Historical Justice in International Perspective: How Societies Are Trying to Right the Wrongs of the Past

Description

This book makes a valuable contribution to debates on redress for historical injustices by offering case studies from nine countries on five continents. The contributors examine the problems of material restitution, criminal justice, apologies, recognition, memory and reconciliation in national contexts as well as from a comparative perspective. Among the topics discussed are the claims for reparations for slavery in the United States, West German restitution for the Holocaust, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge's mass murders in Cambodia and the struggles of the indigenous people of Australia and New Zealand. The book highlights the diversity of the ways societies have tried to right past wrongs as the demand for historical justice has become universal.

Manfred Berg, the Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at the University of Heidelberg, is a specialist in the history of the African American civil rights movement. His book The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration was published in 2005. In 2006 Manfred Berg received the David Thelen Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best essay in American history published in a language other than English. Professor Berg has published ten more monographs and edited volumes and roughly forty scholarly articles in both English and German. Before joining the Heidelberg faculty, he taught at the Free University of Berlin and was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Bernd Schaefer specializes in international Cold War history and is a senior scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Center's Cold War International History Project (CWIHP). Before joining the CWIHP, Dr Schaefer was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. He has published extensively on the history of the German Democratic Republic and the aftermath of communist rule. He has lectured at universities in the United States, Europe, China, Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Halle in Germany (1998) and a Master of Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1991), where he was a John J. McCloy Scholar. His publications include North Korean 'Adventurism' and China's Long Shadow, 1966-1972 (2005) and American Detente and German Ostpolitik, 1969-1972 (2004). An English translation of his book Staat und katholische Kirche in der GDR, 1945-1989 (2nd edition 1999) is in preparation.

"...this collection makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on historical justice, which is precisely what it sets out to do." -Sarah Pinto, Canadian Journal of History