Rethinking the right to know and the case for restorative epistemic reparation

Abstract

In the spirit of this special issue to center on wronged individuals and groups, their account of how the wrongs should be understood and repaired, and what actions promote repair, this article focuses on individuals and groups wronged by genocide and their entitlement to epistemic reparation in the aftermath of genocide. I argue that epistemic reparation requires not only fulfillment of the informational needs of victims, survivors, and descendants, including access to archives, documents, and provision of knowledge about violations. In addition, taking into account the idea of epistemic injuries, which are part and parcel of genocidal atrocities, epistemic reparation also ought to include recognition and re-establishment of victims' epistemic standing or epistemic recognition in short. This insight is suggested by the fact that genocide is enabled, “justified” and even prescribed through a genocidal epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance constituted by not only the propagation of falsehoods and misinformation about social reality but also abuses of epistemic authority and epistemic authoritarianism, which systematically exclude targeted groups from the community of epistemic trust. Epistemic trust is the kind of trust that allows us to gain or generate knowledge and other kinds of epistemic inputs from and with others. For example, we trust that others tell us the truth—or at least, what they hold to be true and to not intentionally deceive us—and we trust others to recognize us as trustworthy epistemic contributors, or to do their best to understand our words as we intend them. To be systematically and unwarrantedly epistemically distrusted means to be deprived of the epistemic recognition and consequently, social uptake necessary to participate, for example, in the generation of a shared understanding of social reality and to revise misunderstandings imposed by those with dominating power—in the case at hand, genocide advocates and perpetrators. Accordingly, epistemic reparation ought to include the revision of dysfunctional epistemic practices that underlie and sustain a genocidal epistemology. This would make epistemic reparation not only instrumentally valuable insofar as it may, for example through educational and informational measures, prevent the recurrence of these wrongs, but also intrinsically valuable insofar as it re-asserts and repairs survivors and descendants’ epistemic standing. It provides them with epistemic recognition that has been systematically withdrawn from them, making epistemic reparation a crucial element of restorative justice.

In what follows, I start by introducing the idea of a “genocidal epistemology” based on the example of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1917. This historical genocide continues to be systematically denied by the succeeding governments of Turkey, making it a useful case study for exploring the value of epistemic reparation. The methodological impetus here is to generate insights on (restorative) justice from the negative: a case in which justice has failed and continues to fail. The underlying idea is that what matters for justice or injustice is not only knowledge but also, and perhaps more crucially, (willful) ignorance. I discuss how these atrocities were “justified” based on a genocidal epistemology driven by ethno-nationalist ideology grounded in both racial and religious domination. Such a genocidal epistemology is generated and maintained by practices of ignorance on behalf of perpetrators, whereby the targeted groups were not only to be distrusted morally or socially but also epistemically.¹ These are the background conditions against which I develop my subsequent analysis of the right to know and its epistemically restorative potential.

Hence, second, I address the right to know, one of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) core pillars for combating impunity in the aftermath of crimes under international law, and discuss its principles through the lens of epistemic correctives. More specifically, I argue that these principles, in acknowledging epistemic rights, function as correctives against the pressure of pernicious ignorance that persists in the aftermath of such crimes on behalf of perpetrators in an attempt to achieve or maintain absolution or impunity, as well as to normalize injustice, that is, consolidate domination. I then introduce an example of historical knowledge that can be regarded as a crucial epistemic corrective against pressures of Armenian genocide disinformation: knowledge of the Ottoman tribunals that attempted to prosecute perpetrators in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide and accordingly, the crucial role of the Armenian genocide in the history of international law and the concepts of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” in particular.

Third, I highlight that the problem of genocide denialism and thus failure of epistemic reparation is not primarily the lack of relevant historical knowledge, but the epistemic practices and processes that systematically distort, occlude, or obscure such knowledge. Based on this, I propose an account of epistemic reparation that corrects a corrupted genocidal epistemology and guards against ongoing epistemic harms toward victims-survivors as well as descendants. Not only should it go along with a provision of crucial information, evidence, and knowledge about violations, but also with epistemic recognition: While the right to know is a crucial step in the formal recognition of epistemic rights, epistemic reparation must also be rooted in a commitment to restore the victims' epistemic standing and capability of epistemic contribution.²

