Full Description
This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other hand, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialisation.
The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justice - or indeed, any societal engagement with the past - more transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses - South Africa and Sri Lanka - alongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d'Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice.
Contents
Introduction
1 Spotlights and shadows: Revisiting the scope of transitional justice
Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer De Mel
Part I: Commemoration as Celebration
2 Celebrating the end of apartheid
Tim Murithi
3 Commemorating genocide in Rwanda
Erin Jessee
4 Victory celebration and the unmaking of diversity in post-war Sri Lanka
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu
Part II: Forgotten Issues
5 Social justice and the persistence of racialized segregation
Kevin Durrheim and Amy Jo Murray
6 Intergenerational justice
Esther Surenthiraraj
7 Non-citizens' rights: Xenophobia, nationalism and struggle post transition
Philippa Kerr and John Dixon
Part III: Forgotten Actors
8 Diaspora communities in transitional justice: A hidden presence
Stephan Parmentier, Mina Rauschenbach and Laura Hein
9 Rural women and their access to the law: Gendering the promise of postwar justice
Neloufer De Mel and Danushka Medawatte
10 Former combatants: Assessing their reintegration ten years after the end of war
Ramila Usoof-Thowfeek and Viyanga Gunasekera
Part IV: Forgotten Resources
11 Constructive resistance and the importance of not knowing in transitional justice
Briony Jones
12 Inclusive narratives of suffering
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Michelle Sinayobye Twali and Sumedha Jayakody
13 How crowds transfom identities
Yasemin Gülsüm Acar and Stephen Reicher
14 Collective resilience
Sandra Penic, John Drury and Zacharia Bady
Conclusion
15 On the futures of reckoning with the past
Neloufer De Mel and Guy Elcheroth
