Keynote Address Relations between the living and the dead have been unhinged, are out of order. Relations with those yet to be born are at stake – the contract with future generations is unclear, needs to be renegotiated perhaps. I look at transitional justice as a window in time. Transitional justice is a particular, momentary window in the trans-generational, ever-continuous process of dealing with the past. It is an intentional, conscious and societal effort at dealing with the past. If, however, transitional justice becomes a matter of Dealing With The Past (in capital letters), to rewrite certain personal experiences into History (with a capital H), then it may merely lend itself to setting up and establishing the next exclusive and undemocratic dispensation. If the past is to be dealt with ‘once and for all’, it is likely to celebrate the virtues of some to the exclusion of others. Then transitional justice becomes about Vlamik Volkan’s ‘chosen traumas’ and ‘chosen glories’, not transformative at the core but, rather, built on claims to a victimhood that justify violence against others.3 Yet transitional justice also has the potential inherent in seeking to restore the relations between the living, the dead and unborn future generations. If we consider the past to be a living story, then violence is a disruption of this story. The past is a generative energy that seeks to find and engage where the narrative cycle has been broken and start the repairs as well as invent new futures. Hugo von Hofmannsthal referred to collective memory in 1902, which he spoke of as ‘the damned up force of our mysterious ancestors within us’.4 Dealing with the past is the ongoing effort to restore and create anew a coherent narrative of who we are in the here and now. This happens with and without transitional justice. After disruption, war and violence, people embark on a search for meaning. They repair damage in the everyday. They search for and recreate aliveness. Transitional justice in the 1990s, as I experienced it in South Africa, was a staged moment for retrospection and prospection – it was meant as ‘looking back in order to look forward’, based on the core assumption that indeed looking backward enables going forward. At the same time, transitional justice as a political project and projection was inevitably tied up with the processes of nation-building, which are by default exclusive. As we focus on creating the kind of post-colonial citizenship that would 3  See <http://www.vamikvolkan.com/Chosen-Trauma,-the-Political-Ideology-of-Entitlementand-Violence.php>. 4  Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, ‘Social memory studies: From “collective memory” to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices’, Annual Review of Sociology (1998), 24: 106. International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe 13