By Pablo de Greiff
PREFACE
It takes daring to put together a collection of papers on the “state of truth in the world” in what has come to be known as a “post-truth” era. The task becomes even more complicated as the truths in question have to do with human rights violations, given that the very notion of human rights has itself come to be the object of such vitriolic criticism, even from presumptive friends. To the no-longer-new critiques of human rights on grounds of false universality or eurocentrism, or of the individualistic nature of the notion,[1] other objections have been added and acquired more salience recently, including the alleged inadequacy of human rights for stemming the maldistribution that now afflicts virtually every country in the world,[2] their methodological elitist dependence on legal expertise that obscures the agency of victims and others[3] and their alleged focus on short-term and narrow solutions rather than on more emancipatory aims relating to systemic change, to mention just a few of the more recent critiques.[4] Some of these critiques have affected the human rights agenda, for example, in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, where the historical disparities in resources, attention and priorities between the three pillars of the institution—peace and security, development and human rights—far from being corrected, are getting worse. So even the institution that is supposed to be the main custodian and promoter of human rights is seen by many as growing increasingly hesitant to launch large, ambitious projects grounded on the basis of rights. Arguably, what was the most ambitious undertaking pre-pandemic, the Sustainable Development Goals, was thought of as a way to satisfy rights without using the notion directly.[5]
The magnitude of the task undertaken by this project is only magnified by the fact that the case studies are diverse along many axes; some of the country cases relate to the efforts to achieve “truth” about human rights violations—more about the notion of truth to come later in this volume—in post-conflict countries (e.g., Colombia, Lebanon, Sri Lanka), some in countries where conflict is ongoing (e.g., Afghanistan, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine), some in authoritarian countries (e.g., China or traveling in that direction, Tunisia, Venezuela) and some where the violations are more the result of factors having to do with organized crime than with more conventional political struggles (e.g., Mexico). It is not only the variety in the typology of “conflict” (using the term broadly) that is diverse in the sample chosen, so is the “termination” or settlement of the conflict: in some of the countries (e.g., Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela), there has been no settlement and the conflict rages on; in others (e.g., Central African Republic), the conflict is “cyclical” or periodic; in others, there have been peace agreements—sometimes one, sometimes more than one (Lebanon)—that to some extent at least have settled parts of the conflict (Colombia); in others (e.g., Sri Lanka), the “settlement” has come about militarily; and in others, by “regime change” (e.g., The Gambia).
As is obvious from the countries mentioned thus far, they are also geographically dispersed (in the full list, there are six countries in Africa: Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Guinea, South Sudan, Sudan; four countries in the Americas: Colombia, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela; four Asian countries: Afghanistan, China, Myanmar,[6] Sri Lanka; three countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region:[7] Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia; and one country in Europe: Ukraine). The countries in the sample are very different in terms of economic factors, so, to illustrate by means of an (oversimplifying) index, ranking them by nominal gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in U.S. dollars,[8] the list would be: US (7), China (64), Mexico (68), Colombia (97), Ukraine (114), Lebanon (122), Tunisia (123), Venezuela (129), Sri Lanka (133), Guinea (158), Ethiopia (159), Myanmar (168), Sudan (171), Syria (174), Gambia (177), Central African Republic (CAR) (187), South Sudan (189), and Afghanistan (191). They are also very different in terms of demographics and legal and religious backgrounds. In temporal terms, the sample includes countries that have had long-standing conflicts or violations over different periods of time—some of them “bunched” in relatively short periods, others spanning decades or even centuries, some of them proximate, and others in the distant past (not all the country case studies are about conflict in a conventional sense; some of them have to do with the legacies of historical injustices [e.g., the case study of the legacies of slavery and the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in the United States, or the case study about the treatment of the Uyghur population in China today]). Some of the countries have received significant international assistance in their efforts to achieve truth and justice, such as interventions from the International Criminal Court (e.g., Sudan), various forms of UN assistance ranging from Security-Council-mandated peace-keeping operations (e.g., Central African Republic) to more political missions (e.g., the “verification” mission in Colombia) to technical support by various offices and agencies (e.g., Tunisia). Some have received no international support (China and the U.S. , which are not conflict cases to begin with). As if this were not enough diversity and complexity, the collection includes thematic papers on the status of truth during COVID-19, conflict trends, gender and local approaches to truth. Finally, the collection uses “truth” as a “placeholder” of sorts for initiatives in three distinct, albeit related (and, as it turns out, in some of the papers, overlapping) domains: (criminal) justice—both at the national level and internationally—”memory” (itself a term that refers to various efforts from “micro” level memorialization rituals to the more “macro” level public memorialization that takes the shape of monuments, museums, archives and memorials in general) and education (another broad category, mostly intended to refer to official policies regarding formal education about the history of a conflict—understanding the term broadly—or the violations and abuses).
