Writing against terror : a different vocabulary for transitional justice

Abstract

This thesis is a creative critique of transitional justice. It critically assesses policy oriented legal debates on transitional justice, what I call the pragmatic transitional justice literature, as they are structured by the liberal narrative of modern progress in which a democratisation agenda based on human rights prioritises addressing violence against the body of individuals. Contrary to this literature's assumed claim that democracy plus capitalism equals peace, I argue that the narrative of progress obliterates the violent historical relation between forced displacement and the consolidation of capital extraction and labour exploitation. When transitional justice is framed by the liberal progress agenda it reveals one kind of violence and covers up another. By reflecting on violence and silence in the Caribbean mountains of Colombia, I show how the 2000's massacres radically changed practices providing community well-being. Not only were the lives of loved ones lost. The massacres were also an attempt to destroy a mode of living in the world. I understand this violence as a silencing: an attempt to dismantle a meaningful experience of the world. I am concerned that processes of transitional justice attend to this kind of silencing""but the problem becomes, how? Revising more critical, field-based and theoretical debates on transitional justice, what I call conceptual transitional justice literature, the notion of haunting emerged as useful for opening up transitional justice to political imagination. This notion helped me to challenge the narrative of progress by conjuring up the "doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself" (Derrida, 1994, p. 48). The question here is: what can haunting teach us about how to attend to silence, loss and death? How can it teach us to listen to seemingly disappeared non-capitalist worlds? In this thesis I pursued a research agenda interested in using haunting as a strategy to craft a different language capable of envisioning new political possibilities for transitional justice. I found that in order to work against the silencing terror of the massacres I needed a mode of listening that corresponded to this notion of haunting. To make the conceptual promise of haunting productive for re-imagining transitional justice, I decided to perform theôria or travelling with concepts. Theôria is a methodology that draws from the experience of dislocation, of exposure to the unfamiliar, to difference, in search for learning from other ways to give meaning to the world. I went to Indonesia, a privileged site to learn from haunting. Here, one million suspected communists were massacred in the mid-1960s. General Suharto utilised the massacres to remain in power for thirty years, consolidating a political and military elite that profits from a ruthless extractive capitalism. Drawing on historical accounts and Joseph Oppenheimer's documentary films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, I analysed the historical origins and contemporary effectiveness of Suharto's narrative of development. I showed how his silencing strategy consisted in breaking the link between meaning-making and livelihood practices. I then went to Kulon 8 Progo in Central Java, where Muslims and Catholics share the same living space. I observed how the active agency of the dead articulates diverse religious and economic practices that make up a community economy. By listening actively when attending to these practices, my theôria unlocked a new vocabulary of political possibility, one defined by the cohabitation across lines of cultural and religious difference and between the living and the dead, and communicative protocols required to support a shared form of existing in which wellbeing (economic and cultural) is produced through commoning practices. What emerges from these concepts is a different understanding and practice of transitional justice that breaks with both the form and trajectory of "progress." The normative core of this new transitional justice can be understood as the end of the silencing processes that "progress" imposes. This would require enacting listening practices that acknowledge cohabitation and can learn from diverse forms of living in the world. These listening practices are active processes of creating the conditions for the kind of communication necessary for this learning. A communication of this kind can craft and nourish an abundance of strategies that can host the commoning of wellbeing.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English