The art of justice in South Sudan: an ethnographic examination of arts as unconventional and unrecognized transitional justice spaces

In South Sudan promises of transitional justice remain unfulfilled and peace remains fragile. Despite this, artists and activists use the arts as creative spaces to pursue reconciliation and resistance. This paper ethnographically examines the intersection of art(s) and politics in South Sudan and the opportunities and challenges contained within these unconventional and unrecognized transitional justice spaces. At the level of opportunity this paper argues for the need to expand the gaze of transitional justice. In South Sudan the existence and emergence of particular arts spaces serve as unconventional sites of transitional justice. This paper empirically examines how the arts are used as tools for resistance, accountability, reconciliation and transformation by political cartoonists, art trauma therapy practitioners, and artist activists. Drawing on memory studies, this study explores how the arts challenge hegemonic memory in a context of state repression. At the level of challenge this paper investigates the limitations to artistic expressions of transitional justice in South Sudan. It argues that the vocabulary of transitional justice has created a language of exclusion. In South Sudan, the transitional justice properties and potential of its artistic embodiments are largely unrecognized, including by artists themselves. This paper empirically unpacks the implications of how the vocabulary of transitional justice limits recognition of its more creative embodiments. Lastly, this paper discusses the epistemological implications of arts as sites of ethnography on researcher positionality, knowledge production and impact. I discuss the use of indigenous methodologies as tools for decentering artistically-informed knowledge production and reflect on the current limitations to knowledge production that artist relationships present within my ongoing research.