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ABSTRACT
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has played a key role in advancing interracial reconciliation in South Africa, and has become a model to illustrate how transitional justice interventions can be used to heal divided societies and advance reconciliation. While acknowledging its achievements, this article emphasises the importance of socioeconomic justice to the TRC’s objectives, and critically assesses the adequacy of the TRC’s reparation programmes in addressing continuing structural and socioeconomic inequalities in the country. One overall weakness in the Commission’s work was its narrow mandate of investigating gross human rights violations, which meant the TRC contributed to exposing only some ‘truths’ while obscuring others. A detailed exploration of the TRC’s institutional mechanisms reveals that the Commission’s lack of focus on socio-economic justice has served to limit its overall contribution to reconciliation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Nevin T. Aiken is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global & Area Program, University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA. His first book, Identity, Reoconciliation and Transitional Justice: Overcoming Intractability in Divided Societies (Routledge 2013) which explores the relationship between post-conflict justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland and South Africa, won the 2014 Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize for ‘most outstanding piece of socio-legal scholarship’ published in the previous year by an early-career academic.
Notes on contributor
Nevin T. Aiken is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global & Area Program, University of Wyoming, Laramie, USA. His first book, Identity, Reoconciliation and Transitional Justice: Overcoming Intractability in Divided Societies (Routledge 2013) which explores the relationship between post-conflict justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland and South Africa, won the 2014 Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize for ‘most outstanding piece of socio-legal scholarship’ published in the previous year by an early-career academic.
Notes
1. Expert interviews were selected via a ‘key informant’ purposive sampling of academics, government officials, civil society representatives, and non-governmental community leaders most familiar with issues of transitional justice and reconciliation surrounding the TRC in South Africa.
2. Notably, this sentiment was not shared by white South Africans, the majority of whom (59%) directly opposed any program of widespread compensation. Only 20% indicated that they agreed with the need for victim compensation to achieve reconciliation (Gibson and Macdonald Citation2001, 8–9).