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Framing, truth-telling, and the limits of local transitional justice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2021
Abstract
Transitional justice (TJ) is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. While recent critical TJ scholarship has touted the transformative potential of locally rooted mechanisms as a possible means to emancipate TJ, this burgeoning literature rests on shaky assumptions about the purported benefits of local TJ and provides inadequate attention to local-national power dynamics. By taking these factors into consideration, this article contends that local TJ efforts can be used to deflect justice in manners that paradoxically allow ruling parties to avoid human rights accountability and to conceal the truth about wartime violations. It further argues that the principal method by which justice is subverted is not through overt manipulation by abusive governments, but rather, through subtle and indirect ‘distortional framing’ practices, which ruling parties use to set discursive limits around discussions of conflict-related events and to obfuscate their own serious crimes. After developing this argument theoretically, the case study of Cambodia is considered in detail to reveal and to trace the processes by which distortional framing has been used as a technique to deflect justice.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association
References
1 Transitional justice refers to ‘the ways countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large scale or systematic human rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice system will not be able to provide an adequate response’. International Center for Transitional Justice, ‘What is Transitional Justice?’, available at: {https://www.ictj.org/about/transitional-justice} accessed 23 January 2017. TJ measures include trials, truth commissions, reparations, lustration, reforms, apologies, memorialisation, and traditional forms of justice.
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24 Examples include the ‘Jubilee 2000’ campaign for debt relief and the landmine ban movement. See Busby, Joshua W., ‘Bono made Jesse Helms cry: Jubilee 2000, debt relief, and moral action in international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 51:2 (2007), pp. 247–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Price, Richard, ‘Reversing the gun sights: Transnational civil society targets land mines’, International Organization, 52:3 (1998), pp. 613–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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30 Luc Huyse and Mark Salter (eds), Traditional Justice and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: Learning from African Experiences (Stockholm: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2008).
31 Kochanski, ‘The “local turn” in transitional justice’, p. 28, emphasis in original.
32 Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf, ‘Introduction: Localizing transitional justice’, in Shaw and Waldorf (eds), Localizing Transitional Justice, pp. 3–26.
33 Pilar Riaño Alcalá and Erin Baines, ‘Editorial note’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 6:3 (2012), pp. 385–93.
34 Kochanski, ‘The “local turn” in transitional justice’, p. 28, emphasis in original.
35 Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, ‘Political reconciliation’.
36 Ibid., p. 160.
37 Ibid.
38 The RPF was a rebel group that fought the Rwandan government during the Rwandan civil war (1990–4), which culminated in the genocide of Tutsi by Hutu militias starting on 6 April 1994. Over the next hundred days, between five hundred thousand to one million Tutsi were killed. RPF forces halted the genocide with a military victory on 4 July 1994 and the group has governed the country ever since.
39 Waldorf, ‘Mass justice for mass atrocity’. The Rwandan government revived the gacaca courts in 2001 to address the backlog of incarcerated suspected génocidaires. A drastically modified and scaled-up version of a customary dispute resolution mechanism, the courts heard some two million cases over a seven-year period from 2005 to 2012. See Phil Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
40 For an overview of these works, see Kochanski, ‘The “local turn” in transitional justice’.
41 Selim, ‘Contestation and resistance’, p. 53.
42 Gready and Robins, ‘From transitional to transformative justice’.
43 Kochanski, ‘The “local turn” in transitional justice’.
44 This is a common critique of Rwanda's gacaca courts. See, for example, Thomson and Nagy, ‘Law, power and justice’; Waldorf, ‘Mass justice for mass atrocity’.
45 Chandra Lekha Sriram, ‘Post-conflict justice and hybridity in peacebuilding: Resistance or cooptation?’, in Oliver P. Richmond and Audra Mitchell (eds), Hybrid Forms of Peace: From Everyday Agency to Post-Liberalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 58–72.
46 Hollie Nyseth Brehm and Shannon Golden, ‘Centering survivors in local transitional justice’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 13:1 (2017), pp. 101–21.
47 For an exception, see Anuradha Chakravarty, Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda's Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
48 Dustin N. Sharp, Rethinking Transitional Justice for the Twenty-First Century: Beyond the End of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 67.
49 This contrasts with portrayals of silence as a form of individualised – rather than, directed – forgetting meant to restore peaceful coexistence. See Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to forget: Chosen amnesia as a strategy for local coexistence in post-genocide Rwanda’, Africa, 76:2 (2006), pp. 131–50.
50 This classic formulation is developed in Robert A. Dahl, ‘The concept of power’, Behavioral Science, 2:3 (1957), pp. 201–15.
51 Foucault saw the constitution of social subjects and their resultant powers as the outcome of diffuse social interactions, systems of knowledge, and discursive practices of broad and general scope. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). See also Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in international politics’, International Organization, 59:1 (2005), pp. 39–75.
52 Goffman, Frame Analysis, p. 21.
53 For more on the role of bureaucratic cultures and pathologies in international politics, see Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
54 Autesserre, ‘Dangerous tales’, p. 202.
55 Autesserre, ‘Hobbes and the Congo’, p. 222.
56 Ibid.
57 See, for example, Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, ‘Introduction: Opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes – toward a synthetic, comparative perspective on social movements’, in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–20.
