Group items tagged

"This paper focuses on competing appropriations of international women's rights standards in the framework of the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC) and its follow-up projects. I argue that, even if the ERC's gender approach has been introduced as part of international models of transitional justice, it is geared toward earlier women's rights and human rights activism, as well as to established state practices of at least selectively supporting women's rights. Like political reform in general, the ERC and its gender approach are an outcome of internal, long-time dynamics of change. Within the ERC's politics of gender, there exists a tendency to depoliticize women's rights activism in the process of reconciliation by making women a target for welfare measures and "human development." Yet, at the same time, the officially recognized gender approach also allows for strategies to broaden the basis for women's rights activism by making women's experiences of violence during the "Years of Lead" (the period of fierce repression under the rule of Hassan II), an issue of concern in the framework of its new politics of memory. The implementation of the ERC's gender approach can be interpreted as an example of how women's rights activism may be able to push its agenda while adjusting to both transnational discourses and national politics."

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, 'there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future'. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue - another controversial aspect of reconciliation - remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.

In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians for past injustices. The apology was presented as a turning point in the history of the nation. According to Rudd, 'there comes a time in the history of a nation when peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future'. The apology marked a new step in the reconciliation process in Australia, but as this article argues, the treaty issue - another controversial aspect of reconciliation - remains a major challenge to the Australian nation.

"The burgeoning literature on transitional justice, truth commissions, reconciliation and official apologies tends to ignore the conditions of settler states in which 'reconciliation' needs to take account of indigenous minorities. The settler colonialism literature is worth including in the general discussion because it is exceptionally reflective about political theory (the constitutional recognition of indigenous rights) and ethnogenesis (the origin and viability of both settler and indigenous identities), challenging mainstream liberalism, in particular, to account for difference beyond platitudes about multiculturalism. This article highlights the postcolonial critiques of the Australian governments' apology to the indigenous peoples of the country. The authors of these critiques seek to protect indigenous alterity from the Australian state, which they regard as irredeemably colonialist, especially in its liberal and progressive mode. The article suggests that Indigenous political agency transcends the resistance/co-option dichotomy presented in much of the apology's commentary."

"In this article, I argue that the praise of legal and political analysts who perceive Rwanda's gacaca courts as a model of locally grounded and culturally relevant transitional justice is unfounded without consideration of the broader power dynamics in which justice is delivered. Drawing on life history interviews with 37 Rwandan peasants resident in the south-west of the country, I argue that the claims of the Rwandan government that its gacaca courts are promoting peace and reconciliation must also assess the impact of local justice mechanisms on those subject to its demands, namely ordinary people. In the case of Rwanda's gacaca courts, local-level analysis illuminates a darker and largely unexamined aspect of transitional justice - the playing out of local power dynamics and the social and political inequalities masked by the pursuit of justice and reconciliation. My study cautions against a wholesale endorsement of the gacaca courts as an effective and legitimate form of transitional justice. Instead, it is a mechanism of state power than works to reinforce the political power of the ruling RPF and to ply international audiences with the idea that Rwanda is 'a nation rehabilitated' from 'the scourge of genocide'."

""Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent. First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991-1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry. By the early 2000s there was a growing number of lawsuits, most notably the Cloud and Baxter class actions. In 1998, following RCAP, the federal government issued a "statement of regret" for physical and sexual violations and established the Aboriginal Healing

"Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2010 at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association; the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association; the joint meeting of the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto and the Centre for Research in Ethics, the University of Montreal; and the international conference "Democracy Today," organized at the University of Minho. I would like to thank John Francis Burke, Daniel Weinstock, Melissa Williams, and Joe Heath for their insightful suggestions. Serdar Tekin, Leah Soroko, Alex Livingston, Amit Ron, Michael Cunningham, and Inder Marwah charitably commented on the article at various points in time. Alessandro Ferrara led me to some crucial insights for which I am particularly grateful. I would also like to warmly thank Mathias Thaler, who read several versions of the article and who provided constructive criticism and encouragement. Last but not least, the recommendations by Robert Goodin and the three anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Political Philosophy helped improve the manuscript, and for this I thank them. Research for this article benefitted from the financial support of the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal; and the European Social Fund. The usual disclaimers apply."

