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

Abstract

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.

“The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome” Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines

“…Even if state involvement and acknowledgment continue to be important for many victims, informal truth practices can be potent because they may avoid the highly scripted nature of formal mechanisms, can typically better accommodate victims' voices and needs, tend to allow for more complex narratives and experiences, and are less characterized by preferences for institutional closure or recognizable stories of ideal victim-and perpetratorhood. As such, while often initiated for pragmatic reasons, these informal truth initiatives hold potential for countering the epistemic injustice implicit in many formal truth initiatives by 'presencing' (ongoing) lived experiences of harm (Herremans and Destrooper 2022).…”

“…One specific way of refocusing the debate on these questions related to truth-listening is through the lens of artistic practices as an approach to truth and memorialization. Throughout the world, in post-conflict or post-authoritarian settings, artists have developed practices that revolve around truth and memorialization and that have the potential to foreground thicker truths that go beyond forensic documentation (Herremans and Destrooper 2022) In doing so, they problematize the ontological status of truth in debates over past violence and ongoing individual and societal harm (Breslin 2017). As such, artistic interventions in the domain of truth and memorialization may resist dominant tropes, like that of the passive voiceless victim, the dichotomy between perpetratorhood and victimhood, the linear victim narrative, or the encapsulation of violence in a remote past (Mihai 2018).…”

Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice

“… On presencing, see De Greiff and Ramirez-Barat (2014) andHerremans and Destrooper (2023). We use this term to refer to…”

“…22On presencing , see De Greiff and Ramirez‐Barat (2014) and Herremans and Destrooper (2023). We use this term to refer to how embroidery can “make absences present,” either in a concrete way (e.g., showing the absence of a disappeared family member) or more generally by “presencing” experiences of harm that would otherwise remain invisible.…”