I take these cues of focusing on the “justification of injustice” from Pauer-Studer and Velleman 2011, who are critical of the view that Nazi crimes were obvious cases of immorality in the context of the Third Reich. After all, “if their immorality had been as obvious to the perpetrators as it is today, the crimes might never have occurred” (p. 330). Rather, they argue that moral reasoning could misfire on such a broad scale because morality became distorted at the level of its social articulation. In a social and normative context infused by Nazi ideology, perpetrators were led to mischaracterize their situation “and consequently misinterpreted and misapplied the guidelines of their conventional morality” (p. 334). Hence, perpetration was enabled through distortions at the stages of moral interpretation and application, among other things, because of misconceptions of reality provided by their social context. This can entail “empirical falsehoods about ‘[the] community's particular circumstances’ (Herman, 1993, pp. 83–84)—for example, what Arendt called ‘the lie most effective with the whole of the German people’ (Arendt, 1994, p. 52), namely, that Germans were engaged in a Schicksalskampf against a race intent on annihilating them” (Pauer-Studer and Velleman 2011, p. 352). Such empirical distortions were accompanied by normative distortions. Perpetrators considered their actions morally justified, because “moral principles were filtered through socially conditioned interpretations and perceptions that gave events a distorted normative significance” (p. 340). This was the case, for example, when the gassing of Jews was viewed by the medical staff as “humanitarian treatment for people who were going to die one way or another” (p. 345) and that it was a humane way of saving them from typhus epidemics, illustrating a distorted medical code of ethics.

It is commonly argued—and most evident in the case of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, as mentioned above—that genocides are based on a very effective lie supported by conspiracy propaganda on behalf of the perpetrating group, namely that the targeted group presents an existential threat intent on annihilating them. The threat posed by the targeted group is exaggerated, often through their assimilation into a much more powerful enemy. In the case of Armenians, for example, the enemy of Western or Russian imperialist powers. However, the justification of genocide and its inherent denialism (of wrongdoing) consists of more than systematic disinformation, the spread of empirical falsehoods, or propagandistic lies about a community's particular circumstances. Unlike lying, denying precludes the acceptance of certain truths or facts. It rather points to a motivated, “active effort not to see, no matter what the evidence may be; as a result of constant distortion and redescription” (Medina, 2013, p. 35) of the injustice.

Drawing on these insights, the “justification of genocide” is conditional upon the active or willful exclusion of targeted groups from the community of epistemic trust. Their exclusion from practices that generate shared knowledge and understanding of social reality and in particular, social grievances, enables the generation and maintenance of willful ignorance required for complicity and perpetration. In the following, I apply these insights to the case of the Armenian genocide. My main focus will be on the overarching, institutionalized ideology and social and normative system whereby ruling authorities could cultivate and impose a way of (un)knowing based on which perpetration could be broadly enabled, rationalized, and justified, granting not only the success of the genocide but also its long-term denialism.⁴

The UNCHR acknowledges the right to know, alongside the right to justice, the right to reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, as a central pillar of a “holistic” approach to transitional justice, hence a state's obligation to combat impunity and thereby protect and promote human rights in the aftermath of “serious crimes under international law.”¹³ This means that they are not to be seen as rights and principles that can be addressed in isolation from one another. Rather, they depend on one another to achieve justice. For example, so-called “symbolic” reparations alone—such as political apologies—are not sufficient if they are not accompanied by real institutional reforms and transformations that address and repair the unjust material conditions in order to achieve full moral repair and make recurrence of social violence less likely. Further, educational measures such as the establishment of memorials and museums can be used to misinform and mislead the public if they are not properly based on respect for victims' epistemic rights; such as if they disregard crucial insights generated by those who experienced the injustice, or focus exclusively on victimhood without acknowledging the responsibility of perpetrators and conditions of perpetration. Moreover, legal prosecution and punishment of individual perpetrators will be insufficient to address and repair the systematic, social, and structural conditions that enabled vast societal complicity and support for such atrocities.

I take these to be some of the pressures (towards failure) that the GP of the right to know seek address and correct. I now introduce an example of historical knowledge particularly relevant to resist some of the pressures of pernicious ignorance in relation to the Armenian genocide. Such is the knowledge of the Ottoman tribunals that attempted to prosecute perpetrators in its aftermath and the crucial role of the Armenian genocide in the history of international law and the concepts of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” in particular.

In what follows, I introduce a further dimension or type of recognition harm, namely epistemic recognition harm. This is rooted in the idea promoted by recent scholarship on epistemic injustice that we also stand in reciprocal relations of epistemic recognition with others and that there can be conditions or situations that render such relations seriously dysfunctional and harmful. The proposal here then, complementing Tirrell's aforementioned account, is to bring victims back into the human community through recognition of their epistemic standing and provision of the social uptake necessary for their Capability of Epistemic Contribution (Fricker, 2015). Fricker defines this as a “social epistemic capability on the part of the individual to contribute to the pool of shared epistemic materials—materials for knowledge, understanding, and very often for practical deliberation” (p. 76). Acknowledging such a central human capability and thus, what may ground particular epistemic rights¹⁷ introduces us to a further form of violence enacted or delivered through discursive behaviors, namely epistemic violence. This is defined by Dotson as “the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges” (Dotson, 2011, p. 238). Epistemic violence not only points to epistemic rights violations we may encounter in epistemically relevant linguistic exchanges such as testimony, but also its enabling background conditions, namely pernicious reliable ignorance. Indeed, a genocidal epistemology requires and is reinforced by the systematic violation and disablement of victims' capability of epistemic contribution. Let us now hone in on the relationship between ignorance, power, and the idea of restorative epistemic reparation.

