Punishing silence: complex victimhood among everyday ex-combatants in Sierra Leone’s truth commission

Transitional Justice is characterized by its victim-centredness. As a toolkit of accountability measures to help states transition from histories of violence to peace, transitional justice prescribes what is today considered necessary and indeed inevitable for societies to successfully break away from their violent pasts. Beyond this, transitional justice further diagnoses its participant populations, into deserving victims, and damned perpetrators, adopting a largely binary framework of participation into which complex individual conflict experiences are subsumed, and within which the (externally defined) needs of designated victims are prioritized. The political construction of victimhood within transitional justice is increasingly criticized among scholars, who seek to illuminate the participatory shortcomings that emerge from the binary designation of conflict-affected populations into either victims or perpetrators, and the subsequent victim-centredness of transitional justice mechanisms. This paper advances these critiques of transitional justice, by examining the silences of everyday ex-combatants within Sierra Leone’s truth and reconciliation commission (TRC). It argues that frictions between ex-combatant justice hopes against restrictive institutional expectations around their role within the TRC interacted to silence this population. It advances calls for greater recognition of complex victimhood within transitional justice, away from static and binary understandings of victims and perpetrators as mutually exclusive categories, towards an integration of the fluid and intersecting experiences that characterize the reality of war among conflict-affected individuals.