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 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory

Jeffrey Blustein

1. Human Rights and Memorialization

Transitional justice refers to the doing of justice in societies whose transition

from an authoritarian regime depends on their confronting the abuses of the past.
It is typically conceptualized in terms of violations of human rights, more spe-
cifically, systematic and/or widespread violations of them. This focus on human
rights has implications for which parties have reason to or an obligation to respond
to their actual or potential violation.
Human rights are a peculiar sort of rights with special moral weight.
The feature that on all accounts is distinctive of human rights is their nation-
transcending character, their spanning of territorial and national boundaries.
According to Charles Beitz, human rights norms provide reasons for the world
community to prevent or remediate failures by state governments to respect and
enforce human rights. It is a distinctive feature of human rights practice, he claims,
perhaps its most distinctive feature, that their observance and breach are matters
of “international concern.”1 The manner in which such international concern
can and should be expressed depends on many factors, but the justification of
any of these possibilities hinges on a basic feature of human rights: namely, their
normative force derives from interests that persons have irrespective of their
membership in particular political, religious, or ethnic communities. What is
more, their observance is increasingly being viewed as a necessary condition of
the legitimacy of state governments themselves.
The response to human rights violations that concerns me here is memorial-
ization, a term that covers a range of initiatives at least one of whose explicit
and main aims is to preserve the memory of past abuses for present and future
generations, by such means as monuments, museums, commemorative ceremo-
nies, and rituals. Memorialization is one sort of response that societies in transi-
tion can employ to deal with human rights abuses of prior regimes, and many have
established memorials of one sort or another. But memorialization is not only a
proper concern or responsibility of the societies in which rights abuses have taken
place. Since the concept of human rights is that of a kind of right that the world
community has a moral stake in, conceptualizing transitional justice in terms
of their violation also has moral implications for the involvement of inter-
national actors in the processes of memorialization. There are various domestic
circumstances that can provide the international community with reasons for such

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© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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20 Jeffrey Blustein

involvement. Transitional societies are not always able to carry out the work
of memorialization, or to carry it out adequately on their own, or there may be
elements within the transitional society that support memorialization initiatives,
and others that resist it. In some cases, it is only through the constructive involve-
ment of agents of the international community that fitting memorialization can be
initiated and sustained.
The basic point is that, as with other sorts of domestic failures to acknowledge
and respect human rights and to do justice to the victims of human rights abuses,
unwillingness, or inability to properly memorialize them is not merely a problem
of domestic political morality. It is, in addition, an occasion for practical reflection
by the international community and its agents about what they can reasonably do
to advance the work of memorialization. To put it succinctly, the purview of
memorialization—characterized as having the violation of human rights as its
generic target—is international, its implementation and maintenance a legitimate
concern of agents outside the particular societies that are responsible for providing
redress for the abuses. This focus on human rights displaces the concept of
historical memory from its home within the setting of nation states, where
memory is delimited by clearly defined borders, to the international arena, result-
ing in an enlarged practice of public historical memory promoted and sustained in
new ways by international actors.
The trigger for the involvement of international actors in efforts to memori-
alize the victims of human rights violations is either the unwillingness or inability
of transitional societies to fulfill their moral responsibilities with respect to memo-
rializing them, although they might have made significant efforts to address
past wrongs. This claim presupposes two others: first, there is a moral imperative
to remember the victims of human rights violations, and second, the states where
the violations occurred have a primary responsibility to memorialize them. Once
I have addressed these points, I will say something about the role of the inter-
national community and its agents with regard to the memorialization efforts of
transitional states.

