Nobles Melissa. The Politics of Official Apologies

Cambridge University Press, 2008. — 216 p.Intense interest in past injustice lies at the center of contemporary world politics. This book examines the political uses of official apologies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. It explores why minority groups demand such apologies and why governments do or do not offer them. Nobles argues that apologies can help to alter the terms and meanings of national membership. Minority groups demand apologies in order to focus attention on historical injustices, the rectification of which, they argue, should guide changes in present-day government policies. Similarly, state actors support apologies for ideological and moral reasons, driven by their support of group rights, responsiveness to group demands, and belief that acknowledgement is due. Apologies, as employed by political actors, play an important, if underappreciated, role in bringing certain views about history and moral obligation to bear in public life.Melissa Nobles (BA in History, Brown University; Ph.D. in Political Science, Yale University) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Nobles' teaching and research interests are in the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics and issues of retrospective justice. She is the author of Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (2000), which received the 2001 Outstanding Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, as well as honorable mention of the Ralph Bunche Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Nobles has been a Fellow at Boston University's Institute on Race and Social Division (2000-1) and Harvard University's Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study (2003-4).