Closing chapters of the past? Rhetorical strategies in political apologies for human rights violations across the world

Abstract

Over the past decades, an increasing number of countries have apologized for human rights violations in the recent or distant past. Although this has led to considerable debate about the value and meaning of apologies and their potential as a transformative mechanism, little is known about how countries across the world try to address and redress past wrongdoings in these statements. Relying on a database of apologies that have been offered worldwide by states or state representatives for human rights violations, we identified various rhetorical strategies that diverse countries use—to varying degrees—to (1) break from or acknowledge past wrongdoings, (2) bridge past wrongdoings with future intentions, and (3) bond with the intended recipients of the apology. In this article, we shed light on the strategies we identified in this regard. In doing so, we show how countries and their representatives use apologies not only or necessarily to address the needs of victims or their relatives, but also to portray and understand themselves, whereby there is substantial overlap in the types of rhetorical strategies and scripts that they use to accomplish this.

Acknowledgments

We thank Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Canada Research Chair in International Human Rights 2003–2016 at Wilfrid Laurier University, for giving us full access to the data she and her team collected for the Political Apologies and Reparations website.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they do not have any conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship of this manuscript.

Data accessibility statement

The Political Apologies database, with all the original and translated texts, is available online at www.politicalapologies.com.

Notes

1 A substantial part of the apologies in our database have been offered by Japan. Although this could lead to bias in the identification of the rhetorical strategies that are used in the apologies, a tentative analysis in which these apologies were excluded did not yield a different outcome in terms of the types of rhetorical strategies that can be distinguished.

2 The apologies quoted in this article can be found in the Political Apologies Database, which is available on our website (www.politicalapologies.com) and also from the authors. Apologies that were not available in English were translated. As there is a risk that some of the delicacies in the original language get lost in the translation process, we instructed our translators to leave comments or discuss alternative translations whenever they deemed necessary.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant awarded to the first author (reference: 682077-APOLOGY) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Notes on contributors

Juliette Schaafsma

Juliette Schaafsma (PhD, Tilburg University, 2006) is a full professor at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. Her research interests include intercultural contact, processes of social in- and exclusion, and reconciliation. She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator Project on Political Apologies Across Cultures.

Marieke Zoodsma

Marieke Zoodsma received an MA in cultural anthropology and genocide studies from the University of Amsterdam. She is a PhD candidate at Tilburg University. Her research interests include transitional justice, reconciliation, and political apologies.

Thia Sagherian-Dickey

Thia Sagherian-Dickey (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast, 2019) is a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University. Her research interests include intergroup dynamics of constructs (such as trust, contact, prejudice, political apologies) in challenging contexts.