Historical Injuries, Temporality and the Law: Articulations of a Violent Past in Two Transitional Scenarios

Abstract

This paper deals with the connections between historical injury and temporality in two transitional scenarios, and explores how the National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995 (South Africa) and the Justice and Peace Law of 2005 (Colombia) ‘articulate’ particular conceptions of ‘violence’ as well as conceive the prospect of an imagined new future. I argue that in trying to grasp the multiple dimensions of violence through different mechanisms, collective languages instituted by State-sponsored laws that seek ‘national reconciliation’ fail (in countries defined by historical, chronic dispossession) to render intelligible—at the very moment of their enunciation into a legal language—the structural dimensions of violence that are at the root of conflict itself. In this regard, the text concentrates on the ways in which difference and inequality—despite the promise of the newness reiterated by Transitional Justice paradigms—are woven together into a longue duree that lies beyond the theoretical contours and the technical mandates defined by and inherent to these laws.