While we often say “knowledge is power,” one might assume that ignorance—understood as lack of knowledge—disempowers. However, whether or not ignorance disempowers and whom it disempowers depends not only on the subject matter, but also on the kind of ignorance we are dealing with. We need to ask: Who is ignorant with regard to what subject matter and might such ignorance in fact be willfully and perniciously generated and maintained based on flawed cognitive norms and motives—for example, in order to defend and protect dominant privilege? Moreover, the other side of this coin is of course that those who carry threatening knowledge—such as knowledge of oppression—are intentionally disempowered. They are indeed rendered powerless knowers. Note that by “threatening knowledge” I mean knowledge that threatens a status quo characterized by unjust power relations. Take the case of genocide and its aftermath. Genocide consolidates domination of the perpetrating party, including the normalizing understandings related to the injustice, which serve to defend and protect dominant privilege. Such ignorance, then, is not to be understood merely in terms of an absence of knowledge (i.e., propositional ignorance), but also as substantive epistemic practice, a problem of ignorant agency guided by particular attitudes, cognitive norms, and evidential policies.

This shifts our analytical focus to the constitutive elements of ignorant agency; the structural social conditions that produce identities, social locations, and modes of belief formation, which become epistemically disadvantageous or defective (Alcoff, 2007, p. 40). This is most evidently the case under structural social conditions of domination and oppression, which tend to cultivate various epistemic vices on behalf of dominantly situated epistemic subjects. These may include epistemic laziness, arrogance, and closed-mindedness with regard, especially to matters pertaining to practices of social violence (Medina, 2013, p. 35). Such cultivated inattention and insensitivity to social violence and the stigmatizing prejudices that enable it are constitutive of the kind of active or willful ignorance produced by oppressive and particularly genocidal systems. It provides perpetrators with a particular perception and interpretations that give their actions distorted meaning; and it is essential to such ignorance that it devalues, excludes, and misrecognizes epistemic contributions provided by the victims. Hence, without addressing the genocidal epistemology and the willful ignorance that sustains it, denialism will continue to have a robust basis and remain a source of epistemic harm to victims, survivors, and descendants. It is against this background that we should formulate the need for and scope of epistemic rights and restorative epistemic reparation.

The underlying assumption here is that impunity in the aftermath of injustice, hence a failure of our ideal of transitional justice, is the norm rather than the exception and it is maintained by denialism—in the form of justification, rationalization, relativization, or trivialization of the injustice (Hovannisian, 1999). Granted these existing pressures posed by cultures of impunity and the ignorant agency they cultivate, the right to know can plausibly be understood as an epistemic corrective. It guards against common efforts to distort, obscure, and obliterate knowledge about perpetrated injustices, which requires the ongoing exclusion or discrediting of victims' epistemic contributions. As it is formulated now, however, the right to know mainly considers entitlements to information and knowledge that are of particular moral, social and political relevance to victim-survivors and descendants. Providing access to epistemic goods such as information and knowledge about violations is not sufficient for restorative epistemic reparation. A further requirement is the revision of unjust epistemic practices and relations through which a genocidal epistemology was generated and maintained—essentially based on the systematic withdrawal of epistemic recognition from victims. Theories of active or willful ignorance show that there can exist epistemically substantive flaws in the very epistemic practices in need of reparation. To restore the victims' epistemic standing against this background, they need to be recognized as authoritative contributors to the common pool of epistemic resources based on which knowledge and understanding of the injustice are generated. This ensures that victims are indeed acknowledged as authoritative epistemic contributors and not only receivers of evidence and knowledge about violation and injustice. In short, one could say that the right to know (as the right to certain knowledge or other epistemic resources) should be extended in its scope to include the right to be recognized as a knower (as the right to epistemic contribution). I shall briefly elaborate on this idea in the remainder of this paper.

