It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.

人们通常认为我们目前生活在一个“道歉时代”，各国越来越多地寻求通过道歉来纠正侵犯人权的行为。尽管已经写了很多关于为什么会发生这种情况的文章，但从未通过对所提供的道歉的大规模审查来检查这种现象本身。为了填补这一空白，我们创建了一个数据库，其中包含为世界各地侵犯人权行为提供的政治道歉。我们找到了 74 个国家提供的 329 条政治道歉，并对这些道歉进行了跨国映射和比较。我们的数据显示，自冷战结束以来，道歉的次数越来越多，而且这种趋势在过去 20 年中加速了。它们已在全球范围内提供，他们似乎已经被巩固的自由民主国家和特别是向自由民主国家过渡的国家所接受。大多数道歉是针对与（内）战争有关或发生在（内）战争背景下的侵犯人权行为，但似乎对各国在道歉中实际提到的具体侵犯人权行为有一定的选择性。平均而言，政治道歉需要一代人以上的时间。