Watching as if Beginning: Spectator/Judges and Truth Commissions

By assembling spectators to listen to survivors, truth commissions can help interrogate and perhaps interrupt structures and narratives of violence. Mark Wenman and Andrew Schaap show how this relationship can be theorized through Hannah Arendt's depiction of spectators as judges whose clashing opinions might mark an event as a new beginning. Yet such approaches overlook an alternative, where spectators strategically forfeit judgment through anticipatory gestures of respect and through promises to believe survivors. In this context, Jacques Rancière's concept of dissensus suggests how spectators' forfeited judgements might stage truth commissions as fragile spaces where structural violence can be challenged.