Humanity Journal

Sharika Thiranagama and Zerrin Özlem Biner introduce the dossier.

In every scene of political reconciliation there is a complicated set of bad relationships that must be transformed before longterm stability is possible. Successful recovery requires more than the rule of law in stable political institutions. Most theories of transitional justice assume liberalism’s autonomous subject as a background and a goal. However, autonomy cannot instruct us in how to restore it where it has been lost or never gained in the first place. Understanding the subject as vulnerable and responsive to others prior to having the autonomy to choose otherwise better captures both how recovery is possible and why it is always fragile, needing to be revisited over time as the past resurfaces in unexpected ways. Using both philosophy and empirical evidence to demonstrate how worlds are destroyed by mass violence, this essay argues for a more nuanced understanding of the selves who seek recovery, not least because it is they who will accept or reject a new institution of the rule of law.

Transitional justice initiatives that sought to remedy the atrocities committed during the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone articulated particular notions of rights-bearing individuals and collectivities. This article critically examines assumptions about rural life and communities of belonging emerging from such initiatives and about the agency of women and children in particular. The signature indictments at the Special Court for Sierra Leone—for child soldier conscription and forced marriage—contributed to their establishment as archetypal figures in the discourse of humanitarian justice in ways that belied actual trial testimony. In particular, court arguments surrounding the forced marriage question highlighted the sometimes contradictory relationship between human rights and humanitarian law.

This article analyses the processes and outcomes associated with legal reforms designed to provide restorative justice in the context of contemporary Turkey. Focusing on the practices and discourses associated with the Compensation Law, it explores both state practices and the survival mechanisms of Kurdish citizens living in the conflict zone. The article shows that the Compensation Law did not transform the relationship between the state and Kurdish citizens. Rather, it reproduced the symbolic and material relationships that historically and politically had been based on bribery, disavowal, abuse, and subversion.

Civil war in Sri Lanka ended in 2009 with the military defeat of the separatist LTTE. International and local pressure around war crime allegations and the lack of political reform subsequently forced the state to initiate the 2010 Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission. This essay first takes the LLRC and the minority response to it to argue that this reconciliation process in Sri Lanka is very little about ethnic reconciliation between communities and instead is a “state performance” in the midst of ongoing violence. Secondly, the essay takes into account everyday relationships between displaced Sri Lankan Tamils returning “home.” The essay argues that long-term reconciliation between former neighbors rests upon the possibility of larger political transformation rather than face-to-face coexistence alone.

This essay offers a set of reflections on the meaning of reconciliation in the context of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In particular, this essay asks about the relation between ideas of reconciliation and the originating wound toward which reconciliation work is directed. It is here argued that, in the case of the United States, the wound of slavery calls for “conciliation,” not “reconciliation.” If we conceive political community to be a kind of friendship, then the originating wound of the United States (and perhaps the Americas as a whole) calls for a first friendship, not the repair or remaking of relations suggested by the term “reconciliation.”

This article examines the politics of Nakba commemoration in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and the instrumentalization of memories of the 1948 expulsion by NGOs and factions. It considers the role eyewitness accounts of the 1948 expulsion play in the production of Palestinian nationalism in exile, as well as the transformations occurring in the way younger generations relate to this critical event. It suggests that Palestine studies may have overemphasized the conceptual potency of nationalist narratives of the Nakba, and that their discursive prominence today more often reflects their role in securing local and international visibility, patronage, and resources than their continuing power to infuse the present and future with meaning for the refugees themselves.

This article examines the possibility of mourning and justice without the body and its implications for political community in the aftermath of state atrocities. It focuses on the forensic exhumation of clandestine mass graves at the military base of Los Cabitos, the headquarters of the 1980s and 1990s counterinsurgency campaign in the Peruvian south-central Andes. These procedures uncovered technologies of body disposal used by the military that made impossible the identification of victims of state terror. In the face of this impossibility, relatives of the disappeared have appropriated the unknown remains to articulate forms of political mourning and justice that speak truth to power through ordinary languages and tropes.