"In recent years, there have been numerous calls for the field of trauma studies to expand beyond its European and North American origins. It is especially important, as the insights of trauma theory are extended to a wider range of geopolitical sites and conflicts and into resistant fields such as law, that critics attend to the ways in which the discourse of trauma travels, how it is used or resisted in specific national or local contexts, and with what cultural and political effects. To explore these issues, I offer a case study of Australian responses to the Stolen Generations in human rights, law, and literature-fields in which trauma theory has significant purchase. The term "Stolen Generations" refers to children of mixed descent who were removed from their Indigenous mothers and communities with the aim of assimilating them into white Australian culture. Children were sent to institutions run by churches or government missions, where they received limited education and were trained as domestics or station hands. Removal typically curtailed the children's relations with Indigenous family and culture, since they were prevented from speaking their language and participating in cultural traditions. Many children faced difficulties integrating into white Australian society; they and their mothers often experienced lifelong feelings of loss."

While there have been recent advances in theories of transitional justice, there remains a lack of theory about how truth commissions and human rights trials interact with each other to facilitate or constrain efforts at transitional justice. This is an important deficiency to remedy because numerous countries long ago leapt ahead of transitional justice theory by sequencing trials and truth commissions, while the International Criminal Court (ICC) will have to manage relationships with truth commissions as its work accelerates. The aim of this article is to use current literatures on transitional justice and political transitions to build a theory of how trials and truth commissions interact with each other. This will be done in three steps. First, the article will elaborate the goals and critiques of trials and truth commissions in order to provide a foundation for how they might interact. Second, the article will consider these institutions in sequence to understand how they interact when trials operate first, truth commissions first, or when they operate simultaneously. Third, the article will consider these sequences in context to understand how legacies of violence and its termination may affect their relationship. This effort is meant to clarify the theoretical issues at stake in the sequencing of these two important institutions, stimulate debate, and inform institutional design.

This empirical article is based on a study of stigmatization of girls formerly associated with armed forces and groups (AFG) in the eastern Congo, and presents a detailed description of how these girls are perceived when returning home. The study reveals that the society views with suspicion those who are or have been part of an armed force or group. People believe that girls having been with an armed group will attract male soldiers to their villages, they are perceived as violent, thieves, promiscuous, and carriers of transmittable diseases, and they are thought to have a bad influence on the behaviour of their peers. These fears and prejudices are translated into stigmatizing behaviour such as name-calling, rejection, social exclusion, and discriminating treatment. Women are identified as those most actively involved in the stigmatization. The stigmatization the girls formerly associated with AFG experience hampers their reintegration process, and can be likened to a second traumatisation. In its discussion the article identifies some important factors impacting on the degree of stigmatization, and distinguishes between two categories: (1) pre-return factors; and (2) post-return factors that may reinforce or reduce the stigmatization. The evidence in this study supports the view that stigmatization is prevalent and poses a major challenge to the reintegration process of girls formerly associated with AFG. The article concludes that the more empowered and financially independent these girls become the less problems and stigmatization they will face

For 30 years the dominant approach to Aboriginal affairs in Australia has been to support cultural recovery and accommodate cultural difference in the expectation that this will enhance Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders' equality as citizens.This approach has been driven by a dialectic of progressivist desire to ameliorate the effects of earlier colonialist policy and Aboriginalist discourse that assumes isolable cultures, unitary identities and uni-directional causes of marginalisation. That discursive formation, once counter to dominant colonialist discourse, has now itself become normative, internally repressive, counter-productive and resistant to change. This is the national misadventure with Aboriginalism. This paper argues that this unexpected development is a product of the national governing attempt to gain control through public policy that is inadequate to Aborigines' contemporary lived reality of interculturality, post-ethnicity and political agency. It uses an indicative case study and an analysis of the national misadventure to propose a deliberative intercultural approach to public policy in respect of Aborigines.

