When the State Says “Sorry”: State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgments*

Mihai, Mihaela

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2012.00418.x

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…As with other forms of injustice, the marginalisation of the recognition of the ‘refugee crisis’ as structural continues to facilitate a form of gatekeeping which shapes the effectiveness of particular kinds of affective discourses and their capacity to be mobilised to support legitimate accounts of political responsibility. It is for this reason that nation-state apologies and reconciliation efforts are frequently contested because the degree to which they represent a process of testimonial empathy – the acknowledgement of injustice and its historical and structural dimensions, subjective shifts of understanding, and collective political action – as opposed to a performative display of empathy which evades political responsibility and enacts a ‘turning away’ is often questioned by the state's interlocutors (Mihai 2013, 201; Waterton and Wilson 2009). Attending to the affective dynamics of narratives draws our attention to the constant presence of emotions and the ambivalence of the political processes they are constitutive of (e.g.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentimental politics or structural injustice? The ambivalence of emotions for political responsibility

Head

2020

Int. Theory

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Stories and representations of suffering are frequently central to attempts to arouse our emotions and initiate political action. Yet, the evocation of emotion and, in particular, empathy, remains politically ambivalent. It does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgement of political responsibility or to actions to address the historically-constituted roots of contemporary structural injustices. Moving beyond the legal, moral, and institutional boundaries of political responsibility, this article argues for greater recognition of its affective dimensions. In particular, it differentiates between a sentimental politics and testimonial empathy to better understand the affective dynamics of political responsibility. While the former finds close company with pity and a lack of acknowledged political responsibility, the latter offers an ethical–political orientation towards radical reflexivity and social transformation, situating experiences of injustice within wider networks of power, privilege, and agency. Drawing on the work of feminist, cultural, and social theorists, the article offers a critical conceptualisation of testimonial empathy and its limits. The article illustrates the insights offered by re-thinking political responsibility in terms of testimonial empathy through a close reading of a historical account of structural injustice – slavery in the United States – as written in Harriet A. Jacobs’ 1861 slave narrative.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentimental politics or structural injustice? The ambivalence of emotions for political responsibility

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2020

Int. Theory

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“…As is now widely accepted within the domain of political philosophy, public apologies are an important component of any effort at reparation. Far from being ‘mere symbols’, extraneous to the pursuit of justice, they underpin the whole work of moral repair by providing a public acknowledgment of wrongdoing and a commitment to ensure that it never happens again (Thompson, 2008; Govier and Verwoerd, 2002; Verdeja, 2010; Mihai, 2013 ). If nothing else, however, the prominence of the purification motif in the Apology ought to give us pause for thought.…”

Section: Reconciliation the History Wars And The Apologymentioning

confidence: 99%

A reconciliation most desirable: Shame, narcissism, justice and apology

Muldoon

2017

International Political Science Review

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This paper seeks to draw attention to the narcissistic dimensions of the reconciliation movement in Australia and, more specifically, to the way in which the desire to ‘make innocent’ compromises the attempt to ‘make amends’ and construct a just polity. Building upon some early work by Anthony Moran (1998) and Elizabeth Povinelli (1998), it sets out to defend two claims: firstly, that the intensity of the desire for reconciliation in Australia (and conceivably in other settler colonial states as well) is attributable to the sense of shame arising from the collapse of the national ego ideal; and secondly, that the real target of the reparative efforts undertaken under the auspices of reconciliation is the healing of the ‘narcissistic injury’ inflicted by the failure of the assimilation project and the assertion of Aboriginal separateness.

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“…As Mihaela Mihai pointed out, however, these formal and normative approaches end up constructing a ‘check-list model’ of political apology that is too decontextualized to be analytically useful: ‘Clearly, apologies will take different forms in different communities’ and their ‘success’ depends on ‘the normative and political resources, that the context provides’ (2012: 214). Put another way, the emerging field of research on political apology needs an alternative framework capable of taking into account dynamics and complexities of larger political contexts of perpetrator–victim interactions.…”

Section: Apology: From Personal To Politicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology

Saito

2016

Cultural Sociology

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In recent decades, research on ‘political apology’, wherein the state apologizes to victims of its past wrongs, has multiplied, as redress movements based on human rights have proliferated around the world. Since most of this research has been conducted by political philosophers, however, analyses of political apologies tend to adopt formal and normative perspectives. To propose an alternative, empirically-grounded approach, in this paper, I develop the ‘cultural pragmatics’ of political apology. To this end, I first conceptualize political apology as a social performance aimed to ‘re-fuse’ an impaired relationship between the perpetrator state and the victim individual. This conceptual move enables systematic analysis of political apology in terms of six elements constitutive of social performance: collective representations, actors, audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, and power. To elaborate this model of the cultural pragmatics of political apology, I then examine the protracted dispute over wartime atrocities that Japan committed against South Korea.

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When the State Says “Sorry”: State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgments*

Cited by 20 publications

References 1 publication

Sentimental politics or structural injustice? The ambivalence of emotions for political responsibility

Sentimental politics or structural injustice? The ambivalence of emotions for political responsibility

A reconciliation most desirable: Shame, narcissism, justice and apology

The Cultural Pragmatics of Political Apology

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