It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.

No abstract

Was it enough merely to say "sorry" on the part of those who had the humility, courage and honesty to say "sorry"? And what of those who are perhaps too arrogant to utter this simple word?' 1 In his speech at the commemoration of the Rwandan genocide in April 2004, South African President Mbeki questions the relevance of offering an apology when such a heinous crime has happened. After himself apologizing for South Africa's passivity and highlighting the inaction of the international community during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, he continues to wonder if uttering this simple word is actually enough. In doing so, he seems to exemplify the 'paradoxical qualities' (Tavuchis, 1991: 5) that are often attributed to political apologies: they cannot undo or 'unstate' what has been done, but they are also often seen as extremely meaningful in healing processes, including those that take place at the national and international level.According to some scholars, we live in an ' age of apology' (Brooks, 1999;Gibney et al., 2008), a time in which countries are increasingly being called upon to take responsibility for past wrongdoings and to redress these wrongs by offering apologies. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, numerous apologies have been offered

Political apologies have been theorized to play an important role in healing and reconciliation processes in postconflict settings. Whether they actually fulfil this function, however, remains unclear as the voices and perspectives of victim communities have largely been underrepresented in research. To address this, we examined the role of apologies that were offered for the El Mozote massacre (El Salvador), the Jeju 4.3 massacres (Republic of Korea) and Bloody Sunday (United Kingdom), according to members of these communities and the broader public. Although we anticipated that victim community members should find the apology more valuable and meaningful and should, therefore, be more positive about its role in healing and reconciliation processes, we found that this varies across countries. This variation could be explained by people's trust in the country's institutions. Across the samples, we found that the apology was seen as a relatively important gesture. For the apology to be perceived as impactful, however, it had toThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

No abstract