The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism, and Memory After Atrocity

​​The Art of Transitional Justice examines the relationship between transitional justice and the practices of art associated with it. Art, which includes theater, literature, photography, and film, has been integral to the understanding of the issues faced in situations of transitional justice as well as other issues arising out of conflict and mass atrocity. The chapters in this volume take up this understanding and its demands of transitional justice in situations in several countries: Afghanistan, Serbia, Srebenica, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, as well as the experiences of resulting diasporic communities. In doing so, it brings to bear the insights from scholars, civil society groups, and art practitioners, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations.

The re-assesment of transitional justice as both an institutional craft and a system of knowledge has been ongoing for sometime now. The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism and Memory After Atrocity contributes to this revaluation by focusing on the prevalence of art and aesthetic practices in the various domains and institutions of transitional justice.

Interdisciplinary in approach, this volume provides personal and intellectual contributions by literary and cultural critics, legal scholars, artists and activists as well as policy experts. It ranges across theatre, public art installations, literary fiction and public protest, poems and film, photography, museums, monuments and body art. How are these cultural performances used in the practices of transitional justice? What can and do they tell us about the discourses of transitional justice, and their representations of the cultural and social transformations of post-conflict societies? How do they provide provide a forum and idiom through which survivors of atrocity can have their voices heard, can tell their story, as well as evaluate and reflect on the transitional justice mechanisms in their society?

This volume seeks to understand the significant and plural role that artists, works of art and more broadly aesthetic performances have played in societies in transition. Among the topics covered are:

• Cultural intervention and the imagination of peace and transition
• Education, photography and fictional narratives after Genocide
• Memory, performance and trauma
• Public protest, public art and cities in transformation
• The role of theatre in healing in Afghanistan, Serbia and beyond
• Diasporic communities and the artefacts of lives recalled
• The reception of artworks by survivors of atrocity
• The dilemmas of transitional justice scholarship and the feeling for justice

With its global and detailed case studies approach, The Arts of Transitional Justice is a significant resource for those interested in the role of the arts in responding to the multidimensional legacies of atrocity as well as those interested in the transformation of transitional justice. In coming to terms with the past and setting the terms and conditions of a different future, it engages the plural idioms of accountability and responsibility, memory and trauma, justice and the rhetoric of transition after atrocity.