‘Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?’1 Compensation, Social Control and Social Suffering
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663911433670 |
| Author | Claire Moon |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
21(2) 187–199
‘Who’ll Pay
ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663911433670
Soul?’1 Compensation,
sls.sagepub.com
Social Control and
Social Suffering
Claire Moon
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Abstract
Contemporary debate about compensation for past wrongs turns on the assumption
that state reparation benefits the victims of atrocity by acknowledging harm and
ameliorating victim suffering. Indeed, much recent theoretical and practical work has
concurred to establish reparation to victims of state crimes as a cornerstone of human
rights. However, this article argues that reparation can also function to placate victim
demands for criminal justice and to regulate the range of political and historical meanings
with which the crimes of the past are endowed. This is most evident in transitional
political contexts in which gestures of reparation are usually concomitant with the
inauguration of new political orders, and formal investigations of past atrocity are
conditioned by the balancing of the political demands of new and old regimes. This article
argues that in such contexts, state reparation can work to control social suffering with
the consequence that it sometimes intensifies rather than alleviates it. To evidence this
claim, the article investigates the refusal of reparations by the victims towards whom it is
addressed, with reference to Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo. This analysis of their
refusal demonstrates how victim groups make important challenges to some of the core
assumptions in the field, reveals internal inconsistencies within the analytical architecture
of the scholarly and professional discourse, and indicates the ways in which reparations
carry political, and not just palliative, significance.
Corresponding author:
Claire Moon, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK
Email: c.moon@lse.ac.uk
188
Social & Legal Studies 21(2)
Keywords
Argentina, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, reparation, social control, social suffering, transitional
justice
. . . the tendency to reduce the value of man to a monetary expression . . . not only makes
money the measure of man, but it also makes man the measure of the value of money. (Simmel,
2004: 357–358)
. . . but for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by acci-
dents irreparable, and dwells on objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires
what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should
return, or the past should be recalled. (Johnson, 1750: 47)
Current debate about the imperative to repair past wrongs turns on the assumption that
state reparation works to benefit the victims of atrocity by acknowledging wrongful acts,
recognising harms, and ameliorating victim suffering. Indeed, much theoretical and
practical work has concurred to establish state reparation to victims of state crimes as
a cornerstone of human rights. Most recently, reparation has been cast as a ‘right’ in
itself, testimony to the moral certainty that characterises the contemporary debate and
practice.2 However, I will argue in what follows that reparation can also function as a
mechanism that attempts to placate victim demands for criminal justice and regulate the
range of political and historical meanings with which the crimes of the past are endowed
and through which they are interpreted and acted upon. This is most evidently the case in
transitional contexts, in which gestures of state reparation are often conditioned by the
inauguration of new political orders in which formal statements about past atrocity –
what happened, who is responsible, and whether and how the book should be closed –
are the subject of a precarious politics, of balancing the political demands of an outgoing
authoritarian order against the moral demands on the nascent political regime: demands
for truth, justice, accountability and reparation. These are the touchstones upon which
transitional states now ground their authority, and as such they are not purely moral
endeavours but thoroughly political practices.
I argue that in such contexts – Argentina, South Africa, Chile, amongst others – state
reparation can work to administer and control social suffering and can sometimes inten-
sify rather than ameliorate it.3 To illustrate this claim, this paper investigates the refusal
of reparations by the very victims towards whom it is addressed. One case is significant:
that of the refusal of financial and memorial reparation by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo,
Argentina’s ‘mothers of the disappeared’. This case is important not only because the
Madres are internationally recognised as prominent human rights activists, and thus
potential proponents of reparation, but because the existing literature on reparation
within the field of transitional justice has paid a notable lack of attention to their refusal
of reparations, in spite of its significance. In the literature they go either unreported
(Minow, 1998: 104–106), are granted cursory mention (Hamber, 2000; Hayner, 2001:
178), or are subordinated to analysis of those in Argentina who accepted reparations
rather than contested them (Guembe, 2006).4 This silence is also remarkable because the
Madres are not alone in their contestation. Northern Ireland’s Eames Bradley Report
Moon
189
recommended financial reparation to victims of the political conflict, generating fierce
social protest, including from the victims to whom it was addressed. And in South
Africa, victim groups contested the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s financial
reparations by pursuing multinational corporations through US courts (Moon, 2008:
chapter five). In these contexts, victim refusals of reparation are not a refusal of the ges-
ture of repair per se, but are often a rejection of the range of political and historical mean-
ings, and their coercive potential, to which state reparation is attached in transitional
politics. This is due to the fact that the key challenge of transitional states lies in ‘control
by opening and control by closing’ the past (Cohen, 1995: 47), in memory recovery and
eradication in the maintenance of public order. It is precisely at the site of victim con-
testation that the public order dimension of reparation becomes visible.
In order to explore this assertion, this paper examines the settled ideas around repara-
tion and the Madres’ refusal of it in order to show how victim groups ‘speak back’ to and
challenge some core assumptions in the field. This empirical engagement reveals both
internal inconsistencies within the analytical architecture of the scholarly and profes-
sional discourse, and the political, and not just the palliative, performance of reparation.
Reparation: What is it Good For?
The term ‘reparation’ denotes a complex and dynamic combination of elements but is
grounded in ‘the simple fairness of replacing what one has taken or destroyed’ (Sharpe,
2007: 24). This principle has come to engage a cluster of related ideas with their origins
in different aspects of social life such as religion (confession, atonement, forgiveness),
justice (correction, remedy, restitution), the emotions (guilt, shame, remorse, apology)
and the economy (compensation, damages). The etymology of the word gives us clues
as to its social function: it is derived from ‘repair’, meaning to mend, fix or restore.
Reparation aims to reduce inequity arising from the original injustice, and in the process,
decrease the suffering of the offended. Both replacement and repair are its conditioning
qualities.
Both human rights and transitional justice debates and practice have secured for
reparation a new normative status and power, and along with it a set of categorical claims
and assumptions about what reparation, broadly conceived, can achieve. In two of the
most influential works in the field, Minow and Hayner highlight its alleged therapeutic
benefits: ‘unlike retributive practices which may reinforce anger and a sense of victim-
hood, reparative approaches instead aim to help victims move beyond anger and a sense
of powerlessness’ (Minow, 1998: 92); reparations ‘can serve an important psychological
role of acknowledging wrongs’ (Hayner, 2001: 171). ‘Acknowledgement’, ‘healing’ and
‘closure’ are powerful tropes animating the contemporary relationship of reparation to
mental health. According to Zehr, a further function is that reparation makes a ‘moral
statement to the community that they [the victims] were right’ (2003: 75). This is crucial,
since state crime is routinely accompanied by state denial and any process of reparation
must involve ‘setting the record straight’. Further, in declaring that victims were ‘right’,
a wrong is affirmed and some measure of responsibility might be established in fulfil-
ment of the obligation to repair the harm (Zehr, 2003: 79)....
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