Acknowledging epistemic rights, or the “general idea that human wellbeing has an epistemic dimension” depends, according to Fricker (2015, p. 76), “on the idea that functioning not only as a receiver but also as a giver of epistemic materials is an aspect of human subjectivity that craves social expression through the capability to contribute beliefs and interpretations to the local epistemic economy.” If we accept this idea, epistemic reparation measures and policies ought to consider not only the right to receive epistemic materials, but to participate in their generation. Hence, it must be ensured that victims receive the social uptake required for rehabilitation of their capability of epistemic contribution, that is, their “enjoyment of epistemic relational equality” (Fricker, 2015, p. 87). As already mentioned, a genocidal epistemology is generated and maintained based on the systematic, unwarranted exclusion or rejection of the epistemic contributions of the marginalized and victimized. In the context of the Armenian genocide and the preceding persecutions, Armenians and their intellectual contributions, social grievances and struggles, demands for reform, and resistance movement were persistently ignored, demonized, misrepresented, and violently suppressed by Ottoman authorities. Without properly addressing such misconceptions constituting genocidal epistemologies, they will continue to provide fertile ground for practices of silencing. Survivors and descendants will continue to be deprived of the social uptake needed for their capability of epistemic contribution, thereby subjecting them to ongoing testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (as I have argued elsewhere, e.g., Altanian, 2021a, 2021b).

Restorative epistemic reparation is thus not only instrumentally valuable insofar as it might prevent the recurrence of wrongs, but intrinsically valuable, insofar as it re-asserts and repairs survivors' and descendants' epistemic relational equality. Applying these insights to the three GP of the right to know suggests the following, extended formulations of a state's corresponding epistemic duties for combating impunity. Recall that (GP 1) pertains to the justificatory framework of a genocidal epistemology. For (GP 1) to be epistemically restorative, it ought to entail a duty to recognize victims' epistemic contributions in correcting the distorted epistemology based on which genocide perpetration was justified. (GP 2) pertains to collective memory. For it to be epistemically restorative, it ought to entail a duty to recognize the victim group's epistemic contributions, particularly to the societal practice of giving meaning to the past. (GP 3) pertains to individuals and their families right to certain kinds of knowledge, in recognition of their informational needs that carry crucial personal and moral value. Re-integrating victims-survivors in the generation of knowledge and understandings of the circumstances of perpetration and in generating meaning about what happened is crucial to help them maintain intellectual courage and epistemic self-confidence, ultimately, in order for them to indeed keep their knowledge and memory crucial for personhood. To a certain extent, (GP2) acknowledges the victim group's epistemic authority in relation to its (historical) experiences of injustice, by stating that “[a] people's knowledge of the history of its oppression is part of its heritage and, as such, must be ensured by appropriate measures in fulfillment of the State's duty to preserve archives and other evidence concerning violations of human rights and humanitarian law and to facilitate knowledge of those violations.” However, it still falls short of explicitly recognizing their status as authoritative epistemic contributors—of evidence, archives, and other epistemic resources—required for knowledge and understanding of those violations and the collective memory based on it.¹⁸

In order to repair and resist the epistemically unjust legacies of a genocidal epistemology, these epistemic contributions have to be particularly recognized by representatives of the perpetrating group. Drawing on Margaret Urban Walker's notion of “making amends,” which refers to perpetrators' attempts to make things right, Almassi (2018, p. 10) conceives of such epistemic reparation-qua-amends not in terms of compensation, but “acts of demonstration that underwrite processes of relational repair in accordance with victims' perspectives and priorities.” Epistemic amends enable victims to trust that “they will be believed, understood, properly interpreted […] which is why prioritization of victim subjectivities is so crucial for determining the actions and outcomes needed to make amends after the perpetration, experience, and acknowledgement of epistemic injustice.” (ibid.) Thus, reparation of epistemic injustices inherent in the perpetration of genocide requires centering victims' situatedness and epistemic resources developed from such situatedness. Campbell (2014, p. 165) convincingly showed in her analysis of challenges faced by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) in Settler societies like the Canadian Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) that in order for it to fulfill its commitment to supporting the establishment of “new relations embedded in mutual recognition and respect,” one should first identify the disrespectful challenges and contestations of memory and testimony that survivors face when remembering and sharing their experiences or histories. To provide them with due epistemic recognition requires becoming aware of and correcting for the legacy of colonialism through disrespectful challenges to memories and perspectives that they continue to face, hence the legacy of unequal moral and social-political, as well as epistemic standing. Campbell's analysis helps us see that even if epistemically restorative measures such as TRCs are implemented, the testimonies of victim-survivors do not meet a prior epistemic gap, or interpretive “terra incognita.” Instead, they bump into existing myths and narratives that “rationalize continued unequal treatment of those formerly colonized” (ibid.). One upshot of this is that their testimony will tend to be met with default skepticism and diminished credibility, in virtue of their already socially marginalized position. Hence, acknowledgment of different and in particular, oppressed “epistemic standpoints” (Harding, 1993), situated knowledge (and ignorance) and the legacy of genocidal epistemologies that continue to shape unequal epistemic relations is necessary for restorative epistemic justice in the aftermath of colonial and imperial atrocities, including genocides.