Past Political Violence Research Articles

Re-emerging memories: humanitarianism and sovereignty in the Târgu Jiu Camp

This article briefly charts the debates surrounding the afterlife of a heritage space of political violence, the Târgu Jiu camp in Western Romania, and locates the ensuing narratives in the current contestations of the liberal democratic consensus in Central and Eastern Europe. The camp was an important Holocaust site and an equally relevant space for the early communist movement. Contrary to similar sites where competing interpretations of these histories are at play, this camp has been largely absent from debates on public memory of past political violence nationally. The significance of this space for local political history has been silenced. This article concerns itself with the long dynamic of silencing difficult heritage, its causes and implications and the selective perspectives on certain histories it entails. Târgu Jiu is a microcosm of this entanglement. Emerging in Romanian media and public debate at the time of the 2014 “refugee” reception crisis, this newly retrieved collecting memory of the camp capitalized on a history of past internal European displacement, Romanian victimhood and a sense of persecuted national sovereignty. Silencing made room for newer selective histories of this heritage space. Specifically, the complex history of the camp was appropriated into a type of politics of memory that reconfigures narratives about “liberal” values in the region. This article discusses the processes through which liberal, “European” values are appropriated and instrumentalized for the very opposite principles.

Closing the ranks: Bondedness, sense of self and moral injury during legacy case prosecutions

This article represents an entry point for the sociological study of protests by British Army veterans opposed to legacy case prosecutions arsing out of the conflict in the North of Ireland. Acknowledging the lack of sociological analysis when compared with recent legal, criminological and political studies, it uses insights from military sociology, the sociology of emotions, and the social movement literature to understand how and why veterans have mobilised against these prosecutions. It argues that veterans have resorted to taking collective action for three reasons: out of loyalty to the handful of veterans currently facing prosecution; because these prosecutions challenge their self-image as peacekeepers; and because of their sense of betrayal by the British government. In making this argument, the article highlights how political and moral contestation over past political violence touches on collective and individual identities constructed during that violence, social solidarity within groups impacted by that violence, and different expectations of post-conflict justice in its aftermath.

The Burden of a Violent Past: Formative Experiences of Repression and Support for Secession in Catalonia

AbstractThis letter studies the impact of past violence and repression on current territorial preferences in a contemporary democracy. Does a violent past lay the grounds for pro-secessionist preferences, or does it lead individuals to cling on to the territorial status quo? We study whether exposure to the events of the Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath made people more or less likely to support Catalan secession from Spain. Our analysis employs a dataset that combines a large N of individual-level survey data with historical data about repression and violence in each Catalan municipality. Findings indicate that current preferences for secession tend to diminish among the oldest Catalan generation that was exposed to higher levels of violence in their municipality. Most crucially, we show that exposure to violence created a sense of apathy towards politics among the oldest cohort, which eventually leads to a lower predisposition to support secession, a feeling that was not transmitted to subsequent generations. Our findings qualify some of the existing knowledge on the effects of past political violence on present political attitudes.

Uncomfortably Numb: The Disconnect between Individual Human Rights Perceptions and State Human Rights Practices

Abstract:In this article I argue the average person does not have an accurate perception of their government’s human rights practices. Individuals are unable to accurately gauge their government’s human rights behaviours due to a conflation of indifference, personal biases, and focused reframing efforts by the government and other interested parties. This disconnect between state practice and individual perception creates an informational barrier for human rights activists and non-governmental organizations that threatens both their public support and their ability to meet objectives. I offer analysis of the above arguments by examining a survey question from the World Values Study that asks participants to rank their state’s human rights behaviour. I find that there is no direct correlation between these perceived rankings and the state s actual human rights practices. Further, I find that individuals living in states with higher existing levels of personal human rights are more likely to have a negative view of their state’s human rights performance. Finally, I find that individuals from states with a history of past political violence are more likely to demonstrate inflated perceptions of their state’s human rights practices. These findings elucidate the necessity for human rights organizations to take account of, and potentially combat, the disconnect between individuals’ human rights perceptions and states’ action when engaging in activism.

