Politics Of Apology Research Articles

Indigeneity, Localism, Sinophobia and the Politics of Apology in Taiwan, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand

Indigeneity, Localism, Sinophobia and the Politics of Apology in Taiwan, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand

Racism, climate activism, and the politics of apology: the image exclusion of Black youth activists

Global heating is associated with historical and contemporary climate racism. Apologies for (climate) racism have the potential to facilitate meaningful discussions about a way forward. However, apologies are complex and can reveal assumptions about privilege. There has been very little work on understanding apologies concerning climate racism. I focus on the apologies received by three Black women activists who (separately) had their images excluded from reporting about their climate activism. The activists alleged that the acts were racist at the individual and systemic levels. I analysed the apologies, online responses, and actions to repair the damage using thematic analysis. I argue that the apologies were not meaningful. Apologies also reveal how privilege operates, including controlling the narrative, drawing on unconscious racism, silence, and ignoring victim reparations. I discuss the importance of apology expectations for climate change from countries in the global North towards the global South. I also discuss the implications for future psychological studies on climate racism.

Separate National Apologies, Transnational Injustices: Second World War Oppression, Anti-Japanese Persecution, and the Politics of Apology in Five Countries

AbstractDuring the Second World War, several Allied countries oppressed Japanese diaspora groups (also known as Nikkei). The United States and Canada apologized in 1988; today, Brazil and Mexico face reparative demands for their persecution of Nikkei communities. There has been no integrated analysis of these interconnected injustices. This article offers a preliminary account, highlighting some of the key transnational factors involved. It also addresses the significant domestic bias of public discussions about the injustices, a bias that ignores the historical centrality of transnational forces in historical processes of anti-Asian oppression. We ask whether the possible spread of apology politics from the US and Canadian cases to Brazil, Mexico, and Australia might help to promote a new political awareness of the transnational character of the wartime oppression of Nikkei civilians in Allied countries. However, our analysis reveals that the politics of apology tends to promote domestic bias in public understandings of anti-Japanese racism. Indeed, to the extent that transnationality emerged in our cases, it was in the perverse form of “White civility” comparisons that chided countries in the Global South to emulate their allegedly more advanced apologetic counterparts from the North. Yet, there remain compelling reasons for domestic political apologies in our cases. The point is not to proscribe apologies but rather to understand their biases and, in the cases at hand, to use the spread of apology debates in our cases to promote a more widespread understanding of transnationality in the production of anti-Asian racism and White supremacy.

The Politics of Apology and the Prospects for ‘Post-conflict’ Reconciliation: The Case of the Provisional Irish Republican Movement

Abstract This article analyses the Irish Provisional Republican movement and the evolution of its approach to the politics of apology. The first section analyses recent scholarship regarding ‘political apologies’, and provides a challenge to the existing literature, which concentrates upon ‘official’ or state apologies, rather than examples involving non-state armed groups (paramilitary or ‘terrorist’ organisations). This section argues that it remains difficult to discern an adequate general model for establishing criteria for a ‘successful’ or ‘sincere’ political apology involving such groups. The second section considers a number of case studies, including the statements of the IRA in 2002, and after the Enniskillen bombing in 1987. It is argued that the Provisional movement’s apologies have not generally proven helpful to its declared aim of post-conflict reconciliation. This article argues that attempted apologies or quasi-apologies by non-state groups may not ameliorate the sense of grievance experienced by victims/survivors, and may also serve to revivify social and political ‘framing battles’ over the past.

Sexual violence, political apology and competing victimhoods

ABSTRACT This article utilizes feminist literature on victimhood and rape mythology to suggest a new theoretical lens by which to view victims of sexual violence and the politics of state recognition through apology. The campaigns of two South Korean victim groups, the comfort women and camptown women, are examined to demonstrate that the process in which they must battle to obtain state redress through apology implies the existence of a discursive, gender-normative regime of victimhood. In this context, this article suggests that although the delivery of an apology for sexual violence might provide some form of gendered justice, this process may produce additional effects which work to discipline the related identities of gender and victimhood, and which have forced the comfort women and camptown women to compete for recognition by the South Korean state. The results of this struggle are ambivalent when it comes to victim agency and, in the cases examined in this article, the politics of apology has resulted in a somewhat impoverished form of redress for sexual violence.

