Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies ed. by Paige Arthur (review)

This book grapples with questions of how to address identity in transitional justice following mass violence. The histories of violence that transitional justice strives to confront are largely identity-based. Indeed, genocide and crimes against humanity are legally defined by the targeting of identity groupings. Yet identity has rarely been taken up as an analytic lens in transitional justice debates, making this book a unique intervention that provides novel insights into the potential and limitations of transitional justice scholarship and practice. Comprised of eleven chapters and divided into two parts, this volume offers both rich conceptual discussion and detailed empirical substance through a range of case studies, including transitional justice practices for indigenous peoples—a long overdue, emerging subfield.

The authors contributing to this volume interpret identity (whether political, ideological, gendered, ethnic, or religious) through a constructivist framework that emphasises identity (ascribed or self-designated) as historically contingent, intersubjectively constituted, and shaped by larger social and political forces. The authors eschew the “primordialist” discourse that prevails in transitional settings, which casts conflicts as “ancient” hatreds. This book challenges identity essentialism by treating identity as dynamic while recognising the material consequences of identity-based inequalities in shaping life chances.

Several interlocking themes animate this volume. First, while transitional justice pursues human rights violations against individuals through a universalistic framework, this collection understands individual victims within larger identity groups and contends that human rights abuses must be read against everyday violence. Rubio-Marin et al. (chapter 1), in their analysis of reparations for indigenous peoples in Guatemala and Peru, argue that exceptional violence must be situated in structural inequality, a larger structure of harms as Arthur (chapter 9) contends, or longer-term memories as Jelin (chapter 6) asserts. Similarly Fullard and Rousseau (chapter 2), in their chapter on truthtelling in South Africa and Guatemala, criticise the failure of truth commissions to address systemic violence, which consequently exonerates beneficiaries of unjust systems.

The book’s second theme surrounds the mitigated identities that must be de-essentialised in transitional justice to contest the construction of polarised conflict identities while forging new identity solidarities. O’Rawe’s (chapter 3) discussion of security system reform in Northern Ireland not only warns that transitional justice must avoid revalorising conflict-identities, but points to the potential of transitional justice to foster new solidarities through common experiences across different identity axes (e.g., class). In her comparative discussion of perpetrator/victim identities in the ad hoc tribunals, Aptel (chapter 5) argues that the “pathological” focus on one dimension of identity suppresses similarities across groups, producing a rigid us/them divide or what Cole and Murphy (chapter 11), in their discussion of history education reform, call “zero sum” identities. Likewise Jelin (chapter 6), examining hidden ethnic and gender dimensions in political violence, critiques identity essentialism as the basis of exclusionary politics. Chapman (chapter 8), however, implies the potential instrumental value of static concepts of identity by suggesting the leveraging of minority and indigenous people’s rights as powerful moral tools.

A third theme identifies how transitional justice may limit the narration of complicated victim/perpetrator identities. Fullard and Rousseau (chapter 2) contend that the perpetrator/victim dichotomy in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to reflect lived complexity. Transitional justice narratives, moreover, as Jelin (chapter 6) examines them, veil the heterogeneity of victim groups, as master victim narratives emerge that marginalise the experiences of victims with less social power. Wilke’s (chapter 4) discussion of trials as dramas shows how complex forces shape audience identification with the staging of victim/perpetrator identities.

Several chapters in this volume grapple with nation building as a complicated transitional justice goal that, as Wilke (chapter 4) explains, can be contested in how trial identities are staged. In his discussion of multination federalism, Kymlicka (chapter 10) asserts that the nation-building goals of transitional justice can be divisive in multinations (states with a significant, territorially-concentrated minority), and that the multination...