2. Memorialization in Transitional Societies

If there is a moral duty to remember wrongdoing at all—or responsibility

or imperative or obligation, the exact words and their different significations are
not critical here—then at least three conditions must be met in order for it to be
engaged: (i) the victims must be identifiable; (ii) the party with the duty must
be specifiable; and (iii) the wrongdoing must cross a threshold of seriousness. One
sort of wrong that seems to cross the threshold for a responsibility of remem-
brance, on any plausible view, is the particularly serious wrong that consists in the
violation of a person’s or group of persons’ human rights. The special importance
of this sort of wrong can also be expressed by saying that if there are any duties
to remember the victims of wrongdoing, as I take there to be, then surely duties
to remember the victims of this sort of wrong must be counted among them. The
 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory 21

reasons have to do with the distinctive normative force of human rights norms and
with the gravity of the assault on the dignity of the victims as a result of human
rights violations. Human rights violations do not exhaust the whole domain of
political immorality: persons might be treated unjustly or unfairly, for example,
and as James Griffin observes, “there is no inference from something’s being a
matter of justice or fairness to its being a matter of human rights.”2 The inference
does not even necessarily go through when the injustice or unfairness is extensive
and persistent. Intuitively, violations of human rights are wrongs of a different
order, and if any wrongs are serious enough for their victims to be remembered,
these must be.
In the context of the concerns of this paper, the question that needs an
answer is why violations of human rights are appropriately responded to by acts
and practices of public remembrance specifically, that is, by memorialization.
Persons’ enjoyment of their human rights must be protected, and if it is not
protected, the violations must be dealt with by appropriate remedial or reparative
measures. Can memorializing wrongdoing count as a kind of redress for violations
of human rights?
This of course depends on the conception of redress one has in mind. There
is a great deal that remembrance obviously cannot do. It cannot “make good” the
loss that was caused. It cannot, that is, make it right. It cannot restore the victims
to the state they were in prior to the violation, as expropriated possessions or their
equivalent might be restored to their rightful owner. It cannot literally compensate
the victims for what they suffered, and even as symbolic compensation, it is not by
itself a fully adequate response to the grievances of survivors and victim families.
The remedy or redress that remembrance itself provides, insofar as it does, may
seem to be relatively modest and is only partial. But especially when combined
with other sorts of remedial action, it can have powerful moral, psychological, and
social effects for the victims whose suffering is memorialized as well as for their
families and communities.
For the victims, memorialization can both validate and vindicate. It can
validate the victims by symbolically restoring their moral standing and political
status. And it can vindicate them by giving the lie to official histories that
minimize the culpability of state agents and demonize the victims as traitors who
deserved whatever they received. By remembering and thereby honoring the
victims, living and dead, a step is taken toward repairing the harm caused by
wrongdoing. For the families of victims, monuments and other forms of memo-
rialization “provide an avenue for the acknowledgment that may be particularly
significant in meeting families’ need for memorializing their loved ones and the
extent of the loss suffered by them and their communities.”3 Memorials give
meaning to the suffering of families and survivor communities, and they express
the larger community’s solidarity with them.
In short, memorialization, like public apology, can be an act of moral recog-
nition of victims (and as a consequence their families and communities) and
of moral repair. Memorial initiatives in transitional societies are public acts of
22 Jeffrey Blustein

bearing witness that take place in lieu of or alongside the testimonies that the
victims themselves may or may not be able to give about the treatment they
received. The initiatives also signify a kind of protest, often officially sanctioned,
against the wrongness of what was done and symbolize resistance to the forgetting
of it. Moreover, it may not be too late to restore the moral standing of victims
through memorialization even if many of the victims are dead. Because wide-
spread and systematic human rights abuses harm not only the direct victims but
their families and immediate survivor communities as well, memorialization
may also contribute to their sense of self-worth and enhance their standing in the
larger political community. Survivor communities, as well as individual survivors,
can experience a kind of moral regeneration from social recognition.
Memorialization is valuable for other reasons as well, not only as a way of
making amends or as a type of moral reparation. It also has a critical historical
function and may aid in the moral reconstruction of political relationships. The
symbolic meaning of memorials is not a given as much as an opportunity for
interactive exchanges among the members of a society about their shared past. In
transitional societies especially, they are often the loci of public education and
debate, because they challenge a society’s natural tendency to think well of
itself and official versions of the past that regimes promote to cast themselves in
a favorable light. As Ernest Verdeja puts it, “they should be understood as encour-
aging citizens to reflect critically on the past, fomenting public discussion
and deep moral reflection. . . . In this respect, they are critical devices, for they
question what kinds of historical interpretation are normatively appropriate.”4
Memorialization might also help to reconcile former enemies and warn about
dangerous developments in the present and future by reference to the past. As one
author puts it, “by stimulating an on-going dialogue necessary for building and
sustaining a peaceful, democratic society after long periods of violence and
repression, memorials may serve as catalysts for social change.”5