How War Changes Land: Soil Fertility, Unexploded Bombs, and the Underdevelopment of Cambodia

AbstractHow does past political violence impact subsequent development and practices, long beyond the life of the regime that perpetrated violence? Prior research focuses on physical destruction without much attention to weapons left behind in conflict zones. I contend that unexploded ordnance create direct and imminent threats to rural livelihoods. Individuals respond by shortening time horizons and avoiding investment in activities for which there is an immediate security cost but a distant return. Short‐term adjustments in agricultural methods accumulate to long‐term underdevelopment and poverty. In Cambodia, I find that the historic bombing of high‐fertility land, where impact fuses hit soft ground and were more likely to fail, reduces contemporary household production and welfare. Counterintuitively, the most fertile land becomes the least productive. This reversal of fortune qualifies the presumption that post‐war economies will eventually converge back to steady‐state growth.

How framing past political violence affects reconciliation in the Basque Country

How framing past political violence affects reconciliation in the Basque Country

Victims Who Have Done Nothing or Victims Who Have Done Nothing Wrong: Contesting Blame and ‘Innocent Victim’ Status in Transitioning Societies

AbstractBuilding on recent victimological interventions in transitional justice, this article critically examines nuanced interpretations of what an ‘innocent victim’ is in transitioning societies without any agreed legal, political or moral base position on past political violence. It suggests that the term refers to two different types of victims: victims who have done nothing that fit traditional victimological understandings of the blameless, passive ‘ideal victim’ and victims who have done nothing wrong where innocence and blame are open to fundamental political and moral contest. It concludes that the irreconcilability, looseness and adaptability of competing frameworks for understanding the past pose a core victimological disagreement surrounding victims who have done nothing wrong that even a more critically self-reflective approach by victimizers fails to resolve.

Law of Denial

Law’s claim of mastery over past political violence is frequently undermined by reversals of that relationship of mastery, so that the violence of the law, and especially its symbolic violence, becomes easily incorporated into longues durees of political violence, rather than mastering them, settling them, or providing closure. Doing justice to the past, therefore, requires a political and theoretical attunement to the ways in which law, in purportedly attempting to address past political violence, inscribes itself into contemporary contexts of violence. While this may be limited to an analysis of how law is an effect of and affects the political, theoretically this attunement can be further refined by means of a critique of dynamics that are internal to law itself and that have to do with how law understands its own historicity, as well as its relationship to history and historiography. This article aims to pursue such a critique, taking as its immediate focus the ECHR case of Perincek v Switzerland, with occasional forays into debates around the criminalisation of Armenian genocide denialism in France. The Perincek case concerned Switzerland’s criminalisation of the denial of the Armenian genocide, and concluded in 2015 after producing two judgments, first by the Second Chamber, and then by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. However, although they both found for the applicant, the two benches had very different lines of reasoning, and notably different conceptions regarding the relationship between law and history. I proceed by tracing the shifting status of ‘history’ and ‘historians’ in these two judgments, and paying attention to the deferrals, disclaimers and ellipses that structure law’s relation to history. This close reading offers the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between law, denial and violence: I propose that the symbolic violence of the law operative in memory laws is a product of that which remains unresolved in law’s understanding of historicity (including its own), its self-understanding vis-a-vis the task of historiography, and its inability to respond to historical violence without inscribing itself into a history of violence, a process regarding which it remains in denial.

Caring for the Missing: Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Responses to Disappearance and Enforced Disappearance

