The perils of recognising local agency: a situational concept of agency and the case of victims of sexual violence and the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

Abstract

Following the so-called ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding research and efforts towards a ‘Global’ orientation in international relations (IR) scholarship, a number of authors have recently called for and proposed research approaches that recognise local actors’ agency in peacebuilding and other forms of intervention. These calls and proposals have revealed a serious lack of attention to local agency in previous research. But eagerness to recognise that which has long been wrongfully neglected also comes with new challenges. Most importantly, the emphasis on local agency runs the risk of overlooking or even misrecognising situations when and where actors feel severely limited in their possibilities and/or experience that their actions are of little or no effect. This paper develops a situational concept of agency for open-ended empirical analysis that explicitly allows for findings of severely limited or even absent agency in specific contexts. The concept’s analytical value is exemplified in an exploration of the case of victims of sexual violence and the post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Sierra Leone, based on recent field and archival research. Although this exploration reveals activism, individual initiative and coping strategies, these only amount to severely limited victims’ agency in the context of the TRC.