ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out a sketch of the principal questions and lines of argument of this study. Central is the thought that communities, familial or political, endure as something shared across time: moral principles, norms of justice, affectional ties, and so on. The persistence of this shared world gives a certain presence to the past, making its actions ours, its greatness and great wrongs ours too. That persistence also keeps past victims of historical injustice present as claimants on justice. The dead (and the future) members of our community are not impossibly remote from us, the living, but are rather absent members of an intergenerational archipelago. The dead and the unborn are at once absent and present.
The continuity of the victims as sharing with us in a community of justice across time brings with it a duty of recognition of that still present status, and of the relationship of solidarity among citizens that it invokes. Not to acknowledge them, or to exclude them from the collective civic memory of the political community, is to overturn their relationship in justice to us. Seeing the absent victims of injustice in this way suggests that their enduring presence under justice is central, and not merely derivative from the relationship of their fate to present harms or to the status of the living inheritors/victims of those wrongs.