58 Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International norm dynamics and political change’, International Organization, 52:4 (1998), pp. 887–917; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
59 Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International norm dynamics’, p. 897.
60 McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.
61 Nicole Deitelhoff, ‘The discursive process of legalization: Charting islands of persuasion in the ICC case’, International Organization, 63:1 (2009), pp. 33–65; Rodger A. Payne, ‘Persuasion, frames and norm construction’, European Journal of International Relations, 7:1 (2001), pp. 37–61.
62 Ronald R. Krebs and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, ‘Twisting tongues and twisting arms: The power of political rhetoric’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:1 (2007), pp. 35–66.
63 Volha Charnysh, Paulette Lloyd, and Beth A. Simmons, ‘Frames and consensus formation in international relations: The case of trafficking in persons’, European Journal of International Relations, 21:2 (2015), pp. 323–51.
64 Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International norm dynamics’.
65 Price, ‘Reversing the gun sights’.
66 An exception is the debate surrounding the framing of the ‘Save Darfur’ campaign. See, for example, David Lanz, ‘Save Darfur: A movement and its discontents’, African Affairs, 108:433 (2009), pp. 669–77; Lee J. M. Seymour, ‘Let's bullshit! Arguing, bargaining and dissembling over Darfur’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:3 (2014), pp. 571–95.
67 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
68 Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
69 Sverker Finnström, ‘Reconciliation grown bitter? War, retribution, and ritual action in northern Uganda’, in Shaw and Waldorf (eds), Localizing Transitional Justice, p. 151.
70 Kristof Titeca and Theophile Costeur, ‘An LRA for everyone: How different actors frame the Lord's Resistance Army’, African Affairs, 114:454 (2015), pp. 92–114. These efforts have focused on excluding the 1981–86 Ugandan Bush War (when officials in the current government committed atrocities as rebels) and the post-2002 period (when now acting as the government, the Ugandan military's counterinsurgency operations against the LRA brought significant civilian casualties).
71 Sarah Kenyon Lischer, ‘Narrating atrocity: Genocide memorials, dark tourism, and the politics of memory’, Review of International Studies, 45:5 (2019), p. 806.
72 Snow and Benford, ‘Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilization’.
73 Ibid., pp. 199–204.
74 For other examples, see Radoslav S. Dimitrov, Detlef F. Sprinz, Gerald M. DiGiusto, and Alexander Kelle, ‘International nonregimes: A research agenda’, International Studies Review, 9:2 (2007), pp. 230–58.
75 Scott A. Hunt, Robert D. Benford, and David A. Snow, ‘Identity fields: Framing processes and the social construction of movement identities’, in Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield (eds), New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 185–208.
76 Ibid., p. 186.
77 Lischer, ‘Narrating atrocity’, p. 809.
78 Ibid., p. 825.
79 For more on ‘othering’, see David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (New York: Routledge, 2006).
80 I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
81 Pádraig McAuliffe, ‘Transitional justice's expanding empire: Reasserting the value of the paradigmatic transition’, Journal of Conflictology, 2:2 (2011), p. 33. McAuliffe opposes applying the term ‘transition’ to initiatives in ongoing conflict situations or authoritarian regimes.
82 Wallis, Jeffery, and Kent, ‘Political reconciliation’.
83 Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 139.
84 Ibid., p. 176.
85 Ibid., p. 146.
86 See Rafael Escudero, ‘Road to impunity: The absence of transitional justice programs in Spain’, Human Rights Quarterly, 36:1 (2014), pp. 123–46.
87 Lischer, ‘Narrating atrocity’.
88 Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Narrative truths: On the construction of the past in truth commissions’, in Susanne Buckley-Zistel et al. (eds), Transitional Justice Theories (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 144–62.
89 This exemplifies a conception of power in a productive sense.
90 See Marijke Breuning, ‘Roles and realities: When and why gatekeepers fail to change foreign policy’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 9:3 (2013), pp. 307–25; R. Charli Carpenter, ‘Governing the global agenda: “Gatekeepers” and “issue adoption” in transnational advocacy networks’, in Deborah D. Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan K. Sell (eds), Who Governs the Globe? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 202–37.
91 Breuning, ‘Roles and realities’, p. 313.
92 Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘Process tracing’, in Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel (eds), Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–38.
93 Audie Klotz and Cecelia Lynch, Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 37.
94 This sentence draws on Autesserre, ‘Hobbes and the Congo’, p. 255, emphasis added.
95 Vincent Pouliot, ‘“Sobjectivism”: Toward a constructivist methodology’, International Studies Quarterly, 51:2 (2007), pp. 359–84.
96 Informants included government spokespeople, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia officials, representatives of bilateral donor agencies, CSO and NGO staff, journalists, and independent analysts. I triangulated statements obtained from government officials with other sources to increase my confidence in the findings and offset confirmation bias.
97 Sources included publicly available government statements and speeches, relevant donor and CSO reports, and articles in Cambodia's two main independent newspapers, the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post.
