‘The Cast of the Past’: Truth Commissions and the Making and Marginalization of Identity

Abstract

While truth commissions have become the ‘go to’ response in the aftermath of violent conflict and human rights abuses, serious critical discussion on the extent to which commissions have tended to shape and reify the identities of victims and perpetrators and obscure the reality of structural culpability is only tentatively emerging in the field. Drawing on the literature from the field of transitional justice, this article critically interrogates the relationship between truth commissions and the three key constituencies of victims, perpetrators and structural actors. It suggests that binary oppositions between victims and perpetrators are frequently privileged, resulting in hierarchal conceptions of innocent victims and guilty perpetrators. These polarized categories fail to reflect the complexity of conflict and promote easy and uncritical allocations of blame and responsibility. It also argues that the capacity of truth commissions to engage with structural actors and the structural causes of conflict is limited due to the influence of human rights and criminal justice on transitional justice and an individualized focus on violations of civil and political rights. An impunity gap is thus created, eliding broader patterns of institutional complicity and responsibility for structural violence, while the focus on civil and political rights violations creates further hierarchies of harm and hierarchies of victimization. The paper concludes that greater recognition of the complexity of identity and involvement in conflict is required to provide a more honest reflection on the past and a more sustainable link between truth telling and peace building.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Professor Kieran McEvoy, Dr Luke Moffett and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article. All errors remain the author's own.

Notes

1. While beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that a lively debate has developed concerning how truth commissions should handle structural violence. For example, Mani (2008) argues that commissions should go further than analysing the causes of social injustice or marginalization and should propose workable solutions actionable by government. In contrast, Gready (2011, p. 25) states that while truth commissions could do more to name and analyse violations of economic and social rights, it is unrealistic to expect them to offer ‘informed strategic recommendations on everything from torture to education’ – they simply lack the expertise for such policy formulation (Waldorf, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

Parts of the article are drawn from a larger research project entitled ‘Voice, Agency and Blame: Victimhood and the Imagined Community in Northern Ireland’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/N001451/1].