Framing Trials for Past Abuses Through an “Educative Dialogue”: Recovering the Formative Role of Conflict in a Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Various thinkers of transitional democracy have attempted to justify trials for past state-sanctioned abuses by pointing to their ability to pedagogically showcase the principles and benefits of deliberation. 1 Such trials are thought to stage a public forum where post-conflict disagreements can be conciliated through an "educative dialogue" sustained by the consensual regulative principles inherent in court procedures.In this essay, I argue that an interpretative model that seeks to justify and understand such trials by emphasizing the effects of an "educative dialogue," that strives for social unanimity and mutual understanding, overlooks the formative pedagogical role that conflict plays in a democracy.I unravel this point by critically engaging with the conceptual shortcomings found in the work of Mark Osiel and Carlos Nino, two legal thinkers who respectively develop a deliberative pedagogical proposal from their reading of the 1985 Trial of the Military in Argentina.2 Given that their interpretation draws on certain philosophical assumptions regarding the way in which democracy and education are linked through deliberation, I begin with a gloss on how this link is generally conceived.I then examine how deliberation is envisioned by "transitional scholars" who concern themselves with the educative role that criminal trials play in a new democracy.Following my working through of Osiel and Nino's claims, I utilize "radical democracy" theory to offer another reading of the Trial of the Military, one that necessitates a more dynamic sense of the pedagogical and can account for the formative role of conflict and exclusions in reproducing and sustaining democratic subjectivity. DEMOCRATIC DELIBERATION AND EDUCATIONBoth democratic deliberation and education are thought to provide an index and entry to the other through their social and interactive dimension.They are mutually presented as a process of communication and joint participation through which the discovery and reconstruction of a common task is undertaken.Varied thinkers such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, Benjamin Levin, and Stephen Macedo believe that at the core of both deliberation and education we find an emphasis upon a shared social experience, one that supposes that people can change and grow in understanding through the active exchange of ideas.3 The dynamic process of participants shaping and transforming their position on an issue through deliberation and collective learning sharply contrasts with the prevalent "aggregative model" of defining democracy.In this model, individual interests are aggregated through the mechanisms of strategizing, coalition building, and voting, consequently rendering democracy -as C.B. Macpherson critically describes -into merely a means of registering "the desires of people as they are, not to contribute to what they might be or might wish to be." 4 Stripped of its dialogical dimension, democracy is thought to simply become a market mechanism: 10.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.038 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".