98 To counteract selection bias, research sites were chosen to include government-friendly areas (Kampot and Takéo) and Khmer Rouge strongholds (Battambang and Siem Reap).
99 Interview with Khamboly Dy, Director, Department of Policy, Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 30 January 2014.
100 Sorpong Peou, Intervention and Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy? (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000).
101 Klemensits, Péter and Czirják, Ráchel, ‘Child soldiers in genocidal regimes: The cases of the Khmer Rouge and the Hutu Power’, Academic and Applied Research in Military Science, 15:3 (2016), pp. 215–22Google Scholar.
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105 See Killean, Rachel, ‘An incomplete narrative: Prosecuting sexual violence crimes at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 13:2 (2015), pp. 331–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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109 The 1980s conflict featured two other militant groups, which disarmed and demobilised as part of the Paris Peace Agreement: the Khmer People's National Liberation Front and the Armée Nationaliste Sihanoukienne, the armed wing of FUNCINPEC.
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112 Victims can participate directly in the ECCC's trial proceedings against the accused persons as civil parties. While less than one hundred civil parties were admitted for Case 001, an astonishing 3,866 were accepted in Case 002. ECCC, ‘Internal Rules (Rev.9)’, Phnom Penh, 16 January 2015, Rule 23.
113 The ECCC has done extensive outreach and liaises with the civil parties through two offices: the Civil Party Lead Co-Lawyers Section and the Victims Support Section.
114 For example, both the CPP and the 1997 UN Group of Experts favoured a limited temporal jurisdiction, but for different reasons. The former wanted to restrict the scope of the investigations, while the latter wished to dampen focus on American bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s and broad international patronage of the KR in the 1980s from the US, China, Thailand, and others. See Hughes, Rachel, ‘Ordinary theatre and extraordinary law at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33:4 (2015), pp. 714–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
115 Interview with donor official, Phnom Penh, 29 January 2014.
116 Watch, Human Rights, 30 Years of Hun Sen: Violence, Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2015)Google Scholar.
117 These figures include Heng Samrin, Chea Sim, Hor Namhong, among others.
118 Watch, Human Rights, Cambodia's Dirty Dozen: A Long History of Rights Abuses by Hun Sen's Generals (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2018)Google Scholar.
119 Strangio, Sebastian, Hun Sen's Cambodia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.
120 This formulation echoes and draws on existing literature on a dominant ‘atrocity narrative’ of the KR regime. See Hinton, Alexander Laban, The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lischer, ‘Narrating atrocity’; Manning, Peter, Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia: Beyond the Extraordinary Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
121 Human Rights Watch, 30 Years of Hun Sen.
122 Gottesman, Cambodia After the Khmer Rouge.
123 Slocomb, Margaret, ‘The K5 gamble: National defence and nation building under the People's Republic of Kampuchea’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 32:2 (2001), pp. 195–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Bernath, Julie, ‘“Complex political victims” in the aftermath of mass atrocity: Reflections on the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 10:1 (2016), p. 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
127 For example, KR soldiers – some of whom had been kidnapped as children – were often forced to carry out violent acts under extreme duress to show their dedication to the ‘revolution’.
128 Hinton, The Justice Facade, p. 45.
129 Interview with Youk Chhang, Executive Director, Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, 30 January 2014.
130 Chhim, Kristina, ‘Pacifying Vindictiveness By Not Being Vindictive’: Do Memory Initiatives in Cambodia Have a Role in Addressing Questions of Impunity? (Utrecht: Impunity Watch, 2012), p. 56Google Scholar.
131 While my focus is on local truth-telling, other analysts have described similar dynamics in memorialisation. See Hughes, Rachel, ‘Memory and sovereignty in post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and local genocide memorials’, in Cook, Susan E. (ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 257–79Google Scholar; Lischer, ‘Narrating atrocity’; Manning, Transitional Justice and Memory in Cambodia.
132 McCargo, Duncan, ‘Cambodia: Getting away with authoritarianism?’, Journal of Democracy, 16:4 (2005), pp. 98–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
133 Ibid., p. 99.
134 Interview with Im Sophea, Former Head, Victims Support Section, ECCC, 23 February 2015.
135 Interview with donor official, Phnom Penh, 29 January 2014.
136 Interview with Im Sophea, Former Head, Victims Support Section, ECCC, 23 February 2015.
137 Ibid.
138 Interview with donor official, Phnom Penh, 29 January 2014.
139 Bernath, Julie, ‘Civil party participation and resistance at the Khmer Rouge tribunal’, in Jones, Briony and Bernath, Julie (eds), Resistance and Transitional Justice (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 118Google Scholar.
140 Interview, Phnom Penh, 18 February 2014 (identity withheld).
141 Interview with local practitioner, Phnom Penh, 8 December 2015.
142 Interview, Phnom Penh, 14 March 2014 (identity withheld).
143 Interview, Phnom Penh, 18 February 2014 (identity withheld).
144 Ibid.
145 Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International norm dynamics’.
146 Yakinthou, ‘Reframing friction’.