696 |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights
from the Political Apology database
Marieke Zoodsma
Juliette Schaafsma
Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University
Abstract
It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress
human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the
phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To
fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the
world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these
apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this
trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been
embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular.
Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a
(civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually
mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.
Keywords
cross-national, database, human rights, political apologies
Introduction
‘For no word, how well chosen it may be, can undo what
has happened’.
1
These words, spoken by the Swiss Bun-
desra
¨tin Simonetta Sommaruga in an apology to victims
of draconian social welfare policies, convey the core of
what Tavuchis (1991) has called ‘the paradox of apolo-
gies’: they cannot undo what has been done, yet they are
often experienced as highly important in healing and
national and international reconciliation processes. And
so, despite theirostensible emptiness, apologies have been
offered in the last decades by political representatives for
human rights violations that happened in the recent and
distant past. For example, President Ma
´rio Soares of Por-
tugal apologized in the Israeli Parliament in 1995 for the
persecution of Portugal’s Jews during the Inquisition over
500 years ago, and in 2017 Chile’s President Michelle
Bachelet apologized for the brutal military campaigns
against the indigenous Mapuche people.
These apologies are only a few examples within a
seemingly broader trend that is often referred to as ‘the
age of apology’ (Brooks, 1999), where countries increas-
ingly are being held responsible for past wrongdoings
and seek to redress these wrongs by offering apologies.
Although some see this apparent shift of amending the
past through apologies as an essential step to restore
justice and promote reconciliation in the aftermath of
human rights violations (e.g. Brooks, 1999; Gibney
et al., 2008), there is also skepticism about the sincerity
of the phenomenon – Thaler (2011) labeled it ‘apology
mania’ – and the transformative power of political apolo-
gies (e.g. Trouillot, 2000). This debate has led to a
Corresponding author:
J.Schaafsma@tilburguniversity.edu
1
Speech, 11 April 2013, http://www.news.admin.ch/NSBSubscriber/
message/attachments/30274.pdf.
Journal of Peace Research
2022, Vol. 59(3) 436–448
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433211024696
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