1 Memory and Politics: Three Theories of Justice in Regime Transitions

presents an intriguing reflection on the French Revolution. The moral significance of the revolution, he suggests, is to be found, not in any event directly connected to it, but in the reaction of “disinterested sympathy ” towards the revolutionary cause on the part of onlookers. Because this response was potentially hazardous and had nothing to do with self-interest, Kant sees it as the result of a “moral disposition within the human race”, and thus as a moral phenomenon that can never be forgotten.1 Presumably for Kant, this serves as grounds for hope of moral progress in the form of movement towards a global “federal union ” of independent republics, a union that would secure universal peace.2 Though I am no latter-day Kant, my central aim in this paper is to identify a novel moral phenomenon that is surely as significant, though considerably less exhilarating, than the circumstances noted by Kant in 1798. I am referring here to the remarkable rise of a series of practices and institutions operating at both the national and global level, designed to respond to war crimes, atrocities, human rights abuses, and grave injustices committed by states or political movements against minorities and individuals. Arguably, this is a development that takes its inception in the Nuremberg Trials and the passage of the Unite