Social Science Research Council – förlag

Transitional justice is often pursued in contexts where people have been forced from their homes by human rights violations and have suffered additional abuses while displaced. Little attention has been paid, however, to how transitional justice measures can respond to the injustices of displacement. Transitional Justice and Displacement is the result of a collaborative research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement. It examines the capacity of transitional justice measures to address displacement, engage the justice claims of displaced persons, and support durable solutions, and analyzes the links between transitional justice and the interventions of humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding actors. The book makes a compelling case for ensuring that justice measures address displacement and that responses to displacement incorporate transitional justice.

Transitional justice processes have a fundamental public dimension. Their impact depends in part on the social support they receive. For this reason, transitional justice bodies have increasingly implemented outreach programs. Beyond the role of outreach, however, other initiatives-such as media and cultural interventions-can strengthen, but also in some cases undermine, the public resonance of transitional justice. How can media and art be used to engage society in discussions about accountability and redress? How do media influence social perceptions and attitudes toward the legacy of the past? To what extent is social engagement in the public sphere necessary to advance the political transformation that transitional justice measures try to promote? Examining the roles that society and culture play in transitional justice contexts, the essays in this volume focus on the ways in which communicative practices can raise public awareness of and reflection on the legacies of mass abuse.

After periods of conflict and authoritarianism, educational institutions often need to be reformed or rebuilt. But in settings where education has been used to support repressive policies and human rights violations, or where conflict and abuses have resulted in lost educational opportunities, legacies of injustice may pose significant challenges to effective reform. Peacebuilding and development perspectives, which normally drive the reconstruction agenda, pay little attention to the violent past. Transitional Justice and Education: Learning Peace presents the findings of a research project of the International Center for Transitional Justice on the relationship between transitional justice and education in peacebuilding contexts. The book examines how transitional justice can shape the reform of education systems by ensuring programs are sensitive to the legacies of the past, how it can facilitate the reintegration of children and youth into society, and how education can engage younger generations in the work of transitional justice.

Rachel Dorothy Tanur (1958-2002) wasn't trained as a social scientist, but she cared deeply about people and their lives and was an acute observer of living conditions and interactions. Her profound empathy for others and her commitment to helping those less fortunate than herself accompanied her on her travels and often guided her photography. She delighted in capturing the interaction between people and the artifacts they created and used, which, of course, are the raw materials of social science. In 1999 Tanur was diagnosed with cancer, and in response, she made several trips to Cuba, South and Central America, Africa, and Europe, as well as across the United States, before her death at the age of 43. The following year, Tanur's family and friends organized a memorial exhibit at Gilda's Club in New York called Cancer Journeys. The Social Science Research Council then opened its space for second show entitled Photographic Journeys. When Nikita Pokrovsky of Moscow's State University-Higher School of Economics experienced the SSRC exhibit, he was struck by the "human passion and compassion" of Tanur's work.He suggested combining the photographs with commentary, transforming the photos into useful tools for visual social science. These commentaries, written by an international group of social scientists, now accompany close to fifty of Rachel's photographs, and together the exhibit made its debut at the National Science Foundation in their Art of Science's 2006 show, Visualizing Social Science. This volume is an extension of that exhibition.

Though it is rarely explicitly articulated, many believe that there is no "public" in the Middle East. Scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa almost always engages with politics-a prominent focus of this region-yet the assumed absence of public spaces and fora has led many to think that debate, consensus, and concerted social action are antithetical to the cultural, religious, and national heritage of the region. It is a mistake to exclude the public dimension from the study of processes in this region. Recent studies have demonstrated not only the critical importance of the public in everyday practices of the MENA region, but they have also shown how the term and notion of the public sphere can be used productively to advance understandings of collective life. The first section of this volume offers alternative conceptions of the public sphere through rich and innovative theoretical analysis. Philosophical investigations focus on the role of collective action, the relationship between nationalism and democracy, and the notions of the public employed by socioreligious movements.The second section addresses a wide range of counter-hegemonic discourses and practices that enable the public sphere, such as memoirs, testimonies, strategies of surveillance, the Tehran bazaar, and the movements of migratory workers. The third section provides empirical accounts of the way in which mutual communication through technology has vitally expanded the notion of the public in the MENA region. In conclusion, conflict and resistance are shown to be generative forces in public discourse and debate and in the production of national publics.

Arguing that excluded and marginalized social groups should benefit from the growth of international higher education, Origins, Journeys and Returns reports on the development and impact of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP) which is designed to further social justice in some of the world's poorest, most populous, and most unequal countries. Extending opportunities for advanced education to individuals from marginalized communities has a significant impact that transcends individual beneficiaries. In 2001, the Ford Foundation began to dedicate substantial resources toward providing disadvantaged groups with postgraduate education, a process that gave hope to many. Fellows' academic success challenged presumptions about the disadvantaged and their ability to benefit from educational opportunities in prestigious international universities. Alumni have also exhibited a deep dedication to their communities, proving there is a collective return on investing in individuals. In some regions, IFP practices have modified institutional practices in universities and other fellowship programs.Through case studies of seven countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Origins, Journeys and Returns shows how nuanced approaches to defining the disadvantaged, along with flexible, local implementation of global program goals can actually counter "brain drain" and empower individuals to effect social change at home.

As developing societies emerge from legacies of conflict and authoritarianism, they are frequently beset by poverty, inequality, weak institutions, broken infrastructure, poor governance, insecurity, and low levels of social capital. These countries also tend to propagate massive human rights violations, which displace victims who are marginalized, handicapped, widowed, and orphaned--in other words, people with strong claims to justice. Those who work with others to address development and justice often fail to supply a coherent response to these concerns. The essays in this volume confront the intricacies--and interconnectedness--of transitional governance issues head on, mapping the relationship between two fields that, academically and in practice, have grown largely in isolation of one another. The result of a research project conducted by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), this book explains how justice and recovery can be aligned not only in theory but also in practice, among both people and governments as they reform.

For the past twenty years, international donors have invested heavily in large-scale disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, while, at the same time, transitional justice measures have proliferated, bringing truth, justice, and reparations to those recovering from state violence and civil war. Yet DDR programs are seldom deconstructed to discover whether they truly achieve their justice-related aims. Additionally, transitional justice mechanisms rarely articulate strategies for coordinating with DDR. Disarming the Past examines the connections--and failures--between these two initiatives within peacebuilding contexts and evaluates future links between DDR programs and the aims of transitional justice. The outcome of a substantial research project initiated by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), this book is crucial for anyone interested in effective interventions and enduring outcomes.

What happens to women whose lives are affected by human rights violations? What happens to their testimony in court or in front of a truth commission? Women face a double marginalization under authoritarian regimes and during and after violent conflicts. Yet reparations programs are rarely designed to address the needs of women victims. What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations emphasizes the necessity of a gender dimension in reparations programs to improve their handling of female victims and their families. A joint project of the International Center for Transitional Justice and Canada's International Development Research Centre, What Happened to the Women? includes studies of gender and reparations policies in Guatemala, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Timor-Leste. Contributors represent a wide range of fields related to transitional justice and include international human rights lawyers, members of truth and reconciliation commissions, and NGO representatives.

Digital technologies are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia and YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and other new architectures of agency and control. We have even fewer accounts of how these new capacities have transformed our shared cultures and our understanding of and capacities to act within them. This volume addresses these issues and supplies the demand for a comprehensive critical framework that places these developments in context.