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Redressive politics and the nexus of trauma, transitional justice and reconciliation
| Content Provider | Scilit |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Description | Book Name: Transitional Justice Theories |
| Abstract | The inquiry into the measures and strategies for addressing mass historical violence within the rubric of transitional justice and reconciliation has coincided with the renewed academic interest in traumatic memory (see e.g. Schwab 2010). The critical study of transitional justice has brought to the forefront the victim-centred view on past violence, in contrast to those juridical and quasi-juridical measures that, as it has been widely argued, fell short of incorporating victims’ perspectives and experiences (see e.g. Minow 1999). As a result, it has become a key tenet of the academic inquiry into post-atrocity politics that mitigating the victims’ trauma should be considered an important goal of transitional justice and a condition for achieving reconciliation (Hayner 2001). Given this important nexus of traumatic redress, transitional justice andreconciliation, it is puzzling that in the relevant literature the relation of the last often lacks more elaborate articulation. Is the process of doing justice for the past and achieving reconciliation coterminous with, or conditioned by, the alleviation of trauma among the violence-affected individuals and communities? What is the significance of traumatic memory in redressive politics and post-atrocity societies? This chapter turns to this problematique through critical analysis of the uses and incorporations of the concept of trauma in transitional justice debates, and by mapping the various conceptual constructions of the nexus of traumatic redress, transitional justice and reconciliation. The aim is to investigate critically the meanings and uses of the notion of trauma in the contemporary theorising of transitional justice. Subsequently, the chapter suggests broadening and reframing the concept of trauma in transitional justice scholarship from its clinical rendering as a psychological disorder of individuals and collectives to a cultural understanding of trauma as a breakdown of meaning and of the narratability of experience (cf. Caruth 1995; Felman 2002). The argument is that such framing of trauma illuminates the limit of post-atrocity politics to address and do justice for human suffering. Importantly, at stake is not a situational flaw of post-atrocity politics, which could be corrected through appropriate policy amendments and implementations. Rather, this chapterargues that this ultimate impossibility to attend to suffering – always irreducibly singular, subjective, and corporeal – is a necessary, and even constitutive, limit of post-atrocity politics (and, specifically, of the reconciliatory politics of the past) with regard to individual encounters with historical violence. It must be made clear, however, that the intention is not to argue that post-atrocity politics should not attempt to address traumatisation of violence-affected subjects in a pursuit of social justice and redress, or to declare politics impotent in relation to the realm of private experience. Instead, the intention is to elicit a critical reflection about what is currently one of the dogmas in the field transitional justice and reconciliation, namely the therapeutic and confessional engagement with the ‘inner lives’ of individuals and communities in post-conflict settings. The dominant human rights discourse of transitional justice is built on theassumption that this field constitutes a complex of plural, but coherent and mutually reinforcing, aims – a logic of ‘all good things go together’ – which include accountability for human rights violations; reconciliation and forgiveness; public commemoration; alleviation of trauma; prevention of future violence, etc.1 While some scholars have pointed out tensions and potential incompatibilities between some of these goals (Leebaw 2008), the primary focus of debate in the field has been on ‘truth versus justice’ and ‘justice versus reconciliation’ (Roht-Arriaza 2006), rather than on the potentially problematic alignment of psychological trauma with the pursuit of historical justice within a logic of harmony and coherence (see e.g. Mendeloff 2009). To close this gap, these issues are discussed in this chapter in three dis-tinct steps. First, I map the nexus of trauma, transitional justice and reconciliation, and analyse how the notion of trauma has been incorporated by normative-theoretical approaches to transitional justice. Second, I proceed to therapeutic and clinical uses of trauma in post-atrocity contexts. The suggestion is that while the normative-theoretical approaches engage critically with the assumption of compatibility between the goals of traumatic alleviation and of addressing past human rights abuses, for the most part they remain conflicted about the place of traumatic memory and traumatic redress in post-conflict politics. More specifically, it remains a contested issue whether the question of trauma is specific to the domain of ‘private’ concerns, or whether it has a bearing on the public processes of transitional justice. In contrast, the therapeutic and clinical approaches have operationalised a richer notion of trauma in terms of the overwhelming effect of catastrophic events on the individual and collective psyche, and in terms of the temporal distortion of inner life (living in the present as if it were the past), but for the most part without considering its political dimensions and effects. In the third section, I draw on critical approaches to trauma theory in order to articulate the nexus of trauma, transitional justice and reconciliation beyond the logic of ‘all good things go together’, and to consider the significance oftrauma from the perspective of the subject’s breakdown of meaning and historical narratability for redressive politics. |
| Related Links | https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203465738-17&type=chapterpdf |
| Ending Page | 195 |
| Page Count | 21 |
| Starting Page | 175 |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780203465738-17 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited |
| Publisher Date | 2013-10-30 |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Subject Keyword | Book Name: Transitional Justice Theories Cultural Studies See E.g Traumatic Redress Transitional Justice Post Atrocity |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Chapter |
