Programme full

Thursday 16 April 2015 15:30 - 17:00
PAPER SESSION 6 / PECHA KUCHA SESSIONS
of governmental programmes to democratise Mexico. Within the list of changes the new administration sought to carry
out, Fox included transitional justice as a priority. In 2001, Fox established a Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) to
investigate and prosecute past state crimes. However, the SPO’s work depended on the existing structures of power:
institutions administered by members of the previous regime. So, Fox opted to face past human rights abuses but left
the task in the hands of the institutions whose members had carried out the crimes. The SPO ceased to exist when
President Fox ended his term in office in 2006. During its five years of existence, the SPO did not obtain a single
criminal conviction. Mexico’s transitional justice did not deliver justice, nor truth, but impunity. How did this peculiar
transitional justice process affect Mexico’s transition to ‘democracy’ and the country’s current ‘war on drugs’? Is there
a link between the absence of truth and justice about past human rights abuses and Mexico’s current situation of
unprecedented violence? These are the questions this paper seeks to answer.
Transitions and ‘Temporalities of Victimhood’: A Time-sensitive Approach to the Study of Post-conflict
Societies
Mueller-Hirth, N.
(Robert Gordon University)
One of the challenges for postconflict societies lies in establishing fast-paced economic regimes that at the same must
time gradually deal with long-term issues such as redistribution and reconciliation. Drawing on qualitative research
with victims/survivors of gross human rights violations, this paper examines what I call ‘temporalities of victimhood’ in
South Africa. Two decades after the transition, there is a prevalent understanding among political and social elites that
it is finally time for victims to ‘move on’. By contrast, the consequences of apartheid violence continued to impact on
interviewees’ lives and were exacerbated by contemporary experiences of victimisation, contributing to their senses of
continuity between past and present. The paper identifies three dimensions of temporal conflict: victimhood as
temporary/ as continuous; the pace of national reconciliation/ of individual healing; and the speed of a neoliberal
economy/ of social transformation. It contributes a time-sensitive perspective to existing scholarship on victimhood in
transitional societies. Adopting such a time-sensitive approach and engaging insights from the study of time allows us
to examine more closely the temporal disjunctures that characterise post-conflict societies.
The Politics of the Grave: Forensic Humanitarianism in Political Transition
Moon, C.
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
This paper charts the emergence of what I call 'forensic humanitarianism'. The phenomenon is a feature of transitional
politics, to which the adjudication and settlement of past atrocity (primarily state crimes) is central. Forensic
humanitarianism subordinates the epistemologies and practices of scientific enquiry to the moral and legal framework
of human rights in order to address questions central to the adjudication of mass atrocities, namely: who are the
dead? How were they killed? These questions have come to be addressed in diverse contexts, from attempts to
establish the identities of the disappeared in Argentina in the mid-1980s; the trial for genocide of Guatemala’s former
President, Rios Montt; the efforts to return human remains to families of the dead in the former-Yugoslavia; and to the
exhumation of clandestine civil war graves in Spain. In such contexts forensic expertise has advanced a set of
scientifically-based arguments that claim to settle questions of historical and political contention. However, by
investigating the emergence of the field of forensic humanitarianism and its concomitant claims conceptually,
historically and theoretically, I show that they are the accretions of multiple and complex histories, ideas and practices
within which human remains cross the domains and mediate the diverse demands of humanitarianism, law, politics
and science, and bear witness to a ‘politics of the grave’. My contribution to this panel connects up forensic
humanitarianism with the histories, ideals and politics of its practice and indicates the ways in which it intersects with
the emotional economies of grief and mourning, kinship and family relations, as well as with the moral injunctions of
truth and justice, the political imperatives of legitimacy, the principles of human rights, and, significantly, raising
questions about the human rights of the dead. It presents forensic humanitarianism as a rich site of analysis that taps
into the complex relationships between these varied spheres of idea, practice and lived experience.
Peace through Economic Justice?: The Case of Transitional Sierra Leone
Millar, G.
(University of Aberdeen)
The literature on post-conflict transition regularly highlights the importance of economic restitution and reparations for
the victims and survivors of wartime violence. Such economic contributions are considered central to providing both a
sense of dignity and of justice, and, in the long-term, to avoiding a return to violence as a result of wartime grievances.
However, scholars also acknowledge that many contemporary transitional societies cannot provide such economic
BSA Annual Conference 2015 214
Glasgow Caledonian University