Accounting and reconciling in the balance sheet of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

摘要

A body of critical academic literature has characterized the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a nation-building enterprise with reconciliation as its core. Although this literature is especially influential within South African scholarship, the association of the TRC with reconciliation has become a far wider orthodoxy. An engagement with the full range of the TRC's hearings, its institutional practice and its seven-volume report demonstrates a more contested perspective, involving a wider range of actors, and contending directions, most notably a drive to establish accountability for human rights' abuse.