Human rights, justice processes and the performance of truth-seeking Towards a better understanding of networked truth regimes and their societal impact

Abstract

The notion of truth lies at the heart of struggles for justice. Whether we consider efforts aimed at documenting human rights violations in general, initiatives aimed at gathering evidence to build a case before a court, truth-seeking processes in the context of political transitions, artistic practices seeking to presence lived realities of injustice, or archives and museums revisiting their collections as part of their efforts to decolonize their collections and practices – truth, and how it is understood, lies at the core of these processes. And yet, truth is an ephemeral and highly contested notion, which refers not only to an outcome, but also to the process of seeking truth. This is a highly volatile multi-vocal and multi-layered process in which the notion of performance is central: how truth seeking is performed, shapes how injustices are perceived, and more broadly, how they find their way into the public (and legal) discourse to contribute to change. This centrality of performance, leads the presenters in this panel to explicitly engage with artistic practices and concepts, to explore how the performative dimension of truth seeking shapes various struggles for justice. The concern with truth and truth seeking inevitably steers the conversation in the direction of transitional justice. While this framing is – implicitly or explicitly – used in some of the cases included here, these are all cases of ‘aparadigmatic’ transitional justice, meaning that the struggles for justice either concern situations of ongoing violence (e.g. in Syria) or post-colonial struggles in consolidated democracies. In these diverse contexts, stakeholders have installed a range of truth initiatives for a variety of reasons, in a variety of ways, and with a variety of objectives such as accountability, acknowledgment, and redress, or social change. These initiatives have their own performative logic, as well as their own understanding of what truth is, how it can be achieved or what it can (and should) do at a societal level. The papers in this panel examine how these different but inter-connected truth initiatives are (per)formed, interact and contribute to recognition of injustice and human rights violations. The panel brings together PhDs, postdocs, professorial staff with various levels of seniority, as well as including people with a background in the arts, research and (NGO and museum) practice.

Title	Details
Truth Seeking in Syrian Literary Writing	View Paper Details
Literary accountability and the future of human rights protection	View Paper Details
Migrating Heritage: lived realities of conflict and forced displacement	View Paper Details