Truth Recovery Research Articles

Reckoning with Colonial Legacies of Harm: Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission

ABSTRACT Australia’s colonial era is formally over. Yet the legacies of structural inequality, dispossession, exploitation and racism against Indigenous Australia remain alive and well. In 2021, Victoria established the Yoorrook Justice Commission, culminating in a formal truth-telling and treaty process. Seeking to address harm since colonization, the state process is unprecedented both nationally and abroad. This article considers the relevance of the commission to truth recovery, accountability and structural reform in Australia. To date, national efforts to deal with the colonial past have been piecemeal and relatively ineffective. The Yoorrook Justice Commission departs from previous single-issue inquiries as well as from reconciliation policies driven by white-Australian federal institutions. While the Commission is not a panacea for resolving colonial injustice, it provides an important means of relational and structural truth-telling towards more just relations and righting racial wrongs. Ultimately, the Yoorrook Justice Commission sets a valuable precedent for Australia and other postcolonial nations. Its level of Indigenous ownership, its authority as a Royal Commission and the breadth of its inquiry make it a significant transitional justice project.

'Abject and True Remorse': Loyalism and the Politics of Regret in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT: This article examines the politics of apologies from loyalist armed groups. Using the CLMC 1994 ceasefire statement as a case study, it is based on original survey data; semi-structured interviews with ex-combatants, victims and others; and archival research. It also draws on the academic literature on apologies, transitional justice, political violence, historical institutionalism, literary criticism and the sociology of legitimacy and identity. It examines the broader role of apologies in post-conflict Northern Ireland before focusing on the political and historical context of the CLMC statement and its role as a palimpsest for subsequent loyalist engagement on legacy issues. It suggests that a close reading of the original statement and its afterlife reveals important apology-related themes concerning timing, presentation, leadership and truth recovery. Finally, the paper examines the vexed issues of collusion and criminality. It concludes that loyalists can exercise further agency and leadership through apologies before exiting the political stage.

Truth recovery: an interview with Lance Olsen

ABSTRACT Lance Olsen is author of more than 30 books of and about innovative writing, including, most recently, the novels Skin Elegies [Olsen, Lance. 2021. Skin Elegies. Ann Arbour, MI: Dzanc] and Always Crashing in the Same Car [Olsen, Lance. 2023. Always Crashing in the Same Car. Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2, University of Alabama]. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies. . A Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, two-time N.E.A. Fellowship, and Pushcart Prize recipient, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. This interview is a dialogue about the blurring of fiction and non-fiction, creative writing's place and role in the twenty-first Century, and Olsen's commitment to experimental writing and his use of processes, concepts and ideas to subvert what many regard as traditional writing and storytelling. It also considers how narrative can be deconstructed, reconfigured, re-constructed and re-invigorated; the possibilities and ethics of remix and appropriation; the failures of mainstream publishing; and how we can or might represent our complex and confusing lives on the page.

Special edition: chasing truth and (re)conciliation: navigating contexts, tensions, limits and possibilities “Reclaiming truth recovery against the backdrop of ongoing Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine”

PurposeThis article argues that truth recovery practices that take place against the backdrop of ongoing settler colonial erasure, as is the case when considering Zionist colonial violence in Palestine, must focus on combating state-sponsored attempts at erasure, rather than solely providing a platform for the expression of settler guilt.Design/methodology/approachThe article analyses existing literature on truth recovery practices that take place in Palestine, including the work of a variety of local NGOs engaged in such praxis, with a view to considering how this form of transitional justice has germinated incrementally in the space. Critical reflection on the work of a variety of grassroots NGOs is situated alongside other forms of transitional justice intervention.FindingsThe article argues that in the context of enduring settler colonialism, the truth regarding past Zionist atrocities in historic Palestine must avoid being curated in the present day in such a way as to allow for damage limitation rather than the platforming of conversations around meaningful repair. Truth recovery for recovery's sake serves only to reinforce the settler colonial status quo rather than properly agitate for a full decolonisation, one that demands and facilitates indigenous Palestinian return.Originality/valueThe article challenges prevailing notions of the role of truth recovery practices in spaces of enduring settler colonial value. It makes clear that the role of truth recovery interventions in sites where colonial violence endures must be to actively and meaningfully support activities that reinforce native identity, history and presence on the land. Moreover, by reference to existing grassroots attempts at truth recovery in Palestine, the article provides an original and clear argument that states it is simply not enough to platform the revelation of uncomfortable truths or to provide opportunities for settler violence of the past to be “confessed” in public if it is disassociated from challenging the present-day structures of ongoing oppression.

