The Construction of Victim-Perpetrator Identities in Transitional Justice

Abstract

The panel aims at bringing together early career researchers to explore how transitional justice accounts for the complexity of identities in political violence. In the context of mass atrocity, the line between perpetrators and victims is often blurred and the complex “network of human relations […] [cannot] be reduced to the two units of victims and perpetrators” (Levi 1989). The panel is interested in how diverse transitional justice mechanisms such as memorials, tribunals or truth commissions represent, shape and reify identities in the aftermath of mass atrocity. The panellists will discuss how transitional justice mechanisms construct identities in post-conflict societies between the need for the acknowledgement and specific naming of identities and the challenge of reducing their complexity and nuances. The panel is specifically interested in theoretically informed case studies on the construction of victimhood in the aftermath of mass atrocity. Transitional justice mechanisms may for instance merely be interested in representing or responding to ‘pure’, ‘innocent’ or ‘ideal’ victims. They may thereby introduce a problematic hierarchy of victims that excludes or marginalises more complex experiences of victimized individuals and prevents questioning the processes of othering that initially led to political violence. The panel will also ask how the construction of who is a ‘victim’ relates to the construction of what it is to be a ‘perpetrator’, and how the very conception of a ‘victim’ frames how we think about political violence and the justice that is required to address it. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers embedded in various approaches and disciplines from early career researchers who engage with the issue of complex identities in transitional justice.

Title	Details
Memorial Sites as Centers for Public Memory, Space, and Healing: The Case for the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center and Cemetery to the Victims of the 1995 Genocide	View Paper Details
Transitional Justice, the Denial of Agency and Victimhood of the Child: A Case Study on Former Child Soldiers in Colombia	View Paper Details
Complex Political Victims and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal: A Case Study of the Construction of Victimhood in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity	View Paper Details
Navigating Complex Identities of Victim-Perpetrators in Reparation Mechanisms	View Paper Details
Introduction – The Role of Lawyers in the Construction of Victim/Perpetrator Identities in Transitional Justice	View Paper Details