First, I would like to declare how much I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this dialogue with Monika Nalepa. As I have said, her work on lustration constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of transitional justice processes.
By now, it is probably clear to readers that our approaches to analyzing transitional justice processes differ enormously. Perhaps the difference in our theoretical perspectives is best captured by her assertion that: “Formal theorists conceptualize land redistribution as a rationing or allocation problem.” From my perspective, formal theorists therefore ignore the most interesting aspect of transitional justice situations, and in particular the role played by citizen perceptions of unfairness and historical injustices. Especially in transitional regimes, in which basic political institutions and processes may not yet have consolidated their mass legitimacy, it is crucial that governments respond to citizens' expectations that the injustices of the past be addressed at both the individual and group levels. Moreover, it is valuable to understand that there are several types of justice—distributive, restorative, retributive, and procedural—and that for some purposes these types of justice may be interchangeable. Whether a regime provides its citizens the justice they expect is a crucial factor for establishing legitimacy under transitional conditions. The larger lesson of my research is that transitional justice is about conceptions of justice; justice in this sense is not the subject of Nalepa's work.
Of course, claims about the role of justice are best made within an analytical context in which competing theories and hypotheses are tested. In my Chapter 3, for instance, I examine whether land-policy preferences are more closely connected to rational instrumentalism or to symbolic politics and fairness concerns. To conduct a fair test, I try to operationalize instrumental interests, just as I operationalize attitudes toward symbolic politics and perceptions of historical unfairness. From the empirical test of the competing explanations of policy preferences I conclude that instrumentalism has little predictive value; symbolic attitudes, on the other hand, have considerable predictive value. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that land politics in South Africa are structured by citizens' yearning for justice, not just material compensation, and whether one's group gets justice (sociotropic justice) is perhaps more important than compensating individual victims (egocentric individualism).
Many rational choice scholars will not be satisfied with this explanation because they are committed to the search for some sort of link that may be deemed self-interest. As I asserted in Overcoming Historical Injustices (footnote 16), I find this approach unsatisfactory: “If one takes a quite broad view of self interest, then interests are always implicated and the theory is tautological. For example, I could be said to profit from the murder of my wife because, by society punishing the murder, it reaffirms and reinforces the norm that murder is improper, thereby giving me solace and perhaps even reducing the chances of murder—even my murder—happening in the future, which is of course to my benefit.” If egocentric instrumentalism is always implicated, in one form or another, then egocentric instrumentalism is not analytically interesting.
My finding that justice is important to transitional justice merely reinforces the dozens of studies (cited in Overcoming Historical Injustices) showing that self-interest is a remarkably weak predictor of policy preferences. In the specific case of historical injustices, however, I argue that the empirical findings have added theoretical significance. If a sense of historical unfairness reflects not just what was done to oneself—something that can, to at least some degree, be undone—but in addition reflects injuries to one's group, then programs of land restitution may have only limited success in mitigating historical grievances. By broadening the analysis from individual rational calculations to group-level injustice, my research suggests the possibility of the inter-generational transmissibility of grievances that will not be undone solely by compensating victims. The glue that ties individuals to their groups flows from social identities. The bridge between the past and the present is cemented by group attachments.
There are many other findings in Overcoming Historical Injustices that are not addressed in this exchange because they have more to do with micro-level political psychology (e.g., social identities, institutional legitimacy) or South African politics (e.g., the stunning, and perhaps stunningly depressing, role of race in the formation of policy preferences) than with the common core of both of our books—transitional justice. But the fundamental difference between our two approaches is that Nalepa seems overly concerned with strategic egocentric instrumentalism, while my analysis pits instrumentalism against the alternative hypothesis that people want fairness for themselves and for the groups to which they attached. It is perhaps regrettable that, but for exchanges such as this, the perspectives of rational choice and justice research have been much like two ships passing quietly and independently in the night, oblivious to the other's presence.
