Punishment, Reconciliation, and Democratic Deliberation

From Chile to Cambodia to South Africa to the United States, societies and international institutions are deciding how they should reckon with past atrocities—including war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, rape, and torture—that may have been committed by a government against its own citizens, by its opponents, or by combatants in an international armed conflict. In deciding whether and how to address these political crimes, it is commonly believed that trials and punishment, on the one hand, and reconciliation, on the other, are fundamentally at odds with each other, that a nation must choose one or the other, and that reconciliation is morally superior to punishment. For example, in No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu evaluates the successes and failures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The chair of the TRC, Tutu defends the Commission’s granting of amnesty to wrongdoers who revealed the truth about their