3. State Responsibilities and International Response

The state that has or that inherits responsibility for the violation of
human rights, whether this occurs within its own borders or transnationally, has a
“first responder” role in regard to memorialization initiatives that address those
wrongs. This is so for a number of reasons. According to one argument, citizens
of a political society who have reason to value their membership in it have
obligations to make reparation for past wrongs committed by representatives or
officials of their society, including members of the former regime in transitional
settings. This claim can be defended as follows. A political society does not just
exist in the present. It is made up of a structure of interlocking practices and
institutions that extend across generations. A current citizen, therefore, normally
takes her place within a social order constituted by practices and institutions that
existed before her birth and that will endure after her death, and the obligations she
has as a citizen are conditioned and shaped by the transgenerational framework of
 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory 23

practices she is part of. Being a citizen entails accepting this basic normative fact,
which may be done eagerly, as individuals do who identify strongly with their
state, or reluctantly, as is the case with individuals who are not especially patriotic.
Obligations that have been incurred by a previous generation, therefore, do not
necessarily cease to exist when all the member of that generation have died out,
and obligations incurred by the present do not cease to exist when all its members
have died out. These transgenerational obligations include taking responsibility
for past human rights violations and providing redress for them, for redress
follows from the violation of other obligations for which citizens are responsible.
The issue of guilt is not determinative here: in particular, citizens may inherit
responsibilities to provide reparations, symbolic as well as material, for wrongs
for which they have no rational grounds to feel guilty.6
However, although citizens inherit the obligation to make reparation for the
wrongs committed by their political predecessors, they cannot fulfill this obliga-
tion directly. Instead, the obligation must be fulfilled by a proxy, and this is
the role of the state. In assuming this role as proxy, the state in transitional settings
speaks and makes decisions as though it were the people. Among the critical
decisions it is called upon to make in these circumstances is how to fulfill the
people’s obligation to make amends for the wrongs committed by the former
regime. Memorial projects will or ought to be considered and implemented,
assuming no overriding countervailing considerations, because memorialization is
a form of symbolic reparation that has immense value for victims, families,
survivors’ communities, and the polity as a whole. In short, the transitional state
has an obligation to ensure that appropriate steps are taken to memorialize,
conditions permitting, because citizens’ reparative obligations include the obliga-
tion to memorialize and because the state functions as their proxy in the matter of
providing reparations. Its efforts on behalf of memorialization are significant both
as a form of official and symbolic acknowledgment of the citizens’ obligations to
make reparation and as a means by which these obligations can be discharged.
Other arguments focus on the impact that the state and its representatives
have on how receptive the society at large will be to memorialization and to
the reflection it occasions. These arguments claim that the impact is likely to be
significant, and greater than that of civil society or international actors. There are
at least two reasons for this: (i) state actions have a kind of symbolic power
that public actions by non-state actors lack; and (ii) the actions of states, whose
legitimacy depends on their claim to represent a nation, can give expression to and
safeguard an important kind of identity of its members, namely, national identity.
States have a special responsibility with regard to memorialization because
they have a unique ability to galvanize public support for and motivate citizens
to engage in memorial initiatives. The first reason says that this has to do with the
symbolic power of state actions. State action in general has symbolic power
insofar as the fact of its being the state’s action is taken to confer a particular kind
of legitimacy on it by those who are subject to and recognize the state’s authority.
In other words, the symbolic power of state action derives from recognition of the
24 Jeffrey Blustein

