Beyond Nuremberg: The historical significance of the post-apartheid transition in South Africa.

dc.contributor.author Mamdani, Mahmood
dc.date.accessioned 2015-06-16T07:21:46Z
dc.date.available 2015-06-16T07:21:46Z
dc.date.issued 2015
dc.description.abstract The contemporary human rights movement holds up Nuremberg as a template with which to define responsibility for mass violence. I argue that the negotiations that ended apartheid—the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA)— provide the raw material for a critique of the “lessons of Nuremberg.” Whereas Nuremberg shaped a notion of justice as criminal justice, CODESA calls on us to think of justice as primarily political. CODESA shed the zero-sum logic of criminal justice for the inclusive nature of political justice. If the former accents victims’ justice, the latter prioritizes survivors’ justice. If Nuremberg has been ideologized as a paradigm, the end of apartheid has been exceptionalized as an improbable outcome produced by the exceptional personality of Nelson Mandela. This essay argues for the core relevance of the South African transition for ending civil wars in the rest of Africa. en_US
dc.identifier.citation Mamdani, M. (2015). Beyond Nuremberg: The historical significance of the post-apartheid transition in South Africa. Politics & Society, 43(1) 61–88. en_US
dc.identifier.uri DOI: 10.1177/0032329214554387
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10570/4458
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.publisher Sage en_US
dc.subject South Africa en_US
dc.subject Apartheid en_US
dc.subject Nuremberg en_US
dc.subject Nelson Mandela en_US
dc.subject CODESA en_US
dc.subject Transition government en_US
dc.title Beyond Nuremberg: The historical significance of the post-apartheid transition in South Africa. en_US
dc.type Journal article en_US
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