Description
The past five decades can be described as the age of accountability. Since the then-Chancellor of Germany Willy Brandt kneeled on the site of remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970, in act of an apology for Nazi crimes, the so-called political apologies have boomed. As of 2024, several hundred political apologies have been offered and received, and new calls for states to apologize for their wrongdoings continue, making such actions a global standard of memory. This is despite - or perhaps because of - a widespread understanding that political apology is a Western model of moral remembrance, which gained its prominence in the specific context of the post-Holocaust Europe. This paper discusses the Euro-centric biases of these memory standards and explores the extent to which widely accepted norms and standards of moral remembrance have been supported by exclusion, denial and erasure of certain people and harms. The paper first examines how political apologies limit our understanding of violence. It provides a systematic review of a political apologies database, asking questions such as: What violence needs to be acknowledged/apologized for? What actions and omissions get to be remembered and commemorated? Who is perceived as having acted in violent ways? Next, the paper discusses cases of genocide which are seemingly outside the standards of memory, namely the genocide against indigenous populations of Tasmania and the Selk’nam in Chile, and what learning about them might change about the scholarly and practitioner imagining of the futures of justice, reparations and commemorations of mass-scale atrocities. The paper fills in a gap in the International Relations literature about the role of violence, particularly epistemic violence, in building and sustaining the current liberal international order, while also imagining alternative futures.