Enforced disappearance in Latin America is simultaneously an ongoing reality; an emblematic crime of past authoritarian regimes, and a significant component of the human toll of internal armed conflict in some Central American and Andean countries. Recent accountability developments in Latin America and beyond have called on forensic science to trace, unearth and restore the remains of the disappeared: as part of a judicial process, or as a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Some consider that a distinctive Latin American approach to forensic work as human rights work has emerged, with experts from the region increasingly called upon to assist international tribunals or perform exhumations of mass graves. Technical-scientific forensic interventions are however only part of the story. Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice require exploration of the intersection between international legal norms, regional human rights systems, and domestic criminal justice. While Latin America was a pioneer in originating a regional Convention against Enforced Disappearance, and the Inter-American Human Rights system has been active around the issue since the 1970s, the tensions inherent in retrospective application of those principles to historic crimes have been addressed in varied ways around the region. Activists, relatives’ associations, and cause lawyers have been key actors in navigating domestic impunity, reinterpreting domestic amnesty legislation, and attempting to establish individual accountability for collective, institutional criminality. Meanwhile, democratization and legal reforms have produced state structures at least theoretically more open to complying with ex officio duties in truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. Prosecutions of past perpetrators, both military and civilian, have however provoked social and political controversy. The entire enterprise of seeking remains is meanwhile inimical to historical demands for ‘aparicion con vida’. Some relatives’ associations, and associated political groups, accordingly refuse to recognize the search for remains or certification of death, whether by state or non-state actors. The existence in some countries of a generation of appropriated children, stolen from their forcibly disappeared parents and brought up under false identities, has added weight to these refusals and produced specific scientific innovation in the use of DNA mapping to trace even indirect biological relationships. Cultural, ethnic and religious cleavages that were often at the heart of conflict dynamics of conflict moreover complicate processes of truthtelling, reparation, and even physical identification. Attempts to trace and identify the disappeared therefore give rise to conflicts between ‘civic trust’ and scientific certainty, compounded by a legacy of mistrust between citizens and previously collusive or directly repressive states. This working paper collates and synthesises the results of three events stimulating dialogue between law, social science and forensic (natural) sciences around the issue of disappearance and enforced disappearance in contexts of past political violence. This dialogue, focused principally on Latin American experiences, took the form of two workshops and a set of academic panels carried out in January and April 2017, in Santiago de Chile and Lima, Peru. The events were designed, timed and targeted to contribute to ongoing policy processes in Chile and Peru, as both countries are in the process of designing national mechanisms or search plans in accordance with the terms of the 2006 International Convention against Enforced Disappearance. They also sought to inform ongoing academic and policy debates in and about El Salvador and Sri Lanka, to provide a platform for interaction with relatives’ associations - whose participation is key for successful national design processes - and to highlight the potential resource represented by key international and regional actors such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Latin American Forensic Anthropology Association (ALAF), and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH). The events, and subsequent academic and policy publications, were supported by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) through the LASA-Ford Special Grant ‘Caring for the Missing: Respuestas Humanitarias, Juridicas a la Desaparicion de Personas’, 2017; and in part through the Ulster University Research Challenge Fund project ‘Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance – Scoping Study’ (2017).

Working Paper Caring for the Missing: Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Responses to Disappearance and Enforced Disappearancee

Enforced disappearance in Latin America is simultaneously an ongoing reality; an emblematic crime of past authoritarian regimes, and a significant component of the human toll of internal armed conflict in some Central American and Andean countries. Recent accountability developments in Latin America and beyond have called on forensic science to trace, unearth and restore the remains of the disappeared: as part of a judicial process, or as a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Some consider that a distinctive Latin American approach to forensic work as human rights work has emerged, with experts from the region increasingly called upon to assist international tribunals or perform exhumations of mass graves. Technical-scientific forensic interventions are however only part of the story. Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice require exploration of the intersection between international legal norms, regional human rights systems, and domestic criminal justice. This working paper collates and synthesises the results of three events stimulating dialogue between law, social science and forensic (natural) sciences around the issue of disappearance and enforced disappearance in contexts of past political violence. This dialogue, focused principally on Latin American experiences, took the form of two workshops and a set of academic panels carried out in January and April 2017, in Santiago de Chile and Lima, Peru.

Institutional apologies and socio-emotional climate in the South American context.

This study examined perceptions of institutional apologies related to past political violence and socio-emotional climate among victims and non-victims in Argentina (n=518), Chile (n=1,278), and Paraguay (n=1,172) based on quasi-representative samples. The perceptions of apology as sincere and efficient in improving intergroup relations were associated with a positive socio-emotional climate across the three nations. Victims evaluated apologies more positively and perceived a more positive socio-emotional climate compared to non-victims in Paraguay and Argentina, whereas the opposite was true in Chile where the government opposed the victims' leftist political orientation. The evaluations of apologies also mediated the effects of exposure to violence on the perception of socio-emotional climate, but these effects were moderated by the context. Together, these findings suggest that apologies reinforce positive sociopolitical climate, and that, personal experience of victimization is an important factor determining these effects.

