Part 2: The Great Arenas of Contention6

Chapter 6: Contention and Justice

The chapter opens with three testimonies: the shooting at Sharpeville in 1960 of a crowd that had come unarmed, and a prison on Robben Island that shaped a leader who, once released, knew how to manage victory; four journalists in Boston who discovered that the crime lay not only with the offender but with the silence that protected him; and photographs from Abu Ghraib that bore witness to what a war wanted hidden. It then compares the Tokyo trials with transitional justice in South Africa, reviews the major theories of justice, and traces three stages in its path, concluding that justice is not a state at which societies arrive and rest, but a continuing process of balance and correction that is won, never handed down.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

• 16

  The fall of apartheid

  When injustice becomes a witness against itself

  1960–1994Chapter 6Justice and witness
• 17

  Spotlight

  When four journalists take on an empire

  2001–2002Chapter 6Justice and witness
• 18

  Abu Ghraib

  When a single image halts a war machine

  2004Chapter 6Justice and witness

The Cases