Ever since the United States Institute of Peace published three-volume Transitional Justice in 1995, transitional justice has become a buzzword frequently heard on various occasions all over the globe when it comes to political transitions or regime changes. While political scientists and jurists are enthusiastic about transitional justice interventions to deal with the aftermath of state atrocities or mass violence, scholars in other disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, tend to be more reserved about the idea of transitional justice (Olick 2007, Torpey 2006). One of the critical issues is how the past is remembered and interpreted, which, in turn, profoundly affects how justice is understood and defined. How can transitional justice be pursued in a society torn by splitting identities and diverging memories? This paper draws on Taiwan, a society in which collective memories have been deeply divided, as an illustrative case to investigate the relations between collective memory, organized violence and transitional justice from a sociological perspective.
Taiwan had been under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT), which fled from mainland China to Taiwan after losing the civil war in 1949, for nearly four decades before the KMT lifted the Martial Law in 1987. Viewed as an exemplar case of the so-called "third wave" of democratization, the transition to democracy in Taiwan was characterized as a "silent revolution" in which the process of democratization ran smoothly without incurring large scale turbulences or violence. On the other hand, Taiwan's primary socio-political cleavage has been surrounding splitting national identities and diverging historical memories. Those who bear a Chinese identity view Taiwanese history in the broader context of Chinese history, whereas those who bear a Taiwanese identity tend to hold a Taiwan-centered view, which downplays the historical connections between Taiwan and China. What is more, since Taiwan was a Japanese colony mobilized by Imperial Japan to participate in WWII, the memories and interpretations regarding WWII are contradictory between the two camps that hold different identities. Subsequently, how to understand KMT's authoritarian rule on Taiwan, and how to evaluate certain political figures such as Chiang Kai-shek, who led the War of Resistance against Japan during WWII but inflicted massacres and white terrors upon Taiwanese people after 1945, have been hotly debated issues. However, the current government has been undertaking transitional justice interventions since 2016 without taking cautions to deal with those thorny issues related to diverging memories. Under such a circumstance, the pursuit of transitional justice in Taiwan, which has been taking an extraordinarily complicated route, generated many unintended consequences that lead to further tensions and conflicts rather than dialogue and reconciliation. Drawing on the lessons from Taiwan, this paper argues that, when seeking transitional justice, a converging common memory should be a primary goal to be handled with top priority. If such a condition is not fulfilled, transitional justice interventions may lead to the escalation of conflict and eventually hamper the process of reconciliation in a deeply divided society like Taiwan.