Between Remembering and Forgetting the Years of Political Violence: Psychosocial Impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru

This article analyzes the association between knowledge of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), evaluation of TRC's achievements, experience of victimization, attitudes toward remembering and forgetting past political violence, perceptions of socioemotional climate (SEC), belief in forgiveness and attitudes toward violence in Peru based on a study conducted in three Peruvian cities with different rates of victimization due to political violence during 1980–2000 (n = 1200). Results showed that a positive attitude toward remembering the past of political violence was predominant and related to a positive evaluation of TRC's achievements. Attitude toward remembering also has an ambivalent collective effect increasing both positive and negative SECs, and it is less accepted by victims of political violence. On the other hand, attitude toward forgetting is less accepted by participants, and it also has an ambivalent effect by increasing positive and negative SECs. Attitude toward forgetting has more societal costs, since it is related to attitudes toward violence and decreased knowledge and a positive evaluation of TRC. In general, findings suggest that remembering traumatic events has an emotional cost, but also it is shown that remembering seems to be more beneficial for society in the long‐term than forgetting.

How Transitional Justice Processes and Official Apologies Influence Reconciliation: The Case of the Chilean ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ and ‘Political Imprisonment and Torture’ Commissions

ABSTRACTPerceptions of the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ and ‘Political Imprisonment and Torture’ commissions and related beliefs, emotions and socio‐emotional climate were analysed in people affected and unaffected by past political violence in Chile (N = 1278). People directly affected regard institutional apologies as less sincere and effective, and they were more critical of the commissions. Those who have a positive appraisal of the commissions, compared with people who disagree with the commissions activities, are less prone to forget past collective violence; report higher levels of negative emotions, such as shame, and positive ones, such as pride and hope, about the collective past; and consider that the commissions contributed to knowing the truth about what happened to victims and helped bring human rights violators to justice. Those appraising the commissions in a positive fashion also perceive a more positive emotional climate and inter‐group trust, have more confidence in institutions and report more universalistic values. A multiple‐regression analysis suggests that commissions play a relatively successful role as transitional justice rituals, reinforcing reconciliation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Personal emotions, emotional climate, social sharing, beliefs, and values among people affected and unaffected by past political violence.

Beliefs, emotions, and perception of socioemotional climate were analyzed in people affected and unaffected by past political violence in Chile (N = 1278). Compared with unaffected people, affected people reported a more positive attitude toward transitional justice procedure, were better informed, were more likely to reject an attitude of forgetting about the past, regarded institutional apologies as less sincere and effective, judged the current social climate as less positive, reported higher negative emotions related to the past, and showed less purpose in life. No differences were found for forgiveness or for outcomes of the transitional justice procedures or Truth Commissions, such as documentation of the truth or creation of an inclusive collective memory. Across groups, a negative view of forgiveness and a positive view of Truth Commissions dominated the picture. However, compared with nonvictims, victims also reported more pride and were more likely to endorse Universalist values, and this suggested that victims were subject, simultaneously, to a long-term negative impact of past events and a process of posttraumatic growth.

Governing memory: Justice, reconciliation and outreach at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia

This article explores how devolved outreach work for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia works to govern the past as it acts to reshape and reframe potentially ambivalent and conflicting memories of political violence. The article specifically examines an example of outreach targeting a former Khmer Rouge community that has been situated as a key party in Cambodia’s attempts to realize ‘justice’ and ‘reconciliation’. The article analyses the sites and crucibles of memory that outreach work for the court utilizes in licensing a particular reading of Cambodia’s experiences of war and genocide. First, the article shows how museum and memorial sites and technologies produce acquiescent, ambivalent and resistant effects among outreach subjects. Second, the article then considers the consolidation and contestation of memory at a public forum event, noting the ways in which outreach attempts to disarm and reconstitute memorial accounts that conflict with the officially sanctioned reading of Cambodia’s past political violence. Whilst acknowledging the unique characteristics of the case, I argue that it is illustrative of the various ways in which Cambodians might question the legitimacy of the Extraordinary Chambers.

Social Relations and War Remembrance: Second World War Atrocities in Rural Tuscan Villages

This article addresses the issue of how long‐term memory of extreme conditions is socially transformed. It focuses on elements of the social structure and pre‐war habitus that might help understanding of the divided memory of massacres that were perpetrated by the Nazis in three rural Tuscan villages between 1943 and 1944. Within the “mnemonic communities”, discrepancies arise since some of the villagers paradoxically blame the partisans instead of the Nazis. An attempt is made to trace current representations of historical events in the framework of traditional social institutions and political life of these small villages in time of crisis. Battles over memory are seen as a twofold process—that is, as part of “internal”, intra‐village relations as well as a form of reaction toward the “external” world of which they feel victims. The article argues that long‐term memory of past political violence is strictly bound up with local power relations.