Escaping or Reinforcing Hierarchies? Norm Relations in Transitional Justice

Abstract The global project of transitional justice (TJ) traditionally has been packaged in a multi-pillar model with criminal justice, truth recovery, reparations, institutional reform, and memorialization, and the norms they enshrine, seemingly presented as interventions of equivalent status at the level of policy. This article aims to enhance the theorizing on TJ as a “norm cluster” by comparatively examining the relations between the norms found in the cluster in transitional practices in Colombia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We claim that the relations between the norms of TJ are hierarchically organized, with the anti-impunity norm being positioned as normatively superior. Through an analysis of TJ processes in the two countries in the past three decades, we discuss how such a hierarchy was established, secured, and challenged. Our findings show that hierarchical relations arise primarily due to legitimacy concerns and are manifested as changes in the internal structure of the anti-impunity norm whereby its prescribed behaviors or measures, i.e., criminal trials, seek to fulfill a range of new values. We argue that, in search for ownership and legitimacy, political actors have overemphasized the role of criminal trials by increasing their “social weight” and positioned them as indispensable for achieving the values of truth, reconciliation, and non-recurrence, disturbing the internal structures and co-opting the spaces of other measures in the TJ norm cluster. Such normative superiority of anti-impunity is significant and detrimental for the TJ global project. It has resulted in other TJ mechanisms being weakened by or dependent on judicial procedures, and it has enhanced competing and revisionist truth-making while promoting a narrow understanding of accountability. Ultimately, we establish that the normative superiority of criminal justice continues to challenge the prospects of complex and comprehensive TJ and that the place of anti-impunity in the norm cluster should be rethought.

How bodies challenge disciplinary binaries: re-examining law and the arts inside the Marikana Commission of Inquiry

ABSTRACT The field of transitional justice exemplifies the ‘law and … ’ approach to interdisciplinarity, in the way it has welcomed the arts as a critical counterpoint to legal form. This article challenges conventional notions of interdisciplinarity in this field, claiming that the maintenance of rigid disciplinary boundaries between the law and the arts results in pigeon-holing creativity as a critical foil for the law; and ignoring law’s internal capacity for practices and processes of critique. This reductive perspective denies the potential of both disciplines to offer complicity and critique. Using the Marikana Commission of Inquiry as a transitional justice case study, this article argues that an affective and corporeal perspective reflects the possibility of fluidity between complicity and critique inside both the law and the art of truth-seeking after atrocity. Turning away from binaristic analysis, this case study offers an alternative reading of corporeal agency inside both the law and the arts of truth recovery, discovering a dynamic and co-generative space that highlights the constraints and possibilities of each discipline.

Changing the Script: Non-State Armed Groups, Restorative Justice and Reparations

AbstractThis article examines the role of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs) and their former members in delivering reparations to victims and communities affected by past acts of violence. The article draws from extensive interviews with former members of armed groups, victims and communities affected by violence in Colombia, Guatemala, Nepal, Northern Ireland, Peru and Uganda. Grounded in the theory and practice of restorative justice, this article critiques the legalistic and state-centric analysis which often characterizes the field of reparations and makes four interconnected arguments. First, that NSAG engagement in reparations can offer a unique practical contribution to meeting the needs of victims (including truth recovery, the recovery of disappeared bodies, de-mining etc.) but also represent a powerful symbolic effort to restore the human dignity of victims and a commitment to prevent violence from recurring. Second, that by taking ‘active responsibility’ through reparations work for past violence, NSAGs and ex-combatants can themselves become involved in processes of delabelling and destigmatization, finding routes to demonstrate their own humanity, and in some cases, becoming involved in work that resonates with the political ideology that motivated them to engage in political violence in the first place. Third, that NSAG reparations can play a significant role in societal and political transformation in post conflict societies, with ex-combatants themselves being key drivers for change through such reparative work. The article concludes by arguing that NSAG and ex-combatant reparative work can represent a self-conscious effort to ‘change the script’, transforming relationships previously defined by violence and harm to ones designed to improve the lives of victims, ex-combatants themselves and the societies in which they live.

