The Post-Conflict Environment: Investigation and Critique by Monk Daniel Bertrand & Mundy Jacob

Author:Monk, Daniel Bertrand & Mundy, Jacob
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE FUNCTIONS OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Truth commissions are ostensibly about victims. It has even been suggested that truth commissions restore the voice of the victim that has been robbed from them by repression and violence.74 Dumisa Ntsebeza, a South African lawyer who worked as an investigator with the TRC, recalls how one of the testifiers later told the press that “she finally felt relieved. The TRC environment had been friendly. For the first time, she felt dignified and honored […] The TRC seemed to believe her, which was a new experience.”75 Others, however, have noted that truth commissions are often more exclusive than inclusive in their treatment of victims. Remarking on the South African TRC's narrative selectivity and partiality, Castillejo-Cuéllar concluded, “The TRC was simultaneously a technology that rendered visible certain forms of violence while obliterating others.”76 Here he is underscoring the TRC's focus on famous acts—for example, Biko's assassination, the Winnie Mandela football murder-conspiracy, St James Church massacre, the Gugulethu Seven, and Cradock Four—to the detriment of the generalized and structural violence of apartheid. Marlin-Curiel reminds us what is obfuscated: “With ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ cast in the leading roles, everyone else became the audience. ‘Everyone else’ included bystanders of apartheid who had benefited from an unjust system.”77 While the victim might seem central in theory, Page 124 → in practice truth commissions, national reconciliation, and transitional justice more broadly de-center the victim in order to construct a post-conflict environment. This is not so different from Foucault's observation that the public execution of criminals had less to do with justice or the condemned and more to do with the evolving power of the sovereign state.78 Truth commissions are not simply about the truth or victims; they are about the production of post-conflict spaces, times, and subjectivities. They work by working on the audience.

In so doing, these performances of truth and victimhood help constitute the space-time of the post-conflict environment.79 The relationship between the spatial practices of truth commissions and the production of the post-conflict environment is acutely manifested along the temporal dimension. Truth commissions specifically and transitional justice more generally are, first and foremost, markers in time that delineate different periods. While the habits of war and authoritarianism might die hard,80 the spaces of hope called peace and democracy can be partially constructed by erecting clear markers in time. Just as peace treaties and elections serve to bound space and time into discrete pockets, transitional justice mechanisms likewise play a role in the constitution of the post-conflict environment by inhabiting the non-space of the imaginary plane separating past (conflict, authoritarianism) and future (peace, justice). Transitional justice re-encodes space and time as peaceful by presenting itself as an institutional bulwark against the past. A tactic in transitional justice's production of post-conflict environments is its spatial and temporal transience. The limited existence and spatial impermanence of the transitional justice mechanism is dictated by its role as an institutional bridge between the alleged gap separating conflict and authoritarianism, on the one hand, and peace and democracy, on the other.

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