At the Convergence of Transitional Justice and Art

Cole, Catherine M.

doi:10.1093/ijtj/iju005

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Second, and related to this, beyond the ‘presencing’ of these complex realities, when artistic practices engage with the notion of truth, they facilitate contestation and invite doubt about how we think about reality on the basis of victims’ lived experiences (Dirnstorfer and Saud, 2020). Because of their potential of accommodating opacity, ambiguity, instability and indeterminacy (Cole, 2014, 315), artistic practices can help to acknowledge the limits of the justice that official mechanisms can deliver and of the truths proposed in them (Breslin, 2017, 269), opening up a space where different and sometimes contradictory truths rooted in peoples’ lived realities can be expressed and explored. Arts can entertain the existence of multiple truths, including those often silenced in the public arena.…”

Section: Truth In (The Absence Of) Transitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth

Herremans

Destrooper

2022

Social & Legal Studies

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Truth is a central concept in the struggle for justice for Syrians. Many justice actors have turned to the tools and rhetoric of transitional justice to further the quest for justice and truth. Yet, while doing so has allowed them to generate some international attention for victims, the transitional justice paradigm has several pitfalls. For one, the dominant understanding of truth and truth-seeking embraced in formal mechanisms tends to be narrowly defined as forensic truth. We argue on the basis of interviews with Syrian justice actors and artists that informal, including artistic, practices can entail a thicker understanding of truth. They have the potential to disrupt several shortcomings of forensic understanding of truth and formal practices. They can ‘presence’ experiences of harm, accommodate multivocal truths, and enable epistemic resistance. Therefore, we consider how transitional justice as a field of scholarship and practice could better engage with truth-seeking in inconclusive contexts where formal truth mechanisms may be unavailable.

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Section: Truth In (The Absence Of) Transitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth

Herremans

Destrooper

2022

Social & Legal Studies

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“…Because it engages on a sensory level, it can help transcend discord, accommodate difference, and nourish empathy in a way that purely cognitive, rational engagement cannot (Cohen 2005). Catherine Cole also talks about the centrality of the aesthetic to "represent and activate cultural memory, stimulate cultural imaginaries, generate participatory engagement, depict charged subjects [and] reveal depth, complexity and the effective and embodied dimensions" (Cole 2014). Art leaves the outcome of engagement open and tolerates multiple "truths."…”

Section: Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a gap between the reality of working creatively in unstable and highly sensitive situations and the expectations of donors for robust evidence of measurable outcomes (Fairey 2017). It can be hard to reconcile the instrumental bias of transitional justice and the noninstrumental bias of the arts, which may be fundamentally at odds, with artists valuing "opacity, ambiguity, irony, indirection, instability and disruption" (Cole 2014). As Catherine Cole argues, artists may want to keep transitional justice practitioners at arm's length.…”

Section: Dilemmasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Art and Reconciliation

Kerr

2020

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies

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Art and reconciliation is an emerging area of scholarship and practice that explores the potential of art in transitional justice, specifically to foster one of its core goals: reconciliation. Art encompasses a wide range of practices, from large public art initiatives to very small-scale participatory workshops, and involves diverse art forms, including fine art, photography, film, theatre, dance, music, embodied practice, and traditional crafts. Reconciliation is more difficult to define but is usually conceptualized as a process of coming to terms, which can occur at a variety of different levelswith oneself and one's own experience, with other individuals, within a community, society or state, or interstate. The relationship between art and reconciliation is both instrumentalwhat can art do to help foster reconciliation, and what are its limitations?and instructivewhat can art tell us about what reconciliation might entail?

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“…What is relatively new, however, is increasing appreciation of the roles played by the arts in addressing conflict-related trauma in the contexts of peacebuilding and transitional justice. This acknowledgement has been manifested in a growing body of literature on the nature and functions of arts-based interventions in peacebuilding and transitional justice processes, as well as their effectiveness (Bahun, 2015; Baily, 2019; Cole, 2014; Elander, 2018; Fairey and Kerr, 2020; Garnsey, 2016; Jeffery, 2020; Kurze and Lamot, 2019; Rush and Simic, 2014; Zelizer, 2003). Among those who advocate the more explicit integration of efforts to address individual trauma and mental health in peacebuilding, the potential for the arts to play a significant role is also acknowledged (Tankink et al, 2017: 14).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing psychosocial trauma in post-conflict peacebuilding: Emotions in narrative and arts-based approaches

Jeffery¹

2023

Cooperation and Conflict

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Drawing on contemporary research on the nature and treatment of trauma in psychology, neuroscience and the emerging field of art therapy, this article adopts a psychosocial approach to examine the role that the arts may play in assisting individuals and societies to recover from the trauma of violent conflict and contribute to the establishment of sustainable peace. Taking a broad understanding of the arts to include a range of creative endeavours, it primarily focuses on non-verbal art forms, including but not restricted to music, painting, sculpture, drawing and dance, as well as traditional arts and crafts. It demonstrates that many art forms have the potential to make specific contributions to the amelioration of conflict-related trauma by addressing pervasive non-verbal memories that typically stand outside the remit of more conventional psychosocial practices, such as truth-telling and storytelling. They do so, it argues, by providing a means of expressing, evoking, regulating and transforming the emotions in ways that allow individuals and societies to confront and acknowledge their violent pasts, develop supportive relationships in the present and draw on their creativity to imagine a better future.

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At the Convergence of Transitional Justice and Art

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth

Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth

Art and Reconciliation

Addressing psychosocial trauma in post-conflict peacebuilding: Emotions in narrative and arts-based approaches

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