Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Br J Sociol. 2018 Sep;69(3):691-711. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12300. Epub 2017 Sep 12.
This article offers an interpretation of transitional justice policies - the efforts of post-conflict and post-dictatorship societies to address the legacy of past abuses - as a form of social control. While transitional justice is commonly conceptualized as responding to a core problem of impunity, this article argues that such formulation is too narrow and leads to lack of coherence in the analysis of the diverse array of transitional mechanisms, which include among others trials, truth commissions, reparations for victims and apologies. Building on the work of Stanley Cohen, the article contends that the core transitional problem is the denial of human rights violations, and consequently that the common purpose of all transitional justice mechanisms is to reclassify the past: redefining as deviant some acts and individuals which prior to the transition were considered 'normal'. The article identifies and analyses three themes in the application of a social control framework to transitional justice: (1) truth, memory and retroactive social control, pertains to the way truth-seeking transitional justice mechanisms reclassify past events by engaging in social control of and through memory; (2) censure, celebration and transitional social control refers to the reclassification of categories of individuals through expressions of both social disapproval and praise; and (3) civil society and social control from below concerns the role of social movements, organizations and groups as informal agents of social control during transitions. The concluding section recaps and briefly explores the concept of 'good moral panic' in the context of political transitions. While the concept of social control tends to have negative connotations for critical sociologists, this work suggests that efforts to categorize, punish and disapprove certain behaviours as deviant may not only be viewed as supporting a conservative status-quo, but also as promoting fledging human rights norms.
本文将过渡时期司法政策——后冲突和后独裁社会为解决过去侵权行为遗留问题而进行的努力——解读为一种社会控制形式。虽然过渡时期司法通常被理解为应对有罪不罚这一核心问题，但本文认为，这种表述过于狭隘，导致在分析包括审判、真相委员会、受害者赔偿和道歉在内的各种过渡机制时缺乏一致性。本文以斯坦利·科恩的研究为基础，认为过渡时期的核心问题是对侵犯人权行为的否认，因此，所有过渡时期司法机制的共同目的都是重新分类过去：将一些在过渡之前被认为是“正常”的行为和个人重新定义为越轨。本文在将社会控制框架应用于过渡时期司法时，确定并分析了三个主题：（1）真相、记忆和追溯性社会控制，涉及到寻求真相的过渡时期司法机制通过对记忆进行社会控制来重新分类过去事件的方式；（2）谴责、庆祝和过渡性社会控制，指的是通过表达社会的不赞同和赞扬来对个人类别进行重新分类；（3）公民社会和来自底层的社会控制，涉及社会运动、组织和团体作为过渡时期非正式社会控制代理人的作用。最后一节总结并简要探讨了政治转型背景下的“良好道德恐慌”概念。虽然社会控制的概念对于批判社会学家来说往往带有负面含义，但这项工作表明，将某些行为归类为越轨并加以惩罚和谴责，不仅可以被视为支持保守的现状，也可以被视为促进新兴人权规范。
