Resisting Erasure: Reimagining the Boundaries of Human Rights and Transitional Justice

In what ways do the fields of human rights and transitional justice erase voices and experiences? What are the implications of this erasure? And, how does research participate in, and resist, the dangers of erasure? Recent developments in scholarship and thinking on human rights and transitional justice have been concerned with the processes and effects of the invisibilisation of certain voices, perspectives, and experiences. Work as diverse as anthropological studies of silence, to legal sociologies of courtroom testimonies, have highlighted the biases and boundaries in human rights and transitional justice that limits recognition, participation and agency within these domains. Scholarship anchored in critical feminist thinking and decoloniality has condemned the intersectional shortcomings of transitional justice mechanisms and human rights instruments whose implementation erases both the histories and legacies of patriarchal and colonial power dynamics. Erasure is thus a clear danger in research, policy and practice. Beyond erasure as selective recognition, and elevation, of certain voices over others, research is increasingly drawing attention to chosen silence – highlighting the need to understand why some voices choose silence. Erasure can therefore be understood in a multitude of different ways, and not everyone shares the same vocabulary when grappling with such dynamics. What we do know is that the absence of certain voices, perspectives, and experiences is related to how power operates and that such absences can be both chosen and enforced. This in turn has profound effects on the way we do research, and the way policies are developed and implemented. How does and can research reproduce and/or resist erasure in human rights and transitional justice? In the fields of human rights and transitional justice, where harm is addressed and inequalities tackled, it is incumbent upon us to consider not only what is said and done, but equally to interrogate what is not said, written, acknowledged or addressed. Growing levels of political violence, large scale human rights abuses and armed conflicts around the world add urgency to the need to critically examine why some voices matter more than others, and what resisting erasure does, and can, look like for the future of human rights implementation and transitional justice mechanisms.