Dealing with the legacy of the past has become a popular demand in postconflict and posttransition countries. However, the pursuit of truth can be a divisive issue that threatens rather than promotes understanding, particularly in divided societies. Would a minimalist truth satisfy the victim-centered right to know, without disturbing delicate balances in society? This article theorizes how different designs of truth commissions impact social outcomes, contrasting two ideal types: thin truth, which ...
Dealing with the legacy of the past has become a popular demand in postconflict and posttransition countries. However, the pursuit of truth can be a divisive issue that threatens rather than promotes understanding, particularly in divided societies. Would a minimalist truth satisfy the victim-centered right to know, without disturbing delicate balances in society? This article theorizes how different designs of truth commissions impact social outcomes, contrasting two ideal types: thin truth, which gives solely individual factual knowledge, and thick truth, which produces a public report and searches for a pattern of events. We look at the case of Spain, which long used a “policy of forgetting” to deal with the crimes of the Civil War and Franco dictatorship and where the politics of memory has become a partisan issue, and embed experimental treatments into a representative survey conducted in 2021. Our findings show that restricting truth brings no advantages, as the different designs have no significant impact on the highly polarized reactions. The research has implications for policy by showing how different truth commission formats (fail to) impact on reconciliation.
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