With such a diverse sample and complex analytical frame, the task is gargantuan. But there is something extraordinarily useful for those interested in “accountability” (to use another broad term) in having briefs about ongoing developments in such a diverse set of cases, written by local actors who are deeply familiar with the situation about which they write and can document their pieces so well (the volume as a whole is just shy of having 1,000 footnotes!). It turns out there is great merit in the papers not aspiring to be exhaustive, but rather (to use the term the editors chose for the case studies) that they are “snapshots” of the current efforts to make progress in the three domains of (criminal) justice, memory and education. Inevitably, not all papers cover exactly the same topics under each heading, given the variety of the cases, the breadth of the categories and the multiplicity of approaches to the issues in the countries examined. Nevertheless, given the proliferation of countries where accountability is an issue, thoughtful, well documented, synthetic pieces about the ongoing cases in a single volume is of great service.
It could have been thought, particularly given that this is not a collection that examines, retrospectively, the implementation of measures in the three domains of inquiry but rather concentrates on cases in which the efforts are ongoing, and even more so, in contexts that for different reasons are not particularly auspicious (the reasons why it is difficult to deal with racial justice in the U.S. are not the same that explain why it is difficult to achieve justice for the violations against the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Uyghurs in China, or to bring to account those responsible for violations in Syria, or Venezuela) that the general impression that the volume as a whole would leave would be despair, a confirmation of the futility of efforts to seek the truth, achieve justice, promote memorialization and impart reliable and veridical historical accounts of the conflicts examined. Admittedly, it is true that there are few “success stories” in the collection. Nevertheless, the two main impressions the collection as a whole produces are first admiration for the extraordinary resilience of people’s search for truth and justice, even in inauspicious circumstances; and second, that despite all, a conceptual architecture that enshrines rights to truth, justice and reparations (there is not much about non-recurrence explicitly in the papers, but this is almost certainly a function of what authors were asked to respond to) has taken hold and, hence, the valiant efforts to realize them as evidenced by the accounts in the snapshots.
Some generalizations are easy to make: women are shown to be critical actors in the search for truth (even in the very wide sense in which the term “truth” is used in the collection). The past is often instrumentalized for political purposes. This includes the misuse of the formal educational system. But “counternarratives” produced by various actors are widely shared, even when formal education stops short of the conflict (as happens in many of countries studied), and even more so when the formal system presents a sanitized, politically expedient version of history. One can say that people do not forget, and that they come up with ways of memorializing their dead ones, even in the face of opposition.[9] For these and other reasons, “cultural interventions,” including the arts, in all its forms—graphic, performative, literary, etc.—are important.[10]
Whether the efforts to apply what in certain contexts is similar to at least some of the countries in the list the volume addresses one would call “transitional justice” will ultimately succeed of course cannot be predicted in advance. But the “snapshots” can act as “data points” for future analysis of the conditions of success or failure of the measures. Given the diversity of the sample, it might be possible, in the future, to examine whether there are at least correlations between, for example, economic factors and the successful implementation of the measures; whether a more refined typology of conflict allows for better estimations of the likelihood of success or failure of the various initiatives; whether the measures prove to be “fit-to-purpose” to address phenomena such as historical injustices or the massive “reeducation” of millions of people; and whether the measures lose their plausibility in the face of global disturbances such as pandemics or environmental changes and events.
Of course, the snapshots on their own will not be sufficient to answer complex questions of this sort. But the fact that they provoke them already is an incentive for further research and reflection on these and other topics. And, again, the collection provides an extremely convenient way to be “updated” about a hugely diverse set of ongoing cases.
Pablo de Greiff
Senior Fellow, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
First UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees on non-recurrence
Notes
[1] See, e.g., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
[2] See, e.g., Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[3] See, e.g., David Kennedy, “The International Human Rights Regime: Still Part of the Problem?” in Examining Critical Perspectives on Human Rights, Robert Dickinson, et al., eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[4] Stephen Hopgood’s The Enditmes of Human Rights (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013) was an influential early critique. See also his “Human Rights on the Road to Nowhere” in Human Rights Futures, Stephen Hopwood, Jack Snyder, and Leslie Vinjamuri, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[5] It has been argued that the predecessors of the SDGs, the Millenium Development Goals, were a form of developmentalism that exemplified a certain reticence toward human rights (even if politically justified, nevertheless a worrisome trend) in “Some thoughts on the Development and Present State of Transitional Justice,” Zeitschrift für Menschenrechte /Journal for Human Rights 5, 2 (2011).
[6] The case study in the volume addresses the situation of the Rohingya population, mainly in Bangladesh.
[7] Here departing from the UN regional country categorizations and using instead the OSCE grouping.
[8] Based on the United Nations Statistics Division data for all countries (based on 2021 figures, meaning that the ranking would be different for some of the countries in the sample at present. In parenthesis, place in the ranking for that year). See https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/basic.
[9] I have long had reservations about using “memory” as a category that stands for “history” or “truth,” for even on constructivist accounts of both, history, strictly speaking, calls for methodology designed to improve the reliability (i.e., veracity) of the accounts of the past. Memory, more appropriately a description of a “mental” phenomenon obeys no such methods. See, e.g., my debate with David Rieff around the question “Does collective remembrance of a troubled past impede reconciliation?” at https://www.ictj.org/news/online-debate-remembrance-reconciliation
[10] See, e.g., “On Making the Invisible Visible: The Role of Cultural Interventions in Transitional Justice Processes,” in, Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society Clara Ramírez-Barat, ed. (New York: Social Sciences Research Council, 2014).
