The 20th century saw an unprecedented number of major wars, conflicts, and massive human rights violations. From each emerged the desire to make sense of the recent past (and present) by imagining new ways of dealing with such events. In order to prevent new forms of violence, or to punish the persons responsible of past horrors, various solutions have been imagined, deployed, implemented, and discussed, at different levels.

This book is a reflection on the social and historical construction, appropriation, and circulation of categories, norms, and savoir-faire related to the ways social groups and institutions-state, judiciary, professional organizations-confront traumatic events. Even if there is a robust literature on purges and other mechanisms intended to deal with an authoritarian or violent past, written by authors belonging to numerous disciplines and exploring different periods and topics with a variety of theoretical and methodological backgrounds, our goal was to propose a more sociologically oriented model of analysis. Far from being only an intellectual frenzy, this orientation appears to be less normative than most "post-transitional" approaches and potentially more general than strictly monographic approaches. In doing so, our objective is not only to provide a critical approach, but also to sustain a more realistic view of this highly political and moral domain.

Auteur

Liora Israël is a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and assistant director of the Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris. Guillaume Mouralis is an historian and sociologist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and a member of the Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre.

Résumé
Democratic 'transitions' in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South Africa, often studied under the conceptual rubric of 'transitional justice', have involved the formation of public policies toward the past that are multifaceted and often ambitious. Recent scholarship rarely questions the concepts and categories transposed from one country to another. This is true both in the language of political life and in the social sciences examining past-oriented public policy, especially policy toward 'ethnic cleansing' and the line between the language of political practice, legal analysis, and scholarly discourse has been quite porous. This book examines how these phenomena have been described and understood by focusing recent processes, such as the advent of international criminal justice, in relation to previous postwar and recent purges. By crossing disciplinary approaches and periods, the authors pay attention to three main aspects: the legal or political concepts used (and/or the ones mobilized in the academic work); the circulation of categories, know-how, and arguments; the different levels that can shed light on transitions.

Contenu

General Introduction.- Épuration: History of a Word.- Humanity Seized by International Criminal Justice.- Dealing with Collaboration in Belgium after the Second World War: From Activism to Collaboration and Incivism.- Transitional Justice as Universal Narrative.- The Invention of Transitional Justice in the 1990s.- Transitional Justice and National Mastering of the Past: Criminal Justice and Liberalization Processes in West Germany after 1945.- Poor Little Belgium? Belgian Trials of German War Criminals, 1944-1951.- From Revolution to Restoration. Transnational Implications of the Greek Purge of Wartime Collaborators.- The Defense in the Dock: Professional Purges of French Lawyers after the Second World War.- Law and the Soviet Purge: Domestic Renewal and International Convergences.- Circulation of Models of épuration after the Second World War: from France to Italy.- Reassessing the Boundaries of Transitional Justice: An Inquiry of Political Transitions, Armed Conflicts and Human Rights Violations.- The Emergence of Transitional Justice as a Professional International Practice.- The Uncertain Place of Purge within Transitional Justice, and the Limitations of International Law in the World's Response to Mass Atrocity.