Confronting the Colonial Past: Assessing the Disruptive Capacities of Historical Commissions

The enduring impact of the colonial past significantly shapes contemporary societies, raising not only concerns about ongoing harm and injustice but also raising important questions about historical justice, reparations, and social change. Influential movements such as Black Lives Matter, #RhodesMustFall, and other decolonization initiatives, have put these issues into the forefront of public, policy, and academic agendas and placing former colonial powers under pressure to confront their colonial histories. An oft-used response to these demands by many European (post-)colonial states, has been the creation of a range of truth-seeking initiatives dealing with the ramifications of colonial legacies – for instance, state-sanctioned historical commissions. As these initiatives are increasingly framed as instances of transitional justice, the remaining question is whether, or in what capacity, transitional justice can take part in decolonization efforts for transformative change and the protection of human rights. In this paper, I question the capacities of state-led historical commissions, as institutions sanctioned by former colonial power or the settler nation-state, to enable a process of change; as well as the potential of transitional justice, ‘marked by Eurocentric hierarchies in which Western forms of knowledge’ and remains largely backward-looking, to contribute to decolonization efforts which are fundamentally ‘future-oriented’. I critically assess the commission’s disruptive capacities through a backward-/forward-looking approach characteristic of structural justice models as an analytical lens. Although this piece is mainly conceptual, I use examples of several historical commissions operating in the (post-)colonial context to illustrate my argument.