Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, February 2008. Guatemalan women march in support of reparations for victims of the armed conflict. Photo by Brooke Anderson.
In Iraq, the Balkans, Guatemala and elsewhere, ethnicity and religion create troubling complications for transitional justice efforts. Recently in The Hague, expert testimony was given at the trial of Serbian nationalist Vojislav Šešelj concerning the systematic destruction of cultural sites during the war in Bosnia-mosques, churches, libraries, and other physical heritage so crucial to the maintenance of communal identities. But once these sites are gone, and communal bitterness and patterns of segregation have set in, what can be done to repair the damage and help foster trust?
This is one of many questions the Research Unit of ICTJ tackled in its research project: Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies. In post conflict societies, histories of exclusion, racism, and nationalist violence often create divisions so deep that finding a way to agree on the atrocities of the past seems near-impossible. Many factors may play a role in fostering division:
- a pervasive sense of threat or fear of attack.
- widespread belief in myths that dehumanize other groups and can be mobilized by nationalist leaders for political ends.
- mistrust among ordinary citizens as well as political elites, especially when discrimination continues to be officially sanctioned, and groups do not believe the guarantees offered by the other side to be credible.
- miscommunication and failures of communication between groups.
- continuing conflict over access to resources.
- lack of recognition on all sides of basic human needs such as identity and dignity.
With the help of a global group of researchers from South Africa, Peru, Spain, India, Cameroon, Guatemala, Canada, the United States, and Argentina, the Identities in Transition Project looked for ways to give identity its due.
Two of our main goals are to:
- ensure that transitional justice measures are sensitive to the ways in which targeting people on the basis of their ethnic or religious identity may cause distinctive harms--as in the case of destroying cultural heritage dear to them.
- clarify the difficult political challenges that arise in societies where communities are not ready to cooperate, or even agree on a definition of who the victims are.
If transitional justice can find ways to act as a means of political learning across communities, foster trust and recognition, and if it can serve to breakdown harmful myths and stereotypes, then this will be at least a small step toward meeting the challenges for transitional justice in divided societies.
The project began in January 2007, and continued through the end of 2008. A report entitled "Identities in Transition: Developing Better Transitional Justice Initiatives in Divided Societies," published in November 2009, provides guidance to policymakers and practitioners.
Please also find Research Briefs for all of the project's studies through links below and on the left-hand side of this page. Information on the forthcoming book for this project will be posted here when it is available.
Commissioned Studies, Identities in Transition Project:
- Transitional Justice, Federalism and the Accommodation of Minority Nationalism
by Will Kymlicka, Queens University (Canada)
- Transitional Justice and the Rights of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples
by Chris Chapman, Minority Rights Group
- Transitional Justice for Indigenous People in a Non-transitional Society
by Courtney Jung, University of Toronto
- History Education Reform, Transitional Justice and the Transformation of Identities
by Elizabeth A. Cole, United States Institute of Peace, and Karen Murphy, Facing History and Ourselves
- "Fear of the Future, Lived through the Past": Transitional Justice in the Wake of Ethnic Conflict
by Paige Arthur, ICTJ
- Silences, Visibility and Agency: Ethnicity, Class and Gender in Public Memorialization
by Elizabeth Jelin, CONICET-IDES (Argentina)
- Truth Telling, Identities, and Power in South Africa and Guatemala
by Madeleine Fullard, Independent Researcher, and Nicky Rousseau, University of the Western Cape (South Africa)
- Indigenous Peoples and Claims for Reparation: Tentative Steps in Peru and Guatemala
by Ruth Rubio-Marín, European University Institute (Italy), Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, Institute for the Comparative Study of Criminal Law (Guatemala), and Julie Guillerot, Independent Researcher
- Security System Reform and Identity in Divided Societies: Lessons from Northern Ireland
by Mary O'Rawe, Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster (Northern Ireland)
- Staging Violence, Staging Identities: Identity Politics in Domestic Prosecutions
by Christiane Wilke, Carleton University (Canada)
- International and Hybrid Criminal Jurisdictions: Stigmatizing or Reconciling?
by Cécile Aptel, ICTJ
(Updated January 2010)
