Browsing by Subject "Transitional justice"

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Archive of memories : a journey through the discursive construction and cultural silencing of Mexico’s Dirty War
(2022-08-30) Castro Villarreal, Mario Nicolás; Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, Hector, 1962-; Hartigan, John; Merabet, Sofian; Menchaca, Martha
Mexico's "Dirty War" or guerra sucia refers to the historical period covering the seventies and early eighties, when the federal governments of presidents Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría Álvarez waged open warfare and counterintelligence assaults on urban leftist guerrillas. Once a taboo topic and a historical moment erased and silenced in Mexican historiography, the past fifteen years brought a new wave of historians and activists spearheading attempts at memorializing this bloody event under the frameworks of human rights, archival research, and the recovery of oral history. This research project analyzes three case studies focused on historical and mnemonic reconstructions of guerrilla history and the human rights violations that occurred during the Dirty War; with a particular focus on the two most famous leftist armed movements of that time: the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) and the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (LC23S). The first part delves into Mexico's failed attempt at building a legal framework for transitional justice after Mexico’s “democratic turn” in 2000s. The second case moves to the question of recuperating "spaces of terror" and the successes and failures at building new forms of collective memory. The final chapter focuses on the controversial and infamous murder of Monterrey businessman Eugenio Garza Sada in 1973 and the competing historical and moral interpretations surrounding guerrilla violence. Through a methodology combining discursive analysis, anthropological approaches to memory, and auto-ethnographic vignettes, this dissertation attempts to grasp the current challenges of transforming what once was a marginal countermemory into an accepted and integral part of Mexico's political history. The author expands these questions through the study of guerrilla literature, testimonios, documentaries, and his familial connections to the regional histories of urban guerrillas.
Between then and now, there and here, guilt and innocence : Škvorecký’s Two murders in my double life and the ambiguities of transitional justice
(2013-05) Weil, Abigail Ruth; Neuburger, Mary, 1966-
I situate Škvorecký’s novel as both a primary document in the historical record of transitional justice and as a literary creation in the author’s larger oeuvre. In creating this work of autobiographical fiction, Škvorecký deals with the ambiguities of a tumultuous historico-political moment and creates an appropriately complex work of art. I combine social science research with close-reading of the text in the tradition of new historicism. In the introduction I explain the historico-political background, specifically transitional justice and lustration in Czech Republic in the early 1990s, that engendered Two Murders. In my first chapter, I examine the book reviews, Czech and English, that appeared following the two language-respective publications of Two Murders. In the remaining three chapters I present my analysis of the novel based on close-reading and applied historical information. Chapters two and three discuss different but interconnected manifestations of distance. Chapter two examines memory as the temporal distance of the mind, while chapter three explores exile as spatial distance. Škvorecký invests memory and exile with enormous significance, and uses both concepts to depict his characters’ isolation. In the final chapter, I discuss rumor and reputation in the novel’s two distinct story-lines, demonstrating how they come together to create a cohesive artistic work. Approaching the novel as both a historical document and a work of art, I hope to critically examine this complicated historical moment and appraise Škvorecký’s contribution to the post-communist Czech dialogue.
Methodological problems in causal inference, with reference to transitional justice
(2014-08) Lee, Byung-Jae; Luskin, Robert C.
This dissertation addresses methodological problems in causal inference in the presence of time-varying confounding, and provides methodological tools to handle the problems within the potential outcomes framework of causal inference. The time-varying confounding is common in longitudinal observational studies, in which the covariates and treatments are interacting and changing over time in response to the intermediate outcomes and changing circumstances. The existing approaches in causal inference are mostly focused on static single-shot decision-making settings, and have limitations in estimating the effects of long-term treatments on the chronic problems. In this dissertation, I attempt to conceptualize the causal inference in this situation as a sequential decision problem, using the conceptual tools developed in decision theory, dynamic treatment regimes, and machine learning. I also provide methodological tools useful for this situation, especially when the treatments are multi-level and changing over time, using inverse probability weights and $g$-estimation. Substantively, this dissertation examines transitional justice's effects on human rights and democracy in emerging democracies. Using transitional justice as an example to illustrate the proposed methods, I conceptualize the adoption of transitional justice by a new government as a sequential decision-making process, and empirically examine the comparative effectiveness of transitional justice measures --- independently or in combination with others --- on human rights and democracy.
