Apologia Politica

A decade and a half ago Nicholas Tavuchis noted that a genuine apology on behalf of a political body 'is an accomplishment of no mean order.' Girma Negash's Apologia Politica is a like accomplishment. He knows the differences between failed and successful apologies by high officials concerning the low deeds of state-sponsored atrocity. The book is a triumph of interdisciplinary research and writing. It combines historical accuracy, political realism, and moral insight concerning one of the greatest of all political challenges: how to mend and heal relations between victims and perpetrators of vast evil? Negash describes credible apology as a combination of acknowledgment of a collective wrong, identification of those responsible, public truth-telling about the wrong, and citizen-supported remorse. It is a rigorous formula. If citizens and political leaders of our vexed global community learn to practice that rigor, the twenty-first century might yet recover from the collective sins of the twentieth. Here is wise guidance into the realization of that hope. -- Donald W. Shriver, Jr, President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Applied Christianity Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary
With astute theorizing and assiduous scholarship, Girma Negash has produced an outstanding investigation of hitherto neglected yet extremely important ethical and political dimensions of inter-state relations. -- Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai'i, Manoa