Overcoming Historical Injustices
Land Reconciliation in South Africa

This book investigates the judgements South Africans make about the fairness of their country's past, focusing on historical land dispossessions.

James L. Gibson (Author)

9780521517881, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 July 2009

328 pages, 17 b/w illus. 29 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.7 cm, 0.6 kg

'Gibson's study is ambitious and compelling, not least because it interrogates how different forms of justice relate to one another and figure in South Africans' attitudes towards particular conflicts … Overcoming Historical Injustices sets a high bar for the quantitative study of how the purported beneficiaries of transitional justice view the problems the field seeks to address, and how this relates to factors such as identity.' Megan Bradley, The International Journal of Transitional Justice

Overcoming Historical Injustices is the last entry in Gibson's 'overcoming trilogy' on South Africa's transformation from apartheid to democracy. Focusing on the issue of historical land dispossessions - the taking of African land under colonialism and apartheid - this book investigates the judgements South Africans make about the fairness of their country's past. Should, for instance, land seized under apartheid be returned today to its rightful owner? Gibson's research zeroes in on group identities and attachments as the thread that connects people to the past. Even when individuals have experienced no direct harm in the past, they care about the fairness of the treatment of their group to the extent that they identify with that group. Gibson's analysis shows that land issues in contemporary South Africa are salient, volatile, and enshrouded in symbols and, most important, that interracial differences in understandings of the past and preferences for the future are profound.

1. Land reconciliation and theories of justice, past and present
2. Naming, blaming, and claiming on historical land injustices: the views of the South African people
3. Group identities and land policy preferences
4. Applied justice judgments: the problem of squatting
5. Judging the past: historical versus contemporary claims to land
6. Land reconciliation and theories of justice
References
Appendix A. A note on race in South Africa
Appendix B. The survey methodology
Appendix C. The questionnaire.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC], Politics & government [JP]