DEEP ARTICLE
Left Unsettled
Confessions of Armed
Revolutionaries
Leigh A Payne
Latin American Centre,
Oxford School of Global
and Area Studies
W
hat happens when armed left guerrilla or revolutionary
fighters confess to past violence? Can they contribute to
building stronger democracies or human rights cultures? Are
they in any way similar to confessions by perpetrators of state violence?
Some parts of my earlier work on state perpetrators -- Unsettling Accounts – carries
through to this new study on Left Unsettled. The revolutionary left and state perpetrators,
for example, make confessions that are unsettling in content, specifically terrorist violence
against civilians and extreme violence against their own comrades. Like state perpetrators,
confessions on the left sometimes break, or unsettle, a silence over left-wing involvement
in past atrocities. When the left speaks out – like the right--, they do not settle accounts
with the past, but unsettle them. Confessions by the armed left disrupt a narrative that
has settled about that past, that is, the left as innocent victims, and not perpetrators, of
atrocity. The term ‘left’ in the title of the new project refers in part to the stated ideology
of the revolutionary groups; but it also refers to what is ‘left out,’ or silenced from memory
politics, what remains or is ‘left behind,’ in the analysis of past violence.
The earlier project suggests that despite the unsettling nature of the confessions
and the near impossibility of reconciliation as a result--, engagement of the audience
can nonetheless positively benefit democracy and human rights through “contentious
coexistence.” Dialogic conflict over past violence puts into practice the very values of
democracy--participation, expression, and contestation—that sharpens, refines, and
promotes widespread support for human rights norms. The earlier book comes to this
conclusion by developing a dramaturgical approach. It is not that the confessional
12
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2