Color image distortion assessment based on synthetic ground truth recovery

This paper proposes a quantitative method to measure the color distortion that can occur in color images. There are two main types of color distortion, false color and decolorization. Traditionally, the demosaic process of converting bayer to RGB might results in color distortion, but up-to-date complex color filter array(CFA) can cause even more severe color distortion. Since the conventional method of measuring color distortion requires a reference image, it is difficult to measure color distortion in a situation where the reference image is not secured. We have developed a comprehensive method based on recovering the undistorted color components corresponding to ground truth. Our method uses a chart designed for this purpose and evaluates the color distortion based on this chart.

Irregularities in transnational adoptions and child appropriations: Challenges for reparation practices

Transnational adoption is a global movement of children across borders to new permanent and irreversible legal relationships. It is a circulation that involves social, economic, cultural and political relations marked by geographies of inequalities of power on a global scale. Many of these circulations have been shrouded by illicit practices which mean the violation of child rights. This special issue of the journal Childhood examines individual, social and political narratives on illicit processes surrounding this practice. Drawing from social and political sciences research, the contributors of this collection show the contradiction between ‘silences’ around certain practices in some societies, while in others ‘truth recovery’ has been central to the transition towards democracy. The authors raise concerns about policies and practices that complicate the interests and rights of individual actors.

Through the looking glass: memory, myth and policing the past

ABSTRACT The legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict continues to weigh heavily on the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s institutional memory and contemporary policing practices. In this paper, we argue that the tension between competing interpretations of organisational memory and the need to ‘police’ the past has contributed to a ‘through the looking glass’ phenomenon as regards the policing past and efforts to ‘deal with’ the legacy of the Northern Ireland conflict. The article opens with an examination of the contested memory of policing in Northern Ireland. We then explore how, on the one hand, from a policing perspective, dealing with the past has been regarded as an opportunity to ‘celebrate’ aspects of the policing past but on the other, has reinforced a desire to ‘censure’ the less palatable aspects of police conduct during the conflict. Relatedly, we then interrogate how this desire to ‘secure the past’ has translated into the argument that existing and prospective mechanisms of truth recovery risk ‘re-writing’ the history of the conflict. Finally, the article considers how efforts at truth recovery have been acted upon and received by contemporary policing bodies. This part of the article lays bare both the practical challenges of ‘doing’ truth recovery within a policing framework and the need to ‘secure’ the memory of the policing past. The conclusion argues for the separation of policing and ‘the past’ and the removal of legacy work from policing bodies whose predecessor force was both a victim and perpetrator of that legacy of political violence.

Truth Beyond the ‘Trigger Puller’: Moral Accountability, Transitional (In)Justice and the Limitations of Legal Truth

Abstract This article critically examines how existing truth recovery processes have, and how proposed truth recovery processes might, address the issue of shoot-to-kill in Northern Ireland. In contrast to ongoing legacy case prosecutions of British Army veterans, it argues that truth recovery processes should adopt a maximalist conceptualization of truth and responsibility. This, it is argued, necessitates differentiating between legal truth and structural truth, and between legal, political and moral responsibility. It is further submitted that such an approach would reflect the importance of identifying and understanding patterns (looking at similar cases collectively) and context (looking at the socio-political-legal backdrop to them) when establishing the ‘broad circumstances’ around disputed killings. This approach would allow truth recovery to advance beyond low-level ‘trigger pullers’ to ensure ‘moral accountability’ for the complicity of other actors within the state apparatus.

