Political Apologies, their Content, and Protagonists: Experimental Evidence from Victims and Perpetrators Nations

Roman David is a professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. After his studies in politics at Palacky and Masaryk universities, he worked at Masaryk University, Wits University, The City University of Hong Kong, Yale, and Newcastle University and held visting positions at Oxford, Baptist University, and Harvard. At Lingnan, he served as the Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences (Research) (2015–2017) and the Head of the Department of Sociology (2017– 2020). He conducts interdisciplinary research, spanning political sociology, political psychology, and law & society, focusing on transitional justice and democratization. His book Lustration and Transitional Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) conceptualizes exclusive, inclusive and reconciliatory personnel systems, for which it received the Concept Analysis Award by the IPSA in 2012. His book Communists and Their Victims (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) uses surveys, survey experiments and qualitative methods to examine the impact of justice on victims, perpetrators and society and proposes the transformative theory of justice. His co-authored book (with Ian Holliday) Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar (Oxford University Press, 2019) proposes the concept of limited liberalism to explain various puzzles of political culture in democratizing countries. His articles appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Political Psychology, Law & Social Inquiry, and other indexed journals.

The presentation will be conducted in English.

The research was supported by RGC Hong Kong (GRF grant 13643616). The lecture was prepared in cooperation with Mr. Tam Pui Chuen, member of the research team.