Narrating Transitional Justice: Memory in the Age of Truth and Reconciliation (Confronting Atrocity: Human Rights and Restorative Justice Series, 1) (Volume 1) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0228026237 ISBN 13: 9780228026235

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025

Synopsis

In truth and reconciliation settings, particular narratives are recounted by victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and legal experts, each employing distinct rhetorical strategies. Their testimonies, reported by the media and represented in various cultural forms, profoundly influence public understanding and collective memory in post-conflict societies.

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of international scholars across the humanities and social sciences, policymakers and cultural producers, Narrating Transitional Justice examines truth and reconciliation commissions as acts of public storytelling. Contributors elaborate on how these testimonies function as creative grist for cultural producers to reconstruct, redefine, and reappraise transitional justice work. They further examine the inimitable insights that creative imaginaries – in the form of literature, theatre, film, fine art, popular music, street art, and online media – offer about the remaking of nations fractured by long histories of human rights violations.

Critically reflecting on debates around the centrality of storytelling in transitional justice processes, Narrating Transitional Justice asks: what are the discourses embedded in the varied stories of reconciliation actors, and how do these function as acts of state-making after atrocity?

About this title

About the Authors

Paul Ugor is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo.

Bonny Ibhawoh is Senator William McMaster Chair in Global Human Rights at McMaster University.

From the Back Cover

Series Editors: Bonny Ibhawoh, Juanita De Barros, and Paul Ugor

Critics who link international human rights doctrine with forms of domination and national interests are increasingly questioning its moral foundations, political aspirations, and material importance. Some have proposed alternative rights frameworks centred on the recognition of cultural differences and an inclusive pluriversality to mediate what they see as a hegemonic construct of universal human rights. The Confronting Atrocity: Human Rights and Restorative Justice Series provides a forum for participants in these debates to apply diverse disciplinary, theoretical, historical, cultural, philosophical, and praxis-based perspectives. It responds to a growing desire to go beyond discourses in law and politics, to explore the narrative constructions of rights. Books in the series attend closely to restorative justice in a broad array of contexts, from domestic criminal justice to transitional justice and post-conflict peacebuilding.

This series is published in partnership with the Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, McMaster University.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228026237
• ISBN 13: 9780228026235
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Ugor Paul, Ibhawoh Bonny