Breaking cycles of subjugation through bodily performance: lived experience inside legal processes at the Marikana Commission of Inquiry

On 16th August 2012, the South African Police Service fired live ammunition into a crowd of striking mineworkers, killing 34 men and severely wounding others. Subsequently known as the Marikana massacre, the Marikana Commission of Inquiry was soon instituted to uncover the ‘truth’ about what had happened. This article suggests that such linear attempts at truth-finding excise bodily rhythms, resulting in a truth-finding exercise that risks redundancy and irrelevance for key stakeholders impacted by atrocity. Interrogating theoretical insights around corporeality, performance and rhythm to critique ideals of legal progress and aims of closure and truth exposition, this article uses encountered bodily performance as an analytical touchstone to reveal a parallel, cyclical rhythm inside the linear operation of the law. The article suggests that a prioritisation of such bodily performance – foregrounding the lived experience inside the law of truth-seeking – can make truth recovery more relevant to key stakeholders. Such bodily performance also demonstrates a pathway to breaking the cycle of bodily subjugation to positivist legal undertakings, by creating sensory bridges between key stakeholders inside the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.

Fractured Lives, Dissenting Voices, Recovering ‘Truth’: Frontiers of Research and Resistance

Emerging from critical conferences in the early 1970s involving academic researchers, community-based workers and activists, critical social research challenged the role and legitimacy of mainstream social sciences in their support of social orders fractured by class, ‘race’, sectarianism, gender, sexuality and age. This article opens with a brief reflection on the emergence and consolidation of critical social theory as the foundation and context for research that challenges state-institutionalised power and authority. It draws on long-term, in-depth primary research into the operational policies and practices of policing and incarceration, exploring the profound challenges involved in bearing witness to the ‘pain of others’. Recounting personal testimonies ‘from below’, revealing institutionalised deceit and pursuing ‘truth recovery’, it argues that dissenting voices are the foundation of hope, resistance and transformation.

‘Let Me Tell You’: Transitional Justice, Victimhood and Dealing with a Contested Past

This article explores the intersection between the politics and construction of victimhood in transitional societies and the use of truth recovery as a platform for the creation of hierarchies of truth. It explores how, in a context of contested victimhood and an unresolved past, the ‘political currency’ of victimhood may lead to the domination and embellishment of certain voices and narratives and the concurrent silencing of others. As this article will then demonstrate, when applied to the debate on truth recovery, the capturing of victims’ voice and agency can manifest in a damaging ‘truth as trumps’ dynamic and recourse to ‘whataboutery’ in which one call for truth or the recovery of truth as significant to one side of the community is countered by that of a more ‘significant’ or more ‘important’ truth on the part of the other. The paper argues for the inculcation of a culture political generosity in transitional contexts as a way to begin to ameliorate these challenges.

Tort, Truth Recovery and the Northern Ireland Conflict

Northern Ireland has no effective process to address legacy of the human tragedy of decades of conflict. And yet during that conflict, and especially in the years since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement 1998, people have employed multiple legal mechanisms to gain information about events which affected them and their loved ones. Human rights challenges, public inquiries, freedom of information requests, police investigations and fresh inquests have all contributed to a patchwork of approaches to truth recovery. The UK Government has long viewed these efforts with suspicion; as the primary state actor involved in the conflict its records provide a much richer source of information about historic wrongs than the recollections of members of clandestine paramilitary organisations. Successive Conservative administrations have characterised many of these efforts as “lawfare”, intended to persecute veterans long after the events in question and undermine public faith in the UK’s Armed Forces. One under-explored element of this complex picture is use of tort in legacy cases. Civil actions, supported by legal aid funding in Northern Ireland, provide a potential avenue for the discovery of information held by public bodies. Even unsuccessful actions can thus contribute new information about the events in question. Many of the harms inflicted during the conflict were torts as well as crimes, and this article assesses the extent to which these civil actions provide an ersatz mechanism for truth recovery, and challenges efforts to curtail such actions as a “witch-hunt”.

Confronting the past and changing the future? Public inquiries into institutional child abuse, Ireland and Australia

This article uses the framework of transitional justice to examine two prominent examples of national public inquiries into institutional child abuse: the Irish Commission into Child Abuse of 2000–09 and the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse of 2013–2017. It provides a detailed account of the practical workings of each inquiry in the context of the Irish and Australian political and legal environments, with a view to highlighting the particular nation-building function each played in informing a narrative about transitioning from the past to the present. Public inquiries are increasingly used by democratic states as a form of political and legal reckoning for mass crimes committed on children in the care of the state, with inspiration drawn from other examples of the political redress of atrocities (such as war crimes). While transitional justice approaches to peacetime human rights abuses have much to offer in their promise of truth recovery and accountability, they are limited in their ability to achieve justice in the context of consolidated democracies where the ‘transition’ from the past to the present is ambiguous and incomplete. This article points to the benefits of the national public inquiry approach to addressing institutional child abuse, while offering cautions about the expectations of transitional justice in this context, through the landmark examples of Ireland and Australia.