Since their emergence as a novel form of justice, truth commissions have magnetically drawn writers into their orbit. This essay explores one literary response that seems both logical and provocative: the thriller's shadowy world of conspiracy theories, cover-ups, and coups. As a subgenre associated with popular culture, the thriller has rarely been considered a serious player in discussions of literature in the aftermath of atrocity. However, as a space in which the mystifications of conspiracy meet the imperatives of transitional justice, the newly emergent subgenre of the truth commission thriller challenges pervasive assumptions about the necessary gravitas of literature in the aftermath of violence. Looking closely at this genre allows us to ask how its forms may help the novel envision productive alternatives to the narrative of silence so intimately linked to the writing of catastrophe. These representations emerge within the increasing globalization of transitional justice, a context that seeks intensifying degrees of communicability as it turns local legacies of violence into ones with international implications. Gillian Slovo's account of a South African amnesty hearing, Red Dust (2000), imagines itself as a competitor for the production of truth; Canadian novelist Alan Cumyn's Burridge Unbound (2000) serves as an analogue prone to similar forces of fragmentation; and David Park's vision of a fictional commission in Northern Ireland, The Truth Commissioner (2008), decenters the truth commission into a private space of multiple meanings. These novels challenge the ideal of national disclosure before the law but nonetheless hold out the hope of communicability in a global sphere.

This essay considers the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs in the context of psychoanalytic trauma theory involving repetition, memory, temporality and narrative formation. The American response to the photographs, especially from military investigators, revealed their urgent investigative need to 'plot' and temporalise the event on an axis of idiosyncratic mistakes in judgement. The response among many Iraqis, however, was to encode the event as a repetition, a latent cultural memory in a longe dure of traumatic historical encounters between the Middle East and the 'West'. Psychoanalysis as a critical method is useful in examining the relation between repetition and memory and the compulsion to 'bind' the energy of individual and historical trauma by narrating, sequencing and organising. The challenge presented to the US Abu Ghraib inquiry team - and also to this study - is a uniquely digital one: an over-abundance of photographs in the form of digital media encoded with metadata. The military investigation's response was to time-stamp images to frame the plot sequence, followed by the clicking of the 'Save As …' button: a mnemonic act of re-naming, categorising, hyperlinking and culturally archiving the digital images in accordance with their role in the plot.

somewhat unexamined pedestal in the social sciences and the humanities. Within such narratives, transitional justice, as both a phenomenon and a conceptual tool, is regarded as inevitable and commonplace for anyone wishing to address the issue of past human rights violations. The article suggests that while the concept of transition, strictly speaking, is merely descriptive of processes of change and thereby assumedly a neutral signifier, it has been positively oversignified by various fields of study. The article also examines literary narratives that have political transitions as their foci, proposing that a literary theory approach to transitional narratives should not be dictated only by the privileged themes, forms and narrative structures of the normative narratives of transitional justice (such as truth commission reports), but be open to fictional narratives as having something valuable to contribute within the context of political transitions.

The present world population is 7.1 billions, which is growing at the rate of 97 millions people per year will touch 8.5 billion by the year 2025. About 95 per cent of the population growth will be in the developing countries.

The life narratives of cô Nhựt, a former communist guerilla fighter and political prisoner during the American War in Vietnam, illuminate a dynamic politics of iteration and innovation at play within each act of remembering. Cô Nhựt lives in Ho Chi Minh City and is part of a women veteran's civic association called the Former Women Political Prisoner Performance Group. She is also a national and international advocate against the use of chemical warfare and a supporter of people living with Agent Orange-related disabilities in Vietnam. Historical and contemporary political contexts in Vietnam - such as decades of colonial rule, brutal wars and communist revolution and governance - dramatically affect the shape of official history and collective memory, including cô Nhựt's narratives.

This article probes a set of problems in the theory and practice of the postcolonial archive that has emerged as the author and her Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues have struggled to create a new media archive in rural northwest Australia. This archive does not as yet exist. If it existed as it is currently conceived, it would organize mixed (augmented) reality media on the basis of social media and operate it on smart phones. The smart phones would contain a small segment of the archive, which would be geotagged so that it could not run unless the phone was proximate to the site to which the information referred. This article argues that if "archive" is the name we give to the power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life, the postcolonial new media archive cannot be merely a collection of digital artifacts reflecting a different, subjugated history. Instead, the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within-or distinct from-this form of power.

This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with partial or full 'dual occupation' of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, I present a rationale for constructing inquiry-based Holocaust education experiences. As Latvia, Romania and other countries have entered the European Union, the need for tolerant and open-minded citizens who have the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the common good has become more critical. Inquiry-oriented teaching of the Holocaust brings about essential democratic skills and dispositions, while simultaneously positioning students to investigate the complicated, nuanced and contested contours of the Holocaust, competing forms of propaganda and often spurious historiographical traditions. This kind of teaching is also responsive to the challenges these and other societies face when confronting other historical and contemporary controversial topics.