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Oh, I thought you meant to imply that because you wrote in response to a post about current problems in SA.
I think you are conflating a couple of things. Whatever your colleague might have thought (and can I ask what his or her area of expertise was?), the TRC was the solution to a political problem: How to deal with competing claims regarding justice for those who committed apartheid-related crimes while ensuring stability for the new regime. It seems to have succeeded reasonably well in that regard: There have been no coups, elections are held regularly, etc. I am dubious that many people at the time thought the TRC would have the effect of establishing a liberal democracy, except in the negative sense of reducing the chances that the new system and its liberal democratic constitution would be strangled in its crib. It might have been seen as necessary for the development of a liberal democracy, but certainly not as sufficient (at least not by political scientists, which is why I asked about your colleague's expertise). So, we can't know if it was successful in that sense; it is an unanswerable question. One would have to look at a larger dataset and see if the process is associated with positive outcomes.
I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. Are you of the view that the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures?
Law professor. People rarely get political scientists to inform their political solutions; it's always the lawyers who end up writing the documents and holding the tribunals. Before the Great Awokening, critical legal studies' most recent peak was probably the 1990s, when Clinton was appointing federal judges.
...really? I mean, I don't have any sense of literally how many people thought this way, but like, consider the first sentence of the abstract of this paper from 2001:
Or consider this abstract from 2010:
You may well be right that only a select few people--namely, academics--actually believed any of this, but I'm not sure what that actually gets you. The people calling the shots seem to have either believed it, or considered it very important to be perceived as believing it. My point was that people who doubted the critical theory approach from the start were clearly right to doubt it, so your doubt that "many people at the time thought" it would work appears to refer to the critics of critical theory who I am saying were right all along.
You appear to be asserting that, essentially, we can't know whether Truth and Reconciliation really failed, because maybe it was an essential (and successful!) ingredient, but some other essential ingredient failed. This seems willfully benighted. Truth and Reconciliation clearly did not accomplish what it was intended to accomplish--South Africans are still murdering each other like it's going out of style, and substantially blaming white colonialism for it. So your response is--well, maybe it was successful but something else was missing? No. If something was missing from the program that would have made it successful, then including it in the program would have made the program successful. If this was a "necessary but insufficient" effort, then it was still a failed effort, and that is not remotely "unanswerable." Your response is nonsense on the order of "what do words even mean?"
? So, now you are saying you meant to imply that the TRC caused the current problems? That is the opposite of what you said before.
Regardless, obviously I am not of the view that the current problems are not reflective of past failures. Rather, I am asking you why you claim that the specific event in question is a cause of the specific problems in question. As I said before, what is the causal mechanism?
The second abstract has nothing to do with the purpose or effect of the TRC. It is from a book entitled, "Liberal Democracy and Peace in South Africa: The Pursuit of Freedom as Dignity," a review of which summarize the book thusly: "This book asks whether democracy has made South Africa a more liberal and more peaceful society." It is about the effect of democracy, not the effect of the TRC
Even the first abstract is weak evidence: creating "a culture respectful of human rights" is a far cry from creating a "genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state." As an article written in 1994, about when the TRC was created, put it, the point of truth and reconciliation commissions is to '“allow[] a society to learn from its past in order to prevent a repetition of such violence in the future”; Priscilla B. Hayner, Fifteen Truth Commissions- 1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study,
16 HUM. RTs. Q. 597 (1994), Maybe the SA TRC was an exception, or maybe your colleague's hope and dreams were not representative of those who created the SA TRC.
Yes, that is what I said. That is the nature of social science when your dataset is N=1. That is why I said, "One would have to look at a larger dataset and see if the process is associated with positive outcomes." All you have done is set forth a hypothesis (and without a suggested causal mechanism, it cannot yet be called a plausible hypothesis)
No, the argument is not that there was something missing from the program. It is that social phenomena are the result of scores of interacting factors. Hence, no single factor is sufficient for a particular social phenomenon to exist. If the success of X is necessary for social phenomenon Y, but not sufficient, then the fact that Y does not exist is not compelling evidence that X failed. A whole lot has gone on in SA since the end of apartheid, from AIDS to Winnie Mandela; to say that because SA is in bad shape today, ipso facto the TRC must have failed, is poor causal reasoning (esp since, if other commenters are to be believed, SA was in better shape just a few years ago
As I noted earlier, the murder rate actually fell substantially during the TRC years and after. That is of course not proof that the TRC caused the decline, but it certainly undermines the argument that the high crime rate is a result of the failure of the TRC.
More importantly, you are changing the subject. The high crime rate might well be an indication that it failed at achieving reconciliation (although, unless much of the crime is racially motivated, it is poor evidence of even that). But your claim had nothing to do with achieving reconciliation. It was that the purpose was to create a ""genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state."
I have already told you that I do not regard the TRC as a cause of the specific problems under discussion, but as a failed attempt to solve/prevent them. I don't know how much clearer I can be about that, and I regard your continued insistence on putting words into my mouth as extremely objectionable. All you had to do was like, just, read the words I wrote, instead of some other words you made up in your head for me.
It is especially irritating since, elsewhere, you do seem to actually understand at some level what is being discussed:
I agree. Everything else you've written appears to me at this point to just be deliberate obfuscation and performative doubt, and weirdly persistent attempts to insist that I am saying things I have explicitly told you I am not saying, at the level of "so you're saying." I have no patience for that nonsense, so I will excuse myself from the conversation here.
Then perhaps you need to write more clearly. If that is your position, why, when I apologized, saying "Oh, I thought you meant to imply that because you wrote in response to a post about current problems in SA," did you not simply say, "no, I didn't mean to imply that" instead of "I have no idea what you can possibly mean by this. Are you of the view that the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures?" Do you see how one might infer therefrom that you are in fact making a claim that the current problems in South Africa are reflective of the failure of the TRC?
And, please don't complain about people putting words in your mouth after you claimed that I said that "the current problems in South Africa are not reflective of any past failures."
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