Thematic Reports
Conflict
The links between armed conflict and truth are impossible to ignore: the ways war is waged, justified and resolved are subject to certain understandings of both the past and present. Moreover, resolving armed conflict demands an engagement with the past to understand its root causes and drivers. Cycles of violence are sustained in part by the refusal of communities, armed groups, or political elites to accept the truths of past and ongoing conflict. They are also sustained by impunity for those who have benefited from and driven atrocities. In this sense, truth, memory, justice and education can serve as mitigators or amplifiers of conflict, while conflict interrupts and intensifies the need for truth, justice, memory, and education.
Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation
In countries affected by conflict or enduring other types of mass atrocities, women and LGBTQIA+[1] people are likely to suffer ongoing and severe violations of their human rights. At the same time, these groups are less likely to be adequately represented in truth-telling or justice mechanisms, receive justice for the violations they suffered, or have the truth of what happened to them acknowledged by their communities. These trends persist despite UN member states’ commitments to the Agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 5 on achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls by 2030.[i] The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing conflict, and patriarchal ideologies[2] continue to curtail women's rights and LGBTQIA+ rights globally, threatening hard-won victories in gender equality.[ii]
Local Approaches
Local communities develop their own understanding of and approaches to the truths of the past. The future of peace and conflict in a country often depends on how truth is handled at the local level, including who is allowed to speak truthfully and in what context. Civil society, religious actors, and survivor communities themselves can all be involved in local approaches to truth-telling, which often better reflect the needs of communities than national-level truth and justice initiatives.
COVID-19
COVID-19 changed how people live, work, interact and educate. It is not possible to reflect on the state of truth in the world in 2023 without acknowledging the pandemic’s profound and long-lasting influence on human security, human rights and transitional justice. In late 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission first reported on a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, sounding the alarm on what the World Health Organization would soon classify as a global pandemic. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, would spread throughout the world rapidly, infecting at least 663 million people and killing more than 6.7 million within three years. The geopolitical, economic and social disruptions of COVID-19 fueled the largest global recession since the Great Depression, while leading to widespread food and supply shortages. Under waves of restrictions intended to curb the virus’s transmission, tens of millions of people were pushed into extreme poverty, reversing developmental gains across all regions, but particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The case studies referenced here and throughout this report illuminate how the pandemic shaped memory, justice and education, reflecting key challenges and opportunities in how we reckon with the past.