Identities in Transition

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. In recent months 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 the ICTJ is tackling in its 18-month long 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 is looking 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 will continue through the end of 2008. As papers and executive summaries are received, they will be posted here. In the fall of 2008, we expect to summaries of the following commissioned papers:

Empirical Studies