Melissa Demian – författare

Transitional justice seeks to establish a break between the violent past and a peaceful, democratic future, and is based on compelling frameworks of resolution, rupture and transition. Bringing together contributions from the disciplines of law, history and anthropology, this comprehensive volume challenges these frameworks, opening up critical conversations around the concepts of justice and injustice; history and record; and healing, transition and resolution. The authors explore how these concepts operate across time and space, as well as disciplinary boundaries. They examine how transitional justice mechanisms are utilised to resolve complex legacies of violence in ways that are often narrow, partial and incomplete, and reinforce existing relations of power. They also destabilise the sharp distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’ war or conflict that narratives of transition and resolution assume and reproduce.As transitional justice continues to be celebrated and promoted around the globe, this book provides a much-needed reflection on its role and promises. It not only critiques transitional justice frameworks but offers new ways of thinking about questions of violence, conflict, justice and injustice. It was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal.

Transitional justice seeks to establish a break between the violent past and a peaceful, democratic future, and is based on compelling frameworks of resolution, rupture and transition. Bringing together contributions from the disciplines of law, history and anthropology, this comprehensive volume challenges these frameworks, opening up critical conversations around the concepts of justice and injustice; history and record; and healing, transition and resolution. The authors explore how these concepts operate across time and space, as well as disciplinary boundaries. They examine how transitional justice mechanisms are utilised to resolve complex legacies of violence in ways that are often narrow, partial and incomplete, and reinforce existing relations of power. They also destabilise the sharp distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’ war or conflict that narratives of transition and resolution assume and reproduce.As transitional justice continues to be celebrated and promoted around the globe, this book provides a much-needed reflection on its role and promises. It not only critiques transitional justice frameworks but offers new ways of thinking about questions of violence, conflict, justice and injustice. It was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Feminist Law Journal.

This book explores the role and implications of responsibility for anthropology, asking how responsibility is recognised and invoked in the world, what relations it draws upon, and how it comes to define notions of the person, institutional practices, ways of knowing and modes of evaluation. The category of responsibility has a long genealogy within the discipline of anthropology and it surfaces in contemporary debates as well as in anthropologists’ collaboration with other disciplines, including when anthropology is applied in fields such as development, medicine, and humanitarian response. As a category that unsettles, challenges and critically engages with political, ethical and epistemological questions, responsibility is central to anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, collaborative research, and applied engagement. With chapters focused on a variety of cultural contexts, this volume considers how anthropology can contribute to a better understanding of responsibility, including the ‘responsibility of anthropology’ and the responsibility of anthropologists to specific others.

Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw “globalization” come and go. Suau people encountered the leading edge of missionization and colonialism in Papua New Guinea and were active participants in the Second World War. In Memory of Times to Come offers a nuanced account of how people assess their own experience of change over the course of a critical century. It asks two key questions: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future, and what does it mean to claim that one has lost one’s culture, but not because anyone else took it away or destroyed it?