Forgetting After Injustice: The Limits of Institutional Memory in Political Renewal

Can institutional forgetting ever be morally justified- not as a denial of past injustice, but as a condition for meaningful political renewal? Forgetting has traditionally been viewed as unethical by political and moral philosophy, which correlates it to injustice, denial, and victim betrayal. From Hannah Arendt's emphasis on memory as a moral duty to modern theories of memory and transitional justice, institutional forgetfulness is frequently presented as morally dubious unless strictly regulated or categorically rejected. This paper rejects that binary, arguing that the semantic trap of state amnesia and introducing the concept of institutional closure in place of institutional forgetting: the deliberate, legal bracketing or setting aside of retributive mechanisms to establish political finality. Drawing on political theory from the likes of Arendt, Booth, Blustein, Rieff) and a qualitative textual coding protocol of statutory and judicial texts from South Africa, Argentina, and Spain, the paper advances a two-fold intervention with a typology of Closure which categorizes state closure into three distinct strategies, and a normative framework which establishes six criteria to evaluate when closure is morally permissible: procedural democratic origin, moral recognition of victims, tiered accountability, public justification, contribution to political renewal, and proportionality. By redefining political forgetting as a family of constrained state practices, the paper aims to provide a grounded framework for evaluating how post-conflict societies legitimately navigate difficult pasts.