state’s authority to act as legitimate. As Mara Loveman puts it, “the symbolic
power is a sort of metapower that accrues to the carriers of specific forms of power
to the extent that their particular basis of power is recognized as legitimate.”7
States do not merely exercise a monopoly of coercive power over individuals who
reside in them. They also exercise a kind of power that enables them to influence
behavior not through threat but by affecting the meaning that those who are
subject to state authority attribute to their own actions. This is also true of state
authorization of memorial projects: it confers legitimacy on these projects and
on the reflections and debates about the past that they provoke, to a degree that
non-state actors cannot match. The memorial responsibilities of the state, already
secured by the previous argument, are given additional support by its unique
ability to influence citizen behavior in this way.
The state’s symbolic power derives in part from its role as guardian and agent
of the nation, and this leads to the second reason for assigning a first responder
role to the state. The state, as agent of the nation, enjoys a unique relationship
to a form of identity that strongly influences the actions and choices of those
who reside in it. As the sociologist Andrew Thompson observes, “‘Nation’ and
‘national identity’ . . . are fundamental sociological categories with which each of
us as individuals work in order to make sense of our social world.”8 Non-state
actors may be able to draw on other sources of identity, such as religious affiliation
and family membership, to inspire dedication to political or social objectives,
including the creation of memorials of various kinds. But their ability to speak
to and motivate others from different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups may be
limited. The nation-state, by contrast, is a form of political association that can
tap into the motivational power of a kind of identity that is widely shared and that
can galvanize civil engagement on a large scale, namely, national identity. It is a
kind of identity that can provide moral resources for a state ready to intervene in
social life in constructive ways, including for the purpose of promoting memorial
projects. So if memorializing the victims of human rights abuses warrants this
sort of collective effort, or at least the widespread acceptance and support of the
citizenry, then arguably, the state’s connection to national identity justifies assign-
ing it an especially important role with respect to memorialization, a connection
that non-state actors do not have.
The symbolic power of state action, and the linkage between state action
and national identity, give the state a special capacity to influence historical
memory and public understandings of past wrongdoing. This special capacity in
turn grounds a special responsibility: a responsibility that includes establishing,
promoting, supporting, and stimulating, as well as coordinating public memorials
of different sorts. None of these arguments, it should be noted, establishes that the
state is obligated, all things considered, to promote memorialization at any par-
ticular stage of the transitional process. For the state may have weighty reasons not
to take on a leadership role in this matter, while political conditions are unsettled.
It may happen, however, that despite having some legitimacy and drawing
strength from its connection to national identity, the state in a transitional setting is
 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory 25

unwilling or unable to promote memorial projects, or to promote ones that succeed

in doing justice to the victims of human rights abuses. Should the international
community play a role in these circumstances, and, if so, what?
The answer will depend on why states do not promote memorialization, and
because these reasons vary, no single role for the international community follows
from state failures of this kind. Among these reasons are the potential negative
social consequences of pursuing memorial projects and the unfeasibility of doing
so, given the constraints that social conditions impose on it during the transition.
Fragile democracies may be unwilling to support memorial projects because they
fear a tenuous peace will be undermined and violence will return if they do so, and
their fears may be well grounded or exaggerated. The new regime may even have
struck a bargain with the outgoing regime as a condition of its relinquishing power
that memorials would not be established. There might also be disagreements within
the successor regime itself over the wisdom of memorializing the wrongs of the
past, perhaps because some of the members of the new regime had roles within
the outgoing one. Another possibility is that a successor regime does not lack the
political will to memorialize but the resources, financial, material, and human, and
the expertise to implement suitable memorial projects. Yet an additional explana-
tion is that survivors may feel other pressing reconstruction needs should take
priority over memorialization, such as caring for victims and rebuilding political
and economic institutions, and the transitional state may decide to set its recon-
struction agenda accordingly. In each case, the timing and type of international
response, if there is to be a response at all, must be carefully calibrated to the reasons
for the state’s falling short with respect to memorialization.
Even if states do promote memorial projects within their jurisdictions, the
particular projects they support might actually fail to fulfill the moral purposes of
memorialization, which are to redress past wrongdoing and validate and vindicate
its victims. This is why I said previously that the projects should do justice to
the victims.9 As has often been noted, the work of memory can be foreclosed or
frustrated, as well as advanced, by creating memorials to the victims of wrong-
doing. Paul Connerton puts it this way:

Many memorials are, admittedly, powerful memory places. Yet their effect is more ambigu-
ous than this statement might imply. . . . The relationship between memorials and forgetting
is reciprocal: the threat of forgetting begets memorials and the construction of memorials
begets forgetting. . . . Memorials conceal the past as much as they cause us to remember it.10

Perpetrators and political elites sometimes back memorial initiatives so that

society can forget, or if this is not their intention, memorials can nevertheless
have this as their effect. So when international actors consider whether they could
or should aid a nation-in-transition with the memorialization of past abuses, they
need to take account not only of whether memorials exist there, but what purposes
they actually serve, intentionally or otherwise. States can fail in regard to memo-
rialization, ironically, even though they devote significant resources to it.
26 Jeffrey Blustein

State failures with regard to memorialization do not always warrant interna-

tional intervention, or particular kinds of intervention, and when they do warrant
intervention, its nature, scope, and timing vary according to the particular circum-
stances of the target societies. International intervention that is not appropriate to
domestic conditions, or that is forcibly imposed on states without any basis of
local support within them, is likely to fail because it will be rejected or resented.
It is vital to the success of memorialization initiatives that those affected by
wrongdoing take ownership of the memorializing process, and in order for this
to happen, civil society actors in the countries concerned should be included in
developing memorialization strategies.
Of course the complications presented by the varying conditions of particular
societies would not be an issue at all were such failures not a legitimate concern
of the international community in the first place. But it is hard to contest this
proposition, given that human rights norms have universal reach and exert nor-
mative pressure to restrict the traditional scope of state sovereignty. Because
human rights, their protection and remediation of their violation, are a legitimate
concern of the international community, promoting or securing memorialization
of human rights abuses, as a preventive or remedial measure, cannot be categori-
cally excluded from the range of responses to rights abuses that the world com-
munity or its agents may have reason to pursue. That is to say, it is an implication
of focusing on human rights violations as the specific sort of wrongdoing to be
memorialized that international actors have to be considered interested parties in
regard to memorialization.

4. Modes of International Involvement

There are various ways in which the international community can be

involved in memorialization. I mention a few approaches, one juridical and others
not.

4.1 Memory and International Courts of Human Rights

The inter-American system for the promotion and protection of human

rights was born with the adoption of the American Declaration of the Rights and
Duties of Man in Bogotá, Colombia in April of 1948. The system consists of two
permanent bodies, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Both the Commission and the Court are
authorized to handle complaints of human rights violations allegedly committed
by any state party to the Convention, with the Court having both adjudicatory and
advisory functions. Cases can only be referred to the Court by the Commission or
by a state party, but any person, group of persons, or non-governmental organi-
zation (NGO) may present a petition to the Commission alleging human rights
violations. In addition, the Commission can only process cases where it is alleged
that one of the member states of the OAS is responsible for the violations and the
 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory 27

victims have either exhausted all means of remedying the situation domestically
or were otherwise unsuccessful in obtaining redress.11
Memorialization plays an important and recurring role in the decisions of
the Inter-American Court. It addresses this under the heading of “other forms of
reparation” or “obligations of repair” and refers to it as a type of “non-pecuniary”
or “symbolic” or “moral” reparations or damages. The Court entertains a range of
memorial initiatives, from creating monuments to naming public spaces after the
victims to establishing national days of commemoration.
The significance of an international court ordering states to memorialize the
victims of human rights abuses that occurred within their borders fundamentally
resides in the principle the Court implicitly enunciates in its decisions, to all the
states under its jurisdiction and others that follow its example. The principle
asserts that memorialization of the harm done to individuals, families, and com-
munities by violations of human rights is a form of (symbolic) reparation
that states must take publicly visible steps to ensure is provided and that it is
both legitimate and imperative for organs of the international community to
take an interest in whether states fulfill their reparative memorial obligations.
The Court effectively announces that memorialization is not just a matter
of local or national responsibility and concern, and in this way (and others
besides), it implicates the international community in the provision of repara-
tions for human rights violations.

