[Download] "Commissioning the Truth. (Transitional Justice) (Australia)" by Columbia Journal of Gender and Law " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Commissioning the Truth. (Transitional Justice) (Australia)
- Author : Columbia Journal of Gender and Law
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 312 KB
Description
This Article was originally written as an invited contribution to a workshop on Gender and Transitional Justice organized by the International Centre for Transitional Justice. My particular assignment for that workshop was to write a discussion paper which addressed the key category of "truth." The idea of truth has a particularly potent role to play in the world of transitional justice. For many scholars and practitioners in this field, uncovering the truth is understood as a vital task, both at an individual and at a collective level. At the individual level, truth-telling is presented in therapeutic terms, as a means of healing those who have been wounded by the violence of civil war, revolution, or despotism. At the collective level, establishing the truth of a contested history is understood as a necessary basis for moving forward as a nation and creating the conditions for a viable, shared life. The title of this Article indicates a certain distance from this vision of the ends of truth. In particular, the word "commissioning" is there as a reminder. Throughout, this Article makes visible the institutional conditions and productive effects of the commissioning of truth. Testimony or speech becomes part of commissioned truth through institutional mediation--through the institutions of language, of the state, and of liberal internationalism. How should we try to understand what takes place when an international body, a state, or a private organization seeks to write the truth of history? How should we understand the situation of the subject who is called upon to speak her truth in such a context? What does the act of writing a commissioned truth bring into being? What does the commissioning of an official truth mean for the addressees of such performances? Much critical literature on the current international enthusiasm for the establishment of international criminal courts, war crimes tribunals, and truth commissions in fact does focus on the conditions of production of truth in an institutional context. This literature argues that the juridification of the post-conflict, post-revolutionary, or transitional situation must be understood as part of a broader attempt to create a new world order of liberal democracies in which politics is forever deferred and history comes to an end. Indeed, my initial posture towards the appeal to "truth-telling" in situations of charged international intervention was one of skepticism. My earlier work had explored the arrival of human rights as a justification or alibi for military intervention during the 1990s. (1) In writing on post-conflict reconstruction, I had sought to explore the way in which economic restructuring, exploitation, and management was enabled by humanitarian intervention, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Timor L'Este. I had wanted to understand how it was that the presence of agents of global market integration alongside the militaries of powerful nations and their corporate investors could be interpreted, so straightforwardly, as benevolent and charitable. This research shaped my response to the post-Cold War project of globalizing transitional justice. My first reaction was to read appeals to truth with an assumption that their address to an audience of liberal internationalists might work to mask ways in which states undergoing "transition" were also being produced as reliable subjects of the capitalist democratic order. At the same time, the operation of transitional justice mechanisms would ask the inhabitants of these countries to articulate their needs, desires, losses, hopes, revolutionary ambitions, and so on in the name of a universal humanitarianism. Yet is the arrival of human rights, here in the form of transitional justice institutions, always accompanied by a particular form of restructuring of the subject? Can the process of internationalization be understood as a simple unity with all its operations coordinated to achieve one set of interests?