University of Heidelberg

Conference on Historical Justice in Melbourne

14. Feb. 2012

Dr. Kerstin von Lingen and PhD Candidate Lisette Schouten from the Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies gave a talk at the first conference on Historical Justice and Memory. They spoke on Thursday, 16th February, in Melbourne, Australia.

The Historical Justice and Memory conference was held from February 14-18, 2012, and organised by Swinburne Institute of Social Research at Swinburne University (Melbourne) and the Global Research Network on Historical Justice and Memory. It was the first attempt to bring international scholars together to discuss questions of how to come to terms with past injustice and the politics of memory that have become a global key topic since the 90s. It was promoting conversations across disciplinary boundaries – between historians and lawyers, anthropologists and philosophers, sociologists and cinema studies scholars, heritage scholars and psychologists, human geographers and political scientists – about past injustice and how it is memorialised and remembered (or forgotten). To what extent is historical justice predicated on particular memories, on particular forms of remembering or on the forgetting of a particular past? How do apologies or truth commissions, for example, shape social memories of past injustice?

During the conference, Dr. Lingen and Lisette Schouten presented their findings on the interaction between War Crimes trials policy in Europe and Asia after 1945, focusing on the flow of personnel as well as of concepts and politics, especially in the Dutch case. In a global perspective, the experiences of both, Nuremberg and Tokyo triggered the development of an International Criminal law, taking into account that the war had transgressed all borders in sense of state theory, territories and sovereignty of its citizens. The judges engaged in both regions represented a go-between and transmitter within the Western law system, causing a flow of ideas and legal concepts between Asia and Europe after 1945.

The conference was the first gathering of the Historical Justice and Memory Research Network, which was set up in late 2010.