4.2 Nonjuridical Mechanisms

Other ways in which agents of the international community can have an

impact are by raising awareness of and eliciting support for memorialization
initiatives within transitional societies, making recommendations for memorials,
and collaborating with post-atrocity regimes and civil society actors to help them
mount suitable and effective public memorials. International actors might address
concerns about memorialization by involving themselves in political and social
processes within transitional societies that enhance the protection of human rights.
Their involvement can help to focus public attention on and influence beliefs
about and practices of memorialization in those societies. One way they can do
this is by assisting domestic actors to frame their political activity as not just a
local effort but as a struggle on behalf of human rights. International actors might
also consult with their counterparts in transitional societies about how to memo-
rialize the victims of conflict and/or provide financial and other types of assistance
to states and civil society organizations that lack the capacity to properly memo-
rialize, perhaps because they must also meet other pressing developmental needs.
Several bodies of the United Nations (UN) include efforts to promote memo-
rialization among their objectives, although these are not always realized in
practice. The UN Human Rights Council, the primary UN forum for addressing
human rights, and the UN Peacebuilding Commission work with national gov-
ernments and civil society actors to design, implement, and coordinate strategies
28 Jeffrey Blustein

for promoting transitional justice in post-conflict societies. As part of the UN

system, they are guided by the normative standards set out in the UN’s Basic
Principles on Reparation, which include memorialization initiatives among
their recommended reparative measures. Outside the UN system, there are inter-
national NGOs, such as the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of
Conscience and the International Center for Transitional Justice, which work in
transitional societies to generate strategies for memorializing the victims of
repressive rule and conflict.
Finally, there is the limited but not insignificant influence that the interna-
tional community can exert through the pressure of world opinion. International
NGOs play an increasingly important role in this. They serve as watchdogs and
monitors to ensure that states adhere to human rights norms, and these norms can
be elaborated to include memorialization of those who suffered their violation.
With this enlarged understanding of their mission, international NGOs could
monitor whether and how states have fulfilled their legal and moral obligations
with respect to memorialization, issue public reports about noncompliance, and
censure states that have failed to establish memorial projects or have done little to
support them.

5. Internationalized Memory, Global Memory, and Contextualization

One of the issues addressed by Avishai Margalit in his provocative book,

The Ethics of Memory,12 is the prospect of forging an historical collective
memory on a global rather than a national scale, and it would help clarify how
I see the international community playing a role in promoting remembrance
if I compare elements of his view with my account of the internationalization of
memory. Specifically, his understanding of what it would mean for memory to be
international is different from my understanding of what it means for memory to
become internationalized. Moreover, as a consequence of limiting his focus to
forms of international memory that he himself regards as utopian, he offers little
remedy for failures of states to properly memorialize the victims of human rights
violations. At the same time, his emphasis on memorial projects rooted in what
he calls “natural communities of memory” makes the critically important point
that conclusions about how to memorialize cannot be directly derived from
premises about universal human rights, if memorialization is to succeed in
redressing past wrongdoing.
Central to Margalit’s account is the notion of a community of shared memo-
ries, and he explores the possibility of creating a global community of shared
memories, of either of two types: one he calls an “ethical community,” the other
a “moral community.” The former is based on care for human beings as such and,
given the limits of the human capacity for caring, he regards it as unlikely. The
latter is based on “some minimal shared moral memories” (78) and would involve
a shared sense among human beings that they belong to a community, the com-
munity of mankind, grounded in the inherent dignity and worth of all. As with the
 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory 29