‘Quiet’ Transitional Justice: ‘Publicness’, Trust and Legitimacy in the Search for the ‘Disappeared’

There is a pragmatic value to developing Transitional Justice (TJ) processes quietly. At first glance, such ‘quietness’ may seem to contradict the principles often associated with TJ, such as ‘publicness’, openness and the leaving behind of secrecy and silence. However, I argue that behind-the-scenes efforts and processes are an often-overlooked part of more public-facing TJ mechanisms, and that their quiet nature raises questions that should be more fully understood, particularly around the notions of trust and legitimacy. This article introduces the notion of ‘quiet’ TJ, drawing on the example of the establishment of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains – established to locate the remains of Northern Ireland’s ‘disappeared’. I argue that quiet diplomatic efforts in the development of legislation, and the ‘quiet’ passage of that legislation, facilitated the development of a workable mechanism which has, to a large extent, been effective, has facilitated (limited) truth recovery and the development of trust and can be argued to have legitimacy.

Justice, truth and oral history: legislating the past ‘from below’ in Northern Ireland

Drawing on the ‘from below’ perspective which has emerged in transitional justice scholarship and practice over the past two decades, this article critically examines the dealing with the past debate in Northern Ireland. The paper begins by offering an outline of the from below perspective in the context of post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies which are struggling to come to terms with past violence and human rights abuses. Having provided some of the legal and political background to the most recent efforts to deal with the past in Northern Ireland, it then critically examines the relevant past-related provisions of the Stormont House Agreement, namely the institutions which are designed to facilitate ‘justice’, truth recovery and the establishment of an Oral History Archive. Drawing from the political science and social movement literature on lobbying and the ways in which interests groups may seek to influence policy, the paper then explores the efforts of the authors and others to contribute to the broader public debate, including through drafting and circulating a ‘Model Bill’ on dealing with the past (reproduced elsewhere in this issue) as a counterweight to the legislation which is required from the British government to implement the Stormont House Agreement. The authors argue that the combination of technical capacity, grass-roots credibility and ‘international-savvy’ local solutions offers a framework for praxis from below in other contexts where activists are struggling to extend ownership of transitional justice beyond political elites.

How Conditional Amnesties Can Assist Transitional Societies in Delivering on the Right to the Truth

This article explores how conditional amnesties can assist post-conflict societies to recover truth. It examines how such amnesties can be used optimally to achieve the best results as part of transitional justice mechanisms. Thus, a central question is to see how amnesties can be used for truth recovery purposes. For that reason, the status and role of amnesties, and whether such amnesties can be used to learn more about the past and assist in truth recovery is explored. The article explores what amnesties are, how prevalent they are and how amnesties can be used optimally to achieve the best results. An issue that is also explored is whether amnesties are needed for perpetrators to participate in transitional justice mechanisms. The argument that is made, in this regard, is that amnesty is absolutely necessary to persuade perpetrators to testify. If they do not have such legal protection, perpetrators fear the legal consequences that may result if they admit to crimes for which they have not been charged. Another question that is examined concerns whether amnesties, and specifically conditional amnesties, pass international law muster. This article therefore investigates the continual and extensive use of amnesty to determine whether a conditional amnesty violates international law. The article suggests how a conditional amnesty process could be structured and what difficulties such a process should avoid if perpetrators are to enter such a process.

The Trouble(s) with Transitional Justice: David Park's The Truth Commissioner

David Park's The Truth Commissioner (2008) tells the story of a fictional truth commission, established in the wake of the Northern Irish Troubles. To date, one of the most striking things about Northern Ireland has been its reluctance to engage in any wide-ranging, public process for dealing with the legacy of the Troubles. The Truth Commissioner diagnoses this specific moment in Northern Irish history. This article examines Park's engagement with three key issues, often overlooked by advocates of truth telling initiatives: the emergence of multiple (often incompatible) truths, the ambiguous nature of victimhood, and the gender bias of traditional truth recovery mechanisms.