Reconceiving Civil Society and Transitional Justice: Lessons From Asia and the Pacific by Joanne Wallis & Lia Kent

Author:Joanne Wallis & Lia Kent [Wallis, Joanne & Kent, Lia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367469740
Google: 7p7ozAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 50163070
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-01-15T13:11:34+00:00

Transitional justice, memorialisation and civil society

In a recent article in Human Rights Quarterly, Lea David traces how memorialisation has gradually shifted from the margins to the centre of the transitional justice field. Initially appearing in the UN in the 1990s as a ‘side-remark to the various forms of reparation for the victims of past abuses’,39 memorialisation came to be associated, in the late 1990s, with victims’ ‘right to know’ (the truth about the past) and a state’s concomitant ‘Duty to Remember.’ In a 1997 report by Louis Joinet, the former Special Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, states are described as having a ‘Duty to Remember’ in order to guard against ‘the development of revisionist and negationist arguments’.40 In 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed, produced a special report on memorialisation processes that followed in the wake of several NGO reports on the topic.41 As David suggests, these reports were meant to provide ‘practical guidance’ to societies emerging from state repression or violent conflict on memorialisation policies.42

The embrace of memorialisation by policy makers and practitioners has coincided with an emerging interest in ‘locally resonant’ and ‘holistic’ transitional justice responses.43 While criminal prosecutions remain the core transitional justice mechanism, there are increasing attempts to combine prosecutions with other mechanisms such as truth commissions, reparations programs, missing persons’ commissions, local justice practices, history curriculum reform, and memorialisation, on the basis that this will allow transitional justice to become more responsive to particular local contexts. These shifts, while welcomed by some, have been greeted cautiously by others. Shaw and Waldorf argue for example that despite the putative interest in the ‘local’ there has been little sign that the field of transitional justice has been radically reshaped; it remains state-centric and oriented around a narrow vision of justice as criminal prosecutions.44 Others suggest that transitional justice has become consolidated as a set of standardised practices, ideas and assumptions that now travels the globe as a kind of mobile transitional justice template.45 Seen from this perspective, the rise of memorialisation within transitional justice discourse could be seen as heralding its mainstreaming within this template. Alongside trials and truth commissions, it has become another mechanism through which actors such as the UN, Western states and donors seek to bring pressure to bear on post-conflict states to meet their responsibilities to address the violent past.

Regardless of how we might characterise its effects, what is clear is that memorialisation is now linked to the pursuit of several transitional justice goals. The social expression of memory through commemorations, monuments and memorials is thought to contribute to the restoration of victims’ dignity, by giving them or their family members a clear sign that their story is not forgotten but rather integrated into, and made visible as part of, a ‘national’ memory.46 Memorialisation is also said to contribute to ‘victims’ right to truth’; it is viewed as a ‘tool to call attention to past wrongdoing and pierce the silence engendered by repressive political authorities and institutions’.

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