The politics of human rights prosecutions : civil military relations during the Alfonsín presidency, 1983-1989
(2020-08-16) Esparza, Gabrielle Renae; Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles), 1942-
This project examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency. Alfonsín’s election in 1983 followed Argentina’s most repressive dictatorship and marked the country’s return to democracy. This democratic transition occurred at the beginning of a wave of similar shifts from military to civilian rule throughout Latin America. As a result, the Argentine experience heavily influenced the transitional justice scholarship that emerged in the 1990s. Argentina pioneered new methods of addressing state sponsored human rights violations during Alfonsín’s administration. Never Again, the first published truth commission report became an international model, and more than thirty countries have followed Argentina’s example since 1983. Alfonsín also ordered criminal prosecution of military generals for human rights violations. The trials respected legal codes and due process in order to demonstrate the law’s ability to address wrongdoing. Such efforts helped reestablish trust in judicial processes. These mechanisms applied early in Alfonsín’s term revolutionized the field of transitional justice, but the later years of his presidency limited this initial momentum toward accountability through the authorization of Full Stop and Due Obedience laws. Both measures, dictated under military pressure, narrowed the scope of the trials in order to ensure democratic stability. President Alfonsín had dedicated himself to overcoming Argentina’s legacy of authoritarianism and emphasized democratization as the main goal of the country’s transition. No president had completed his or her mandate against the wishes of the armed forces since 1928. In light of these political realities, Alfonsín made prudent decisions to achieve his legislative goals without undermining democratic processes and institutions. This approach marked a clear break with the past and sought to model democratic governance. Alfonsín’s methods also demonstrated that democracy, even when producing complicated and uneven policy victories, had the power to address social problems.
"To know how to speak" : technologies of indigenous women's activism against sexual violence in Chiapas, Mexico
(2012-08) Newdick, Vivian Ann; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Speed, Shannon; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Ghosh, Kaushik; Ballí, Cecilia
Between 1994 and 2012, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) established a contested zone of exception to neoliberal governance in southern Mexico and women's-rights-as-human-rights universalism reshaped international development and activist discourse. Within this context, Ana, Beatriz, and Celia González Pérez pressed claims against a group of Mexican Federal Army soldiers for rape at a military checkpoint in 1994. A rare instance of first-person denunciation of rape warfare, the Tseltal-Maya sisters' own powerful representation of the physical and procedural violations committed against them forms the starting point of this analysis, which proceeds from there, chapter by chapter, through communal, national, and international representations. Centering the women's speech, then moving to what are conventionally understood as broader fields of discourse produces new ways of understanding violence in relation to nation, culture, and gendered sociality. Though in 2001 the human rights commission of the Organization of American States upheld the women's claims, as of this writing (2012) the Mexican state has neither awarded reparations nor prosecuted the accused. I argue here that the women's unmet demands for collective and individual justice produce a novel language of protest which I call denuncia (denouncement) rather than testimony. Denuncia, I argue, puts the physical and the social body at the center of claims against sexual violation; enacts coraje (courage, rage) rather than petitions for recognition of truth; exposes the nationalist ideology of racial mixing that informs the production of testimony in Mexico, and establishes new audiences for its own reception despite the regimes of everyday violence it foregrounds. Formulated amid military occupation, denuncia exposes the gendered intimacy--control of the food supply, inhabitation of public-private architectural spaces, colonization of local enmities--that gave rise to military rape, which I call here "domestic violence." Denuncia emerges to refute the neoliberal discourse that links indigenous culture, gender, and violence just when the material basis of indigenous livelihood is under siege. This dissertation's method would not have been possible without almost twenty years' engagement with Tseltal and Tojolabal-Maya men and women who have formed part of the Zapatista movement. This long-range perspective has engendered a form of feminist scholarly accountability that cultivates listening to ground critique on the terrain of self-determination.
Truth, National Reconciliation and Cultural Interventions: Lessons Learned from the South African TRC
(The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 2018) Bolton, Michaela
The end of Apartheid marked the beginning of a South Africa that belongs to all who live in it. It was recognised by the Constitution that the pursuit of national unity required reconciliation. In response, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (“TRC”) was established. Its central focus was to “promote unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past”. The TRC identified at least three levels at which reconciliation needs to take place: reconciliation between victims and perpetrators; reconciliation at the community level; and reconciliation between the beneficiaries and the victims of the crime of Apartheid. At the outset, the TRC recognised the magnitude of this exercise. Its quest for truth was viewed as a contribution to a much longer-term goal. The TRC gave its attention to uncovering the truth about gross violations of human rights. The decision was made to focus not on the effects of laws passed by the Apartheid government, but on human rights violations committed as specific political-criminal acts against specific individuals. Reconciliation at the first level (that between victims and perpetrators) was prioritised at the expense of second- and third-level reconciliation. This begs the question of how the reconciliatory dialogue initiated by the TRC could be extended to the people that fell outside of the TRC’s purview. I argue that one of the most effective ways to pursue reconciliation at a community and national level is through cultural interventions. Often neglected as a mechanism of transitional justice, these interventions may be an integral stepping stone between the first-level individual reconciliation aspired to by a truth commission, and the broader reconciliation so indispensable after a regime of systemic human rights abuses.