Settler Colonialism and the South African TRC: Ambivalent Denial and Democratisation Without Decolonisation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the quarter-century since it began its work, the South African TRC has been endlessly debated. At the same time, a field of study emerged centred on settler colonialism, and settler colonial analyses have become established in transitional justice. South Africa’s TRC, however, has escaped examination through the lens of settler colonialism. Typically, settler colonialism in South Africa is treated as an historical phase; however, recent scholarship emphasises South Africa’s colonial present. Following these insights, this article: (1) establishes the relevance of a settler colonial lens for interpreting the South African TRC by demonstrating the settler colonialism of apartheid; (2) provides an empirical examination of the TRC’s Report. The Report acknowledges settler colonialism while advancing a series of denials, producing ‘ambivalent denial’; (3) explores the implications of ambivalent denial. Specifically, ambivalent denial contributes to democratisation without decolonisation by enabling settler denial and failing to address settler colonial structures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".