The Politics of Victimhood in Post-conflict Societies by Vincent Druliolle & Roddy Brett

Author:Vincent Druliolle & Roddy Brett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Compensation as a Post-war Policy of Recognition and Assistance

Compensation has been also promoted internationally as a tool to stabilize post-war societies. This belief has resulted in its inclusion among reparation principles proposed by the United Nations (UN) in 2005.5 The definition contained in this document contrasts compensation against other reparative tools. It defines conpensation as monetary payments for all gross human rights violations such as torture, killings, abductions, and rape, which cannot be undone (i.e., when it is impossible to return to the situation ex ante). The other important tools are ‘restitution ,’ especially as the return of property or jobs and ‘rehabilitation’ as services for survivors such as medical care, psychological support, and re-education. In reality, compensation policies commonly include both payments and services. This is why I merge the UN definition of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘compensation,’ so that compensation here comprises not only state-provided material and monetary but also in-kind benefits. I thus define compensation as a set of state-provided material and in-kind benefits for victimized groups and individuals.

Compensation has indeed been increasingly recognized as a tool of reparative transitional justice (de Greiff 2006; Wemmers 2014). Advocates of this stream see material reparations as mechanisms that bring direct benefits to those who suffered rather than focusing on perpetrators as in the case of trials (see especially van Boven 2010). For example, Pablo de Greiff (2006) argues that material and symbolic reparations help victims to regain their livelihoods, provide them with acknowledgment of their suffering, signal the society’s acceptance of responsibility, and pave the way for a stable post-war society. Although material redress was previously a common tool of ‘victor’s justice,’ that is, when the victor imposed reparation payments, given the contemporary prevalence of civil wars, compensation has been increasingly shifting to the domestic political arena and ideas of victimhood.

Nonetheless, within domestic post-war politics compensation can be seen as a challenge for post-war budgets and understandings of who is a rightful victim and who is not. Compensation also presents domestic authorities with qualitatively different political stakes than other justice tools. For example, lustration and trials can be perceived as threatening the post-war power balances by removing some individuals from office and the public sphere. Truth commissions may divide the public opinion over past narratives and uncover inconvenient facts (Wilson 2001; Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2010). However, compensation is neither removing politicians from power nor taking out skeletons out of the closet (see Nalepa 2010). The battleground over compensation is most commonly in the realm of symbolic politics, war narratives, and financial concerns (Wolfe 2013). Therefore, when security is precarious and finances limited, compensation is rarely a critical policy for peace- and state-building, but rather features as a ‘posttransitional measure’ of justice , which comes at later stages of post-war recovery (Powers and Proctor 2015, p. 10).

There are two main reasons why compensation is a critical transitional justice policy to study in order to understand how victims in post-war states are treated. First, it is a tangible and measurable policy of state assistance, which allows for the assessment of the varied state approaches to victimhood.

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