The politics of apology: The ‘Tzuyu Scandal’ and transnational dynamics of K-pop

This article examines how transnational cultural flows such as K-pop create intensified regional dynamics and conflicts by looking at a specific case called the ‘Tzuyu incident’. A young Taiwanese member, Chou Tzuyu, of the K-pop girl band TWICE apologized for waving a Republic of China’s flag on a Korean TV show in an apology video released on JYP Entertainment’s official YouTube channel. The video soon went viral among K-pop fans around the globe, especially in Taiwan, China, and Korea, creating a transnational discursive space that vividly captures the complex dynamics among various actors such as the local media, the transnational entertainment corporation, fans, as well as the artists. Through a close inspection of the apology video made by Tzuyu and JYP entertainment, as well as the responses generated in China and Taiwan, this article examines the complicated power dynamics of a variety of players involved in the production and consumption of K-pop. The article argues that geopolitics in the Tzuyu incident is manifested in gendered narratives, showing the uneven power relations between the entertainment company, consumers, and the artist as well as that between China and Taiwan.

Challenging the Normative Truth Logic in the Politics of Apology: A Quest for Recognition

In recent years, the historical abuse perpetrated against children in residential child-welfare and protection services has increasingly been perceived as a public concern. In the context of this European and global development, several formal inquiries commissioned by authorities into the alleged historical abuse of children in social work services were perceived as a political priority to repair human injustices, and were set up as an attempt to come to terms with the failure of social welfare policies and services in the past. The number of official public apologies has continued to increase since the turn of the century. In this article, we radically question the normative truth logic that is at stake in these politics of apology as a way to give recognition on both an individual and a collective level, and argue that social work needs to critically deal with its own confusing history, with which it is interwoven, to be able to clarify what contemporary social work represents.

We Have Sinned: When Churches Say we are Sorry and the Politics of Apology and Reconciliation

Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology is a peer-reviewed international journal, which publishes original papers promoting theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology.

The Politics of Apology and Forgiveness

The politics of apologies and forgiveness is present in individual pastoral care and psychotherapy as well as in the broader context of the world in which we live. Forgiveness is a process that names harm and injustices while also offering possibilities for change, ultimately providing individuals, families, and communities with deeper and more profound ways of imagining relational justice. Such a perspective illuminates the ways in which harm and damage can be individual and systemic in nature, as well as how struggles over meaningful forgiveness are part of larger political realities. As one part of this process, apologies that account for the multiple ways power functions can assist individuals and communities in creating more justice-oriented forgiveness processes. Pastoral care specialists are wise to recognize that apologies and forgiveness always engage social, relational, political, and theological realities.

February 13, 2008, or the Baleful Enchantments of an Apology

This essay argues that the 2006 Ray Lawrence film Jindabyne can be read as a national allegory (in Fredric Jameson's sense of the word) for the cultural politics of the national apology to the indigenous people of Australia made by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It argues that the film portrays the cultural politics of that apology as both fraught and ambivalent.

A Cold Cut Crisis: Listeriosis, Maple Leaf Foods, and the Politics of Apology

In the summer of 2008, one of the worst cases of food contamination in Canadian history was confirmed when the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Maple Leaf Foods issued a “health hazard alert” warning the public not to serve or consumer Sure Slice brand cold cuts. This localized warning quickly spiralled into a major listeriosis epidemic. More than 200 Maple Leaf Foods products were recalled, but not in time to prevent 20 deaths, the illness of thousands more and a class action lawsuit. This article explores Maple Leaf’s crisis response strategy. Locating our analysis in relation to theorizing about the legitimacy problems that corporations and other powerful actors face in late modernity, it demonstrates that Maple Leaf’s apology was effective in terms of restoring consumer trust and confidence to the extent that it addressed the uncertainties and anxieties that are endemic to contemporary risk society; and, more broadly, it ‘worked’ by disrupting the distribution of risk and blame to other stakeholders.

Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies

Melissa Nobles, The Politics of Official Apologies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 214 pp. $US 24.99 paper (978-0-521-69385-1), $US 70.00 hardcover (978-0-521-87231-7) Government apologies fill the air these days, becoming, it seems, an endemic feature of modern political cultures. Even strident US regimes have entreated its victims over the debacle of Vietnam, the Abu Ghraib prison horrors, and locally, the botched relief efforts during Hurricane Katrina. Grievance in Canada has been no less prevalent, with official genuflections to various ethnic/racial groups (Japanese, Chinese, South Asian) for discriminatory immigration and wartime internment policies, including a very recent apology to First Nations for the culturally genocidal practices of Canada's Native residential schools. Private corporations appear to be following suit, witness the president and CEO of Maple Leaf Foods, Inc. who printed a full-page newspaper apology to victims of tainted meat that had been packaged in one of its plants. Only two expository books on the politics of apology were written between 1991 and 2004 (Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation, 1991; Aaron Lazare, On Apology, 2004), but it is fast becoming a popular topic in academic circles. The very word apology, which centuries ago meant a defence or self-justification, has long since referred to an expression of regret for past actions. It implies a dialogue or process of communication between offending and aggrieved parties that can lead to reconciliation; on a broader scale, apologies reputedly promote transition to democracy by rectifying past wrongs. Apologies, then, can be uplifting, cathartic, and assuage long-term conflicts, granting hope to all parties. But dredging the past can also be a grueling experience, unsettling whole communities of allegedly blameless descendants. At worst, governments may address past abuses as a pretext for ignoring present ones. To this crucible of timely scholarship, Melissa Nobles has added a useful treatise that examines a segment of the official apology phenomenon. Viewing apologies as group attempts to advance rights based on historical claims--or more generally--as platforms for announcing new directions and promoting societal reconciliation (p. 114), Nobles presents the rudiments of a membership theory of apologies, by examining the way organized groups and state actors in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States use apologies to revamp the terms and meanings of national membership. This is viewed as the chief purpose in pursuing and granting official apologies--the acknowledgment of historical injustices in order to justify fundamental reforms designed to redistribute economic resources and political authority. Nobles focuses on three groups of actors: mobilized minority groups, state officials, and public intellectuals, principally historians. All are seen as driven by reason, emotion and interest, although the meaning of interest is curiously unarticulated while the preponderant influence in the apology process is tied to an overall determination of elites to change policy (p. 35). This assertion however, would seem to undermine the impact of minority group mobilization in a mediatized global community capable of challenging the parochial moral reflections and hidebound ideologies of national politicians. The potential contradiction is not well-explored by Nobles. …

Peace and the Culture and Politics of Apology

Having looked the beast of the past in the eye, having asked and received forgiveness and having made amends, let us shut the door to the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it...

Prisoners of the Japanese and the Politics of Apology: a Battle Over History and Memory

This article examines the arguments and claims of the two groups which have been most active in the campaign for an apology from the Japanese for wartime atrocities and the group which believes that an apology would be counter to its advocacy of reconciliation. The claims and arguments made by the groups are used as a basis to explore further the role of apology within international politics and to develop the criteria for its use.

Reconciliation, Restoration and Guilt: The Politics of Apologies

Current media emphasis recognises that politicians' apologies are powerful tools in the process of reconciliation with those who see themselves the victims of government policies. Through apologies, blame is managed, minorities are reconciled, lingering guilt is assuaged and the image of a government is restored. In this paper, Prime Minister Howard's refusal to apologise on behalf of the Australian government for the harm done to Aboriginal people, as described in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Bringing Them Home report, is analysed in the light of theoretical writing about apologies and the effects of apologies by President Young-Sam Kim of Korea and President Clinton of the United States.

Comforting The Nation: 'Comfort Women,' the Politics of Apology and the Workings of Gender

International politics always operates and is imagined in a gendered manner, especially in matters related to symbolic gestures and spectacles such as the declaration of war, the ritual of surrender, the signing of treaties, or the offer and acceptance of apologies. Therefore, our reading of these events has to be performed with a sustained and rigorous interest in gender: we need to ask how a masculine national image is constructed and guarded in these rituals; how the conflicts among various forms of masculinity are negotiated; how the 'common sense' derived from these gendered rituals affects the real lives of real people on a daily basis. In this essay, I examine the issues of masculine national identity and gendered violence in the context of the controversy around the apologies offered (or not offered) to former 'comfort women,' women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. By investigating the 'common sense' and underlying assumptions that shape the language around the issues of apologies and compensation for former comfort women, I explore how 'male sexual needs' are imagined; who is rendered deserving of the state protection and who is not; who is dispensable and who is not. I argue that, unless we rigorously examine the language representing and interpreting this particular part of history, we end up reinscribing violent patriarchal assumptions, which made possible the practice of comfort women in the first place. In those instances, the apology can be the biggest insult to those women who silently bore the burden of their sexuality and their female bodies, which are by definition guilty according to Confucian thoughts, for half a century.

Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology

Saying Sorry: The Politics of Apology

The New Politics of Apology

The New Politics of Apology