ethical community, however, Margalit calls this form of universal community

“utopian.” He concludes “that the most promising projects of shared memory
are those that go through natural communities of memory” (82), such as “families,
clans, tribes, religious communities, and nations” (69). Margalit does not discuss
other ways in which memory can transcend national boundaries.
Most discussions of historical memory in social and political philosophy
assume, perhaps even without recognizing it, that historical memory is nationally
bounded, and they rarely question the appropriateness of framing issues of his-
torical memory in this way. Margalit, to his credit, does question this. However, he
only discusses a certain kind of role for the international community and does not
mention more realistic mechanisms available to it for contributing to and influ-
encing the memories that ground a nation’s understanding of its past. Among
other things, he does not address the ways in which the resources of the interna-
tional community can be employed to counter the distortions and denials to which
nations and political regimes are often prone in their constructions of the past, nor
does he remark on the important role of the international community in helping
state and non-state actors within transitional societies to integrate memorialization
into the larger work of transitional justice. There need not be a universal moral
community of shared memories in Margalit’s senses for the international com-
munity to be able to influence and shape social practices of remembering that
affect a nation’s collective self-understanding. Moreover, there is nothing utopian
about the international community expressing its concern over violations of
human rights in the ways I have discussed.
Although creating a truly global moral community of shared memories of
human rights abuses may not be a particularly promising project, it is not unheard
of. Holocaust memory is the best, or perhaps the only, example of collective
memory of human rights abuses realized on a global scale.13 But the very rarity of
a global community of this type is the reason why I do not want to tie my account
of the internationalization of memory too closely to it.
Margalit does not say anything about how the resources of the international
community, functioning as something other than a global community of memory,
can be brought to bear to facilitate memorialization within particular historical
political, religious, and ethnic communities. This may lead us to conclude that for
Margalit, memorialization is (almost) entirely a domestic matter and that any
support for it must come from within the particular communities where it is
occurs, not from the international community. I tend to doubt that this is actually
what he believes. In any case, my remarks about the internationalization of
memory have hopefully shown that it would be a serious mistake if he did believe
it. Nothing in what I have said, however, is intended to cast doubt on Margalit’s
claim “that the most promising projects of shared memory are those that go
through natural communities of memory.” In fact, there is a strong case to be made
for it. Let me say why, from the perspective of one who takes respect for human
rights as a guiding principle of memorialization, I think he is on to something
important.
30 Jeffrey Blustein

If we are serious about human rights, it is not enough merely to articulate a set
of abstract aspirational goals. We must also ask how these rights can be respected
and protected, and failures to protect them properly redressed, in particular social
worlds as they are constituted, and what institutional and other improvements
in them are needed to advance the practice of human rights. This raises what I
call the problem of contextualization. Contextualization grounds the demands of
a universal conception of morality in particular historically conditioned political,
ethnic, religious, and other communities, and it is necessary to do this for all
aspects of the satisfaction of human rights, including the memorialization of
human rights abuses and their victims. Moreover, when the demands of memori-
alization are situated within these particular communities, this places constraints
on the form, content, and timing of memorialization projects. Specific modes of
memorialization that are practicable and justified for one social setting may be too
risky, costly, obtrusive or premature for another, or perhaps they would be insuf-
ficiently responsive to the extent and nature of the suffering of victims elsewhere.
At the same time, although projects memorializing the victims of human rights
violations can justifiably differ from one transitional society to another, they
nevertheless all derive their moral warrant from a common value framework that
has universal reach.
These points have implications for how international actors should act in
regard to memorialization. The design and implementation of memorial projects
for particular societies should be sensitive to their political and sociocultural
conditions and to their histories of violence and repression. But it is not just these
conditions that provide the context for memorialization efforts: the political,
institutional, and economic conditions under which international actors operate
as members of the larger international community, and the domestic obligations
and responsibilities international actors have to their own citizens, are additional
features of the context for promoting respect for human rights in states that have
failed or been unable to do so. The reasons that international actors have to
intervene in order to prevent, correct, or remediate violations of human rights
abuses, the strategies of action and modes of intervention that might be open to
them to do so, and the constraints under which they operate, are enormously
varied. To decide whether there is sufficient reason to intervene and how to do so,
a general claim that human rights are matters of international concern is plainly of
little use. It has no determinate implications without the addition of premises
describing the domestic (and international contexts) that condition and constrain
the implementation of human rights in specific cases. This is the sense in which
I think Margalit is right to claim that “the most promising projects of shared
memory are those that go through natural communities of memory.”

6. Conclusion

The establishment of memorials of various sorts potentially has two impor-

tant transformative effects. First, it may positively influence the prospects for
 Human Rights and the Internationalization of Memory 31

political reconciliation within transitional societies. Memorials, depending on

the conditions under which they are implemented and how and what they signify,
can help repair relationships that have been damaged by violence and repression
and establish relations of mutual trust and respect among former adversaries. It
follows that human rights courts and other international agents might be able to
advance the process of rebuilding damaged political relationships by fostering
remembrance of the victims of human rights abuses.
Second, the impact of these memorials may be transformative in another way.
Even if not intentionally designed for this purpose, memorials tend to engage and
involve individuals in, as one author puts it, “an active practice of remembering
which takes an inquiring attitude toward the past and the activity of its (re)con-
struction through memory.”14 Received views of national history may be chal-
lenged; a new understanding of the past and an altered collective identity may
emerge. International actors cannot force people to engage in such critical self-
examination or to revise their thinking about their collective past and what defines
them as a people or nation. They can, however, sow the seed for it and help to
shape collective memory through their involvement in domestic social practices of
remembering.
In most discussions of the relationships between memory, history, and col-
lective identity, there is no mention of the role that outside agents play or can play
in influencing the formation and retention of communal memories, whether those
of a family, a clan, a religious community, or a nation. Nor is any legitimate
role for them generally acknowledged. But it is a mistake to think that communal
memories are only controlled and shaped by processes internal to those commu-
nities and belong exclusively to the natural communities that harbor them, with
outside agents having no legitimate stake in them. It is a mistake that I hope to
have helped remedy.

I thank Ernest Verdeja, Robert Young, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal
for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes
1
Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32.
2
James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 198.
3
Vasuki Nesiah, “Overcoming Tensions between Family and Judicial Procedures,” International
Review—Red Cross 84, no. 848 (December 2002): 823–44 at 840.
4
Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Phila-
delphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009), 74.
5
Artemis Christodulou, quoted in Frédéric Mégret, “Of Shrines, Memorials and Museums: Using the
International Criminal Court’s Victim Reparation and Assistance Regime to Promote Transitional
Justice,” available online at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1403929, p. 22. A revised version of this
article appears in Buffalo Human Rights Law Review 16, no. 1 (2010).
6
The account sketched here belongs to a family of philosophical arguments defending the existence
of transgenerational obligations. Janna Thompson presents a view like this in “Historical Obliga-
tions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 3 (2000): 334–45; also “Apology, Justice, and
32 Jeffrey Blustein

Respect: A Critical Defense of Political Apology,” in The Age of Apology, ed. M. Gibney et al.
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 31–44. See also Ross Poole, Nation
and Identity (London: Routledge, 1999); and W. James Booth, Communities of Memory: On
Witness, Identity, and Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 55–66.
7
Mara Loveman, “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power,” American
Journal of Sociology 110, no. 6 (May 2005): 1651–83 at 1656.
8
Andrew Thompson, “Nations, National Identities and Human Agency: Putting People Back into
Nations,” The Sociological Review 49, no. 1 (2001): 18–32 at 24.
9
In the sense in which I am using the expression, “doing justice to victims” should be distinguished
from, and may in fact be in conflict with, institutionalizing a perpetual category of “victim” for
some group of people. A number of writers have commented on the dangers of the latter. See for
example, Ian Buruma, “The Joys and Perils of Victimhood,” The New York Review of Books 46,
no. 6 (April 1999): 4–9; Tzvetan Todorov, “The Uses and Abuses of Memory,” in What Happens
to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. Howard Marchitello (New York:
Routledge, 2001), 11–39. In addition, memorialization does not do justice to victims if they are
forced to repeatedly remember whether they want to or not, because this disrespects them.
10
Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 27, 29.
11
For more on this two-prong system for promoting and protecting human rights, see Thomas
Buergenthal, “The Revised OAS Charter and the Protection of Human Rights,” American Journal
of International Law 69 (1975): 828–36; Cecilia Medina, “The Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: Reflections on a Joint Venture,”
Human Rights Quarterly 12 (1990): 439–64; “Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” availa-
ble online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-American_Court_of_Human_Rights; “Inter-
American Commission on Human Rights,” available online at http://www.cidh.oas.org/what.htm.
12
A. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
13
For more, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, trans.
Assenka Oksiloff (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
14
A. Kuhn, “A Journey Through Memory,” in Memory and Methodology, ed. S. Radstone (Oxford:
Berg, 2000), 183–86.
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