Missing Persons and colonial skeletons in South Africa

<p>Locating, exhuming, and identifying human remains associated with mass violence and genocide has come to occupy an important place in the panoply of transitional justice measures. Although such work cuts across the core transitional justice issues of justice, reparation and truth-telling, it has received surprisingly little critical attention from within the transitional justice field. Existing studies, with some exception, can be characterized by an ‘inside’ literature concerned to document and develop the transitional justice field, often directed towards identifying ‘best practice’ and refining an appropriate ‘toolkit’. Counterposed to this is a literature often having much in common<br>with the growing critiques of humanitarianism and human rights, in which transitional justice is seen to be a technique of rule, often allied to nationalist and/or a global neo-liberal politics with its associated depoliticizing effects.</p>