A line under the past: Performative temporal segregation in transitional justice

Abstract

After human rights violations, states frequently employ the discourse of “closure” or “drawing a line under the past” as an exculpatory device that situates the wrongdoing in an ontologically discreet and normatively inferior past, a maneuver I term “performative temporal segregation.” Recognizing the United Kingdom’s 2010 apology for Bloody Sunday as an example of temporal segregation, I draw on interviews with relatives of Bloody Sunday victims and other stakeholders to examine how the apology’s recipients have variously resisted and embraced the performative segregating of time. Although many relatives remain enthusiastic about the apology, temporal segregation is challenged by others in three ways: (1) by deriding the apology, (2) by framing it as a stepping stone toward justice rather than an endpoint, and (3) by critically reassessing it over time. I thereby demonstrate that victims and governments can have irreconcilable conceptions of the purpose of apology as a transitional justice mechanism. Nevertheless, participants almost universally embraced closure as a desirable and achievable objective, primarily through prosecutions. This, ironically, entails recognizing that the colonial state can dispense justice and arbitrate on temporality.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the interviewees that partook in this project. I am also grateful to Berber Bevernage and Maja Davidović for their thoughtful engagement with earlier drafts of this work.

Notes

1 A 14th person, John Johnston, later died of injuries attributed to wounds received on Bloody Sunday.

2 I offer a critique of the notions of forgetting and amnesia in Bentley (2016, pp. 60–61).

3 The imploration to “draw a line” under Bloody Sunday was not offered in the main apology speech, but the Prime Minister repeated it twice in answers to parliamentary questions immediately following the apology (Hansard, 2010).

4 Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the Christian confession, my previous work has reproduced an “all or nothing” approach to apology (Bentley, 2020). Derrida (2001), likewise, saw forgiveness as pure or entirely compromised. Even the great Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2000), in terming the ritual “abortive,” framed the effects (or noneffects) of apology as something instantaneous. See Smith (2008) for an extensive critique of the binary notion that apologies succeed or fail.

5 For the starkest illustration, including diagrams, of such a before-and-after relationship, see Kampf and Löwenheim (2012).

6 In a subsequent article on the relationship between past, present, and future in approaches to historical injustice, Bevernage (2015) developed the term “temporal Manichaeism” to denote an understanding of the “structure of historical time” (p. 337) that “posits that the past is evil, but also tends to treat evil as anachronistic or as belonging to the past” (p. 333). Like “temporal segregation,” Bevernage was emphasising a conceptualization of the past that is considered ontologically discreet and normatively inferior (“evil”). Bevernage (2015), too, recognized that this has an exculpatory aspect to it, in that “the past is charged with the worst of all evil, while the present becomes morally discharged by simple comparison” (p. 337). In contrast to his 2012 book and, indeed, the focus of this article, by temporal Manichaeism, Bevernage (2015) was referring to a widely held “philosophy of history” rather than the particular performative representations of a given actor. Thus, although the notion of temporal Manichaeism has been influential in shaping this article, “performative temporal segregation” clearly has a heightened focus on politicians and victims’ active depictions of a compartmentalized past. I am grateful to Berber Bevernage for our discussions on this topic and his feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

7 See Smith (2008, pp. 239–240) for a discussion of the significance of intentions and sincerity in collective apologies.

8 The Bloody Sunday Trust is an organization comprising relatives and civil society actors to represent the families and uphold the memory of the massacre. Some relatives I interviewed have also been on its board and/or chairperson.

9 Interpersonal apologies are fraught with complexity, and I do not want to portray them as overly simplistic. Nevertheless, apologies and their responses become far more complicated in cases of contrition between groups.

10 In March 2019, it was announced that just one soldier, Soldier F, would face prosecution for murder on that day. The trial collapsed in July 2021 due to a technicality. There have been no other prosecutions in relation to Bloody Sunday.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

Notes on contributors

Tom Bentley

Tom Bentley is lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Aberdeen.