Confronting Atrocity: Human Rights and Restorative Justice

In truth and reconciliation settings, particular narratives are recounted by victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and legal experts, each employing distinct rhetorical strategies. Their testimonies, reported by the media and represented in various cultural forms, profoundly influence public understanding and collective memory in post-conflict societies. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of international scholars across the humanities and social sciences, policymakers and cultural producers, Narrating Transitional Justice examines truth and reconciliation commissions as acts of public storytelling. Contributors elaborate on how these testimonies function as creative grist for cultural producers to reconstruct, redefine, and reappraise transitional justice work. They further examine the inimitable insights that creative imaginaries – in the form of literature, theatre, film, fine art, popular music, street art, and online media – offer about the remaking of nations fractured by long histories of human rights violations. Critically reflecting on debates around the centrality of storytelling in transitional justice processes, Narrating Transitional Justice asks: what are the discourses embedded in the varied stories of reconciliation actors, and how do these function as acts of state-making after atrocity? Paul Ugor (Editor) Paul Ugor is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Bonny Ibhawoh (Editor) Bonny Ibhawoh is Senator William McMaster Chair in Global Human Rights at McMaster University. Narrating Transitional Justice asks: what are the discourses embedded in the varied stories of reconciliation actors, and how do these function as acts of state-making after atrocity? Series Editors: Bonny Ibhawoh, Juanita De Barros, and Paul Ugor Critics who link international human rights doctrine with forms of domination and national interests are increasingly questioning its moral foundations, political aspirations, and material importance. Some have proposed alternative rights frameworks centred on the recognition of cultural differences and an inclusive pluriversality to mediate what they see as a hegemonic construct of universal human rights. The Confronting Atrocity: Human Rights and Restorative Justice Series provides a forum for participants in these debates to apply diverse disciplinary, theoretical, historical, cultural, philosophical, and praxis-based perspectives. It responds to a growing desire to go beyond discourses in law and politics, to explore the narrative constructions of rights. Books in the series attend closely to restorative justice in a broad array of contexts, from domestic criminal justice to transitional justice and post-conflict peacebuilding. This series is published in partnership with the Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, McMaster University. What kind of stories are often told in TRC hearings, and by whom? "This first-rate volume offers a profound justification for why we need stories for a proper conception of transitional justice." Chielozona Eze, author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination "This collection brings together humanists and social scientists from North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, offering an exceptionally diverse range of perspectives and methodologies on the arts of transitional justice." Eleni Coundouriotis, author of Narrating Human Rights in Africa