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Home, city and diaspora: Anglo–Indian and Chinese attachments to Calcutta – BLUNT – 2013 – Global Networks – Wiley Online Library
“This article is about the city as home for people living in diaspora. We develop two key areas of debate. First, in contrast to research that explores diasporic homes in relation to domestic homemaking and/or the nation as home or ‘homeland’, we consider the city as home in diaspora. Second, building on research on transnational urbanism, translocality and the importance of the ‘city scale’ in migration studies, we argue that the city is a distinctive location of diasporic dwelling, belonging and attachment. Drawing on interviews with Anglo–Indian and Chinese Calcuttans who live in London and Toronto, we develop the idea of ‘diaspora cities’ to explore the importance of the city as home rather than the nation as ‘homeland’ for many people living in diaspora. This leads to an understanding of the importance of migration and diaspora within cities of departure as well as resettlement, and contributes a distinctively diasporic focus to broader work on comparative urbanism.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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A stranger at ‘home’: interactions between transnational return visits and integration for Afghan-American professionals – OEPPEN – 2013 – Global Networks – Wiley Online Library
“In this article, I explore the interactions between transnational activities (in the form of return visits) and integration, for Afghan refugees living in the USA. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in California and Kabul, I look at why return visits take place and the difficult experiences Afghan-Americans had of being a stranger in what might they might otherwise consider their ‘home’. I argue that return visits can serve as a transnational strategy to help integration in California through, for example, the investment of ‘reverse’ remittances. In doing so, I highlight the importance of multi-directional transnational flows, particularly those from Afghanistan to the USA.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Does ordinary injustice make extraordinary injustice possible? Gender, structural injustice, and the ethics of refugee determination – Journal of Global Ethics – Volume 8, Issue 2-3
“Our understanding of the impact of gender on refugee determination has evolved greatly over the last 60 years. Though many people initially believed that women could not be persecuted qua women, it is now frequently recognized that certain forms of gender-related persecution are sufficient to warrant asylum. Yet despite this conceptual progress, many states are still reluctant to consider certain forms of gender-related persecution to be sufficient to warrant asylum or refugee status. One reason for this continued bias is the lack of a framework with which to understand gender-related persecution. I argue that we ought to understand gender-related persecution as resulting from the intersection of individual or state persecution and structural injustice. Structural injustice can be understood as the kind of everyday injustice, harm, and violence that women experience that makes possible the more extraordinary kinds of violence that women are likely to claim as the basis of asylum. Understanding gender-related persecution within the context of structural injustice will, I argue, help us to see it as a legitimate form of persecution and thus allow more just outcomes for women refugees.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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How Do Immigrants Spend Time?: The Process of Assimilation
“Using 2004-2008 data from the American Time Use Survey, we show that sharp differences between the time use of immigrants and natives become noticeable when activities are distinguished by incidence and intensity. We develop a theory of the process of assimilation—what immigrants do with their time—based on the notion that assimilating activities entail fixed costs. The theory predicts that immigrants will be less likely than natives to undertake such activities, but conditional on undertaking them, immigrants will spend more time on them than natives. We identify several activities—purchasing, education and market work—as requiring the most interaction with the native world, and these activities more than others fit the theoretical predictions. Additional tests suggest that the costs of assimilating derive from the costs of learning English and from some immigrants’ unfamiliarity with a high-income market economy. A replication using the 1992 Australian Time Use Survey yields remarkably similar results. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Transmission of Women’s Fertility, Human Capital and Work Orientation Across Immigrant Generations
“Using 1995–2011 Current Population Survey and 1970–2000 Census data, we find that the fertility, education and labor supply of second generation women (US-born women with at least one foreign-born parent) are significantly positively affected by the immigrant generation’s levels of these variables, with the effect of the fertility and labor supply of women from the mother’s source country generally larger than that of women from the father’s source country and the effect of the education of men from the father’s source country larger than that of women from the mother’s source country. We present some evidence that suggests our findings for fertility and labor supply are due to at least in part to intergenerational transmission of gender roles. Transmission rates for immigrant fertility and labor supply between generations are higher than for education, but there is considerable intergenerational assimilation toward native levels for all three of these outcomes. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Psychic Costs of Migration: Evidence from Irish Return Migrants
“Within the economics literature, the “psychic costs” of migration have been incorporated into theoretical models since Sjaastad (1962). However, the existence of such costs has rarely been investigated in empirical papers. In this paper, we look at the psychic costs of migration using alcohol problems as an indicator. Rather than comparing immigrants and natives, we look at the native-born in a single country and compare those who have lived away for a period of their lives and those who have not. We use data from the first wave of the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) which is a large, nationally representative sample of older Irish adults. We find that men who lived away are more likely to have suffered from alcohol problems than men who stayed. For women, we again see a higher incidence of alcohol problems for short-term migrants. However, long-term female migrants are less likely to have suffered from alcohol problems. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Xenophobic Attacks, Migration Intentions and Networks: Evidence from the South of Africa by Guido Friebel, Juan Miguel Gallego, Mariapia Mendola :: SSRN
“We investigate how emigration flows from a developing region are affected by xenophobic violence at destination. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique survey among more than 1000 households collected in Mozambique in summe 2008, a few months after a series of xenophobic attacks in South Africa killed dozens and displaced thousands of immigrants from neighbouring countries. We estimate migration intentions of Mozambicans before and after the attacks, controlling for the characteristics of households and previous migration behaviour. Using a placebo period, we show that other things equal, the migration intention of household heads decreases from 37 to 33 percent. The sensitivity of migration intentions to violence is larger for household heads with many children younger than 15 years, decreasing the migration intention by 11 percentage points. Most importantly, the sensitivity of migration intentions is highest for those household heads with many young children whose families have no access to social networks. For these household heads, the intention falls by 15 percentage points. Social networks provide insurance against the consequences young children suffer in case the household head would be harmed by xenophobic violence and consequently could not provide for the family. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Comparative European Politics – Abstract of article: The European Union’s approach to conflict resolution: Insights from the constitutional reform process in Bosnia and Herzegovina
“This article sets out to challenge a core assumption of much of the recent literature on the role of the European Union in conflict resolution, namely that the Union’s approach aims at the transformation of conflicts over and above their management. It does so through an analysis of the EU’s engagement with the process of constitutional reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Making use of discourse analysis of EU policy documents and speeches by key actors, supplemented by interviews with policy-makers in Brussels and in Bosnia, I argue that the EU’s approach is based on the acceptance and attempted accommodation of distinct and antagonistic ethnic identities rather than any attempt at their transformation. While EU officials are highly critical of nationalist politicians in Bosnia and praise the efforts of civil society organisations that