Truth, Lies, Ritual: Preliminary Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commmission in Sierra Leone

Kelsall, Tim

doi:10.1353/hrq.2005.0020

Cited by 131 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…There is a small body of literature that has focused on evaluating the work of the TRC as a source of catharsis and healing (Dougherty 2004;Kelsall 2005;Shaw 2005Shaw , 2007Basu 2007;Millar 2010), but which has not investigated similar experiences of justice. Another group of scholars have focused on the formal legalistic definitions of justice underpinning the TRC and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which operated parallel to the TRC (Lamin 2003;Schabas 2004;Evenson 2004;Tejan-Cole 2002), but this group has largely excluded empirical analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Originally, this project grew from my interest in reconciliation and transitional justice theory within conflict resolution literature which is generally optimistic about reconciliation processes (Hayner 1994(Hayner , 2002Kelman 1999Kelman , 2004Lederach 1997, 1999, Kriesberg 2001 and more anthropological works by Wilson (2001), Shaw (2002Shaw ( , 2005Shaw ( , 2007, and Kelsall (2005), which were quite critical of the TRC approach. I designed my larger study to apply the anthropological perspective and methods to test the conflict resolution theories.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar Needs and Transitional Justice

Millar

2011

Hum Rights Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in rural Sierra Leone. It adds to the sparse literature directly evaluating local experiences of transitional justice mechanisms. It investigates the conceptual foundations of retributive and restorative approaches to postwar justice, and describes the emerging alternative argument demanding attention be paid to economic, cultural, and social rights in such transitional situations. The article describes how justice is defined in Makeni, a town in Northern Sierra Leone, and shows that the TRC's restorative approach was unable to generate a sense of postwar justice, and was, to many, experienced as a provocation. The conclusions support an alternative distributive conception of justice and show that local conception of rights, experiences of infringement and needs for redress, demand social, cultural, and economic considerations be taken seriously in transitional justice cases.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar Needs and Transitional Justice

Millar

2011

Hum Rights Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thus, their analysis can hardly inform us about ambiguous or nuanced meanings and how these are significantly contingent on particular life experiences or trajectories and meaningful identities attached to these. communities, 38 justice initiatives, 39 or events. 40 Ethnographic methods are generally used in such scholarship to explore the cultural and symbolic significance of specific practices or behaviors.…”

Section: Current Methodologies In Transitional Justice Research Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Perfect Data-Marriage: Transitional Justice Research and Oral History Life Stories

Rauschenbach¹,

Scagliola²,

Parmentier³

et al. 2016

tjr

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The reason for this is largely due to the international criminal tribunal which was established in the country (e.g., the Special Court for Sierra Leone) Kelsall (2005). provides a good description of this TRC.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Roper

Barria

2009

Hum Rights Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) has grown considerably over the last 3 decades, there is still much that we do not know concerning the choice and the structuring of TRCs. While the literature has focused primarily on the effects of TRCs, we examine the domestic and the international factors influencing the choice of a commission in sub-Saharan Africa from 1974 to 2003 using pooled crosssectional time series. We find that states which adopted a TRC prior to South Africa were generally repressive centralized regimes which used the truth commission as political cover. However, since South Africa's TRC, democratizing states have been more likely to adopt a truth commission as a form of transitional justice.Over the past decade, there has been a spirited debate in the literature regarding the relative strengths and weaknesses of various accountability mechanisms for human rights violations. While the 1990s witnessed several important innovations including the establishment of ad hoc international criminal tribunals culminating in the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), most accountability methods are domestic responses to human rights abuses. Truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) are one of the domestic mechanisms which have received considerable attention from the human rights community as well as intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations over the last 20 years. While much of the literature focuses on the effects of TRCs on democratization, human rights, justice, and reconciliation, there has been considerably less attention paid to the causes of TRCs, namely the political factors which lead states to choose this type of accountability mechanism. Popkin Hum Rights Rev (

show abstract

Truth, Lies, Ritual: Preliminary Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commmission in Sierra Leone

Cited by 131 publications

References 12 publications

Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar Needs and Transitional Justice

Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar Needs and Transitional Justice

The Perfect Data-Marriage: Transitional Justice Research and Oral History Life Stories

Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About