In the Shadow of Transitional Justice
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 memorialization.
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 Cte dIvoire. 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.
Guy Elcheroth is Professor of Social Psychology at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Academic Director of the Lausanne Summer School on Transitional Justice and Conflict Transformation.
Neloufer de Mel is Senior Professor of English (Chair) at the Department of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Co-director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Research Hub.
Europa Perspectives in Transitional Justice
The Europa Perspectives in Transitional Justice series from Routledge, edited by Professor Tim Murithi, provides a platform for innovative research and analysis of concepts, strategies and approaches to dealing with the past in deeply divided societies worldwide. The series encourages multidisciplinary scholarship on issues relating to reconciliation and how it is enhanced by efforts to promote redress and achieve socio-economic justice. The series aims to provide an invaluable resource for academics, policymakers, peace practitioners, researchers and all those interested in issues relating to addressing the deep-seated divisionswithin countries and communities. It also aims to propose forward-looking recommendations on how to achieve societal transformation.
The series comprises individual and edited volumes which provide analysis of transitions taking place at the global, regional and country levels, as well as engaging with thematic issues in the broad field of transitional justice and reconciliation.
Tim Murithi is Extraordinary Professor of African Studies at the Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State, and also Head of the Justice and Reconciliation in Africa Programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa. He has more than 21 years of experience in the fields of peacebuilding, governance, international justice and security in Africa. He sits on editorial boards and advisory panels for the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, African Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Africa Peace and Conflict Journal and the journal Peacebuilding. He is author and editor of eight books; in addition he has authored more than 75 journal articles, book chapters and policy papers.
Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Colombia: Transitioning from Violence
Edited by Fabio Andrs Daz Pabn
Post-war Dilemmas of Sri Lanka
Democracy and Reconciliation
S. I. Keethaponcalan
In the Shadow of Transitional Justice
Cross-national Perspectives on the Transformative Potential of Remembrance
Edited by Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer de Mel
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Europa-Perspectives-in-Transitional-Justice/book-series/ECPTJ.
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2022 selection and editorial matter, Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer de Mel; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Guy Elcheroth and Neloufer de Mel to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-76510-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-12835-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-16728-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003167280
Yasemin Glsm Acar is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Dundee, UK. She received her PhD from Claremont Graduate University, USA, in 2015, where she specialized in social identity and identity politicization through collective action. She has published numerous book chapters and articles on the consequences of collective action. She has also produced publications on various perceptions of the Kurdish-Turkish Peace Process in Turkey.
Zacharia Bady recently obtained a doctorate in social sciences from the University of Lausanne. His research focuses on the definition of collective identities in contexts torn by political violence or societal upheavals more generally. He has developed inductive survey methods designed to capture complex identity configurations that prevail in any given social context.
Neloufer de Mel is Senior Professor of English (Chair) at the Department of English of the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The author of Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (2007) and Women and the Nations Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in 20th Century Sri Lanka (2001), her recent journal publications and edited volumes have been on post-war Sri Lanka, providing feminist, postcolonial and cultural studies perspectives on questions of justice, post-war security and reframing democracy. She is a Co-director and Co-investigator at the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Research Hub, has held several distinguished research fellowships at international universities and academic institutions including Yale, the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna and the universities of Zurich and New York, and she has been the recipient of several research grants.
