scholarly journals Restorative Justice in Transitional Sierra Leone

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia Apori Nkansah
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The People ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation

Intense debate surrounds truth commissions as to their mission, perceived roles and outcomes. This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of truth commissions in post-conflict settings. It examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for Sierra Leone, the first truth commission to be engaged concurrently with a retributive mechanism, the Special Court for Sierra Leone for transitional justice. The study finds that the TRC provided an opening for conversation in Sierra Leonean communities to search for the meanings of truth about the conflict. In this way the communities simultaneously created an understanding of the situation and set reconciliation directions and commitment from the process of creative conversation.  This notwithstanding, the TRC did not have the needed public cooperation because the people were not sure the war was over and feared that their assailants could harm them if they disclosed the truth to the TRC. The presence of the Special Court also created tensions and fears rendering the transitional environment unfriendly to the reconciliation and truth telling endeavors of the TRC. The study has implications for future truth commissions in that the timing for post-conflict reconciliation endeavors should take into consideration the state of the peace equilibrium of the societies involved. It should also be packaged for harmonious existence in a given transitional contexts, particularly where it will coexist with a retributive mechanism.

scholarly journals A cat-and-Maus game: the politics of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict comics

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (04) ◽  
pp. 588-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Redwood ◽  
Alister Wedderburn
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The People ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
Commission Report ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractSeveral scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.

Reparative transnationalism: The friction and fiction of remembering in Sierra Leone

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-354
Author(s):  
Rosanne Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Local Engagement

Analysis of the “productive frictions” that emerge when cosmopolitan paradigms are implemented in local contexts may nuance accounts of how and when memory travels, and when and why it stalls, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the cross-border travels of memory. I explore the frictions of truth-telling in Sierra Leone as articulated in ethnographic analyses of local engagement with the normative paradigm of public remembering and truth-telling promoted by the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and mediated in Aminatta Forna’s post-conflict novel, The Memory of Love. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission disappointed victims’ expectations for meaningful transnational relationships, the novel performs and models what I call reparative transnationalism. Through the intimate but public form of literature it imagines entangled transnational futures that work toward the promise of transnational belonging promoted in much writing on transnational memory.

Using African Truth and Reconciliation Commission documentation for truth telling and reconciliation

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Proscovia Svärd
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commissions ◽  
Reconciliation Process

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.

Transitional Justice, Truth and Reconciliation: An Under-Explored Relationship

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine Natalya Clark
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commissions ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation

AbstractMuch of the literature on transitional justice suffers from a critical impact gap, which scholars are only now beginning to address. One particular manifestation of this aforementioned gap, and one which forms the particular focus of this article, is the frequently-cited yet empirically under-researched claim that "truth" fosters post-conflict reconciliation. Theoretically and empirically critiquing this argument, this article both questions the comprehensiveness of truth established through criminal trials and truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) and underscores the often overlooked problem of denial, thus raising fundamental questions about the reputed healing properties of truth in such contexts. Advocating the case for evidence-based transitional justice, it reflects upon empirical research on South Africa's TRC and the author's own work on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Commissioning Truth and Reconciliation

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-131
Author(s):  
Claire Whitlinger
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Project Planning ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Truth Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Social Scientific

This chapter explores the relationship between the 2004 commemoration in Philadelphia, Mississippi and the Mississippi Truth Project, a state-wide project initially modelled after South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After reviewing the history of transitional justice efforts in the United States and the social scientific literature on how civil society-based truth commissions emerge, the chapter demonstrates how the 2004 commemoration and subsequent trial of Edgar Ray Killen precipitated the formation of a state-wide truth commission when previous efforts had failed. In short, this research finds that the commemoration mobilized mnemonic activists; concentrated local, state, and global resources; broadened political opportunity; and shifted the political culture of the state. Despite these developments—and years of project planning—the Mississippi Truth Project changed course in 2009, abandoning a South African-style truth commission in favour of grassroots memory projects and oral history collection. The chapter thus sheds lights on the possibilities and perils of pursuing non-state truth commissions.

The pressures of getting it right: Expertise and victims’ voices in the work of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-319
Author(s):  
Anne Menzel
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Victim Participation ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract∞ This article contributes to scholarship on power, agency and ownership in professional transitional justice. It explores and details the relationship between ‘professional’ agency arising from recognized expertise and ‘unprofessional’ voices relaying lived experiences, concerns and needs. I approach this relationship via a microperspective on the work of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2002-2004), specifically its work on women and sexual violence, which the commission was mandated to pay special attention to. Based on interviews and rich archival materials, I show how this work was driven by the notion that there was a right way of dealing with women and sexual violence. To avoid mistakes, commissioners and staff members demanded and relied on recognized expertise. This led to a marginalization of victims’ voices. I argue that, to some degree at least, such marginalization belongs to professional transitional justice and will persist despite improved victim participation.

Back to the Future? Confronting the Role(s) of Natural Resources in Armed Conflict Through the Lenses of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 373-400
Author(s):  
Eliana Cusato
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commissions ◽  
The Future ◽  
Conflict Strategies

Abstract Natural resources are critical factors in the transition from conflict to peace. Whether they contributed to, financed or fuelled armed conflict, failure to integrate natural resources into post-conflict strategies may endanger the chances of a long-lasting and sustainable peace. This article explores how Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (trcs), as transitional justice institutions, can contribute to addressing the multifaceted role of natural resources in armed conflict. Drawing insights from the practice of the Sierra Leonean and Liberian trcs in this area, the article identifies several ways in which truth-seeking bodies may reinforce post-conflict accountability and avoid the future reoccurrence of abuses and conflict by actively engaging with the natural resource-conflict link. As it is often the case with other transitional justice initiatives, trcs’ engagement with the role of natural resources in armed conflict brings along opportunities and challenges, which are contextual and influenced by domestic and international factors.

ICERD in the post-conflict landscape: towards a transitional justice role

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydia A. Nkansah
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Reconciliation Process

The chapter highlights the potential of ICERD to contribute to the process of transitional justice in post-conflict societies. In particular it identifies truth commissions as having largely ignored the potential for ICERD as a transitional tool, and calls on CERD, States Parties and other actors to better understand and carve out a role for ICERD in the truth and reconciliation process.

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