|
The Weatherhead Center hosted an international conference entitled
“Settling Accounts? Truth, Justice, and Redress in Post-Conflict
Societies” on November 1-3, 2004. Also sponsored by the David
Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Department
of Anthropology at Harvard University, the conference convened an
interdisciplinary group of nineteen scholars engaged in research
on political violence, transitional justice, and the politics of
memory and processes of reconciliation in diverse regions of the
world.
The conference participants engaged in a number of debates that
are central to our understanding of transitional truth, justice,
reconciliation, and reparations. The conference was conceptualized
thematically rather than regionally, reflecting the globalized context
in which any debate regarding these themes must take place. All
of the panelists have conducted extensive research in diverse settings
of conflict and conflict transformation and drew upon their comparative
research to explore the role of truth commissions in transitional
processes, and to examine how individuals, communities, and states
work toward accountability and justice following lengthy periods
of political violence.
Theme 1: Justice in Transition
We live in an historic époque in which memory has increasingly
become the medium for political action and rights claims. One manifestation
of the role of memory in international affairs is the rise of truth
and truth-and-reconciliation commissions. Truth commissions are
now standard post-conflict structures and have emerged as the reigning
model for nation building after sustained periods of state violence.
As institutional expressions of the globalization of human rights,
they have taken on a transnational validity as one of the main mechanisms
for announcing a new democratic order. Conference participants analyzed
the genealogy of transitional justice, locating truth commission
within a broader set of transitional justice mechanisms such as
lustration, prosecutions, apologies, and reparations.
Our discussion enabled us to explore what truth commissions can
and cannot achieve. They can be effective in terms of historical
clarification and the establishment of certain truths that limit
societal ignorance and official denial of past human rights violations.
There was agreement that the commission process itself may be as
important as the final report in terms of changing political cultures
and generating a sense of citizenship among formerly marginalized
sectors of the population. Additionally, these commissions can be
an important component in determining the fate of the disappeared
and providing their surviving family members with some sense of
symbolic closure.
However, conference participants agreed that commissions do not
replace criminal proceedings or prosecutions, nor do they prevent
further conflict. There was also agreement that both restorative
and retributive forms of justice are optimal, particularly in terms
of ending impunity and providing victims with a sense that justice
has been served.
Theme 2: Reconciling What and With Whom?
While the literature on truth commissions is abundant, to date
there has been scant ethnographic or comparative research that allows
us to move beyond the transcendent moral philosophy of human rights,
truth, and justice to a rigorous examination of the history and
social life of these concepts as they are put into practice. Somehow
these commissions and the equation that drives them — more
memory = more truth = more justice = more reconciliation—
has become an article of “religious faith,” and the
literature to date on these commissions has been overwhelmingly
celebratory.
Our conference participants were interested in juxtaposing these
rituals of the state with the subaltern forms of punishment, pardon,
and reconciliation, which they have studied in diverse social contexts.
The discussion focused on the points of conjuncture and disjuncture
between national reconciliation and the micropolitics of reconciliation
practiced at the communal and intercommunal levels. We found that
retribution has a strong moral hold on people, and that an excessively
theological interpretation of “reconciliation” may obscure
the place of punishment in contributing to the possibility of coexistence
following political violence. There was agreement that states do
not have a monopoly on transitional justice and that local-level
processes of administering both retributive and restorative justice
are central in staying the hand of vengeance and facilitating the
rehabilitation of perpetrators.
Additionally, conference participants explored the role of religious
actors and practices in both the militarization and demilitarization
of daily life. Our comparative research indicated the context-dependent
role of religious belief; religious groups that at one juncture
may elaborate a theology of armed violence may subsequently develop
a theology of reconciliation. There is no simple equation between
the roles of religion and violence, nor between religion and peace
building. However, one striking comparative feature was the role
of religious conversion to various forms of evangelical Christianity
among perpetrators in diverse cultural contexts. This is a phenomenon
that warrants further comparative research.
Theme 3: Aftermaths
One of the least-studied aspects of transitional justice is what
happens after truth commissions publish their reports and close
their doors. Volumes have been written about the aftermath of political
violence, but virtually nothing has been published about the aftermath
of commissions and the impact of their recommendations. Thus our
conference included a final panel addressing this theme, laying
out an agenda for further research.
One theme we identified concerns memory, forgetting, and remembering
to forget. Although much emphasis has been placed upon memory as
a deterrent to further atrocity, less attention has been paid to
the centrality of forgetting in local-level postwar processes. Conference
participants were struck by the salience of ritual forgetting in
our diverse research settings and agreed that this is a key issue
to develop in our work.
Another key issue is redistributive justice following conflict.
While participants agreed that forms of retribution such as criminal
proceedings are important to pursue when possible, there needs to
be more emphasis on redistributive justice in post-war contexts.
When we move beyond the fuzzy dichotomy of victim and perpetrator
to include a third category — beneficiaries — then the
centrality of redistributive forms of justice indicates that settling
accounts is more than a mere figure of speech.
Finally, participants advocated following the debates and implementation
of reparations pro-grams. Reparations include both material and
symbolic forms of redress, and there has been no sustained study
of this topic.
Following the public conference, panelists participated in a one-day
authors’ workshop to discuss their papers and determine the
structure and content of the edited volume that will be the final
product of this conference. Final chapters will be circulated in
the summer, and we plan to submit the manuscript for publication
by the end of the calendar year.
| 
