The Pressures of Getting it ‘Right’: Expertise and Victims’ Voices in the Work of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

This paper contributes to scholarship on expertise and agency in donor-funded transitional justice. It sets out to clarify the relationship between agency arising from expertise on the one hand, and victims’ ‘unprofessional’ voices on the other. In short, I argue that professional agency − usually embodied by highly educated and committed practitioners − ensures narrowly defined project success by managing, interpreting and thus marginalizing the voices of directly affected people without claims to relevant expertise. This marginalisation is not coincidental, nor can it be prevented through professionally planned and organised ‘victim participation’. Rather, the marginalisation of unprofessional voices is the price to be paid for professional transitional justice. If this seems too high a price to pay, the alternative may be to favour less professionalised and more open-ended instead of output-oriented processes. I approach the relationship between expertise and unprofessional voices via a micro-perspective on one transitional justice project: the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was operational between 2002 and 2004. Based on interviews and archival material, the paper explores and analyses the TRC’s work on sexual violence, which the commission was mandated to pay special attention to. This work was driven by the notion that there was a ‘right’ way of dealing with (female) victims of sexual violence and their stories. Many staff members – especially those most committed to making the project a success – did not consider it an open and potentially contested process, but one in which mistakes had to be avoided. While staff hailed from different countries in the Global South and North, their professional habitus concurred in that they highly valued transitional justice expertise. Such expertise enabled a specific type of agency that managed, controlled, and thus marginalized victims’ voices: in the sense that victims were assigned specific roles and could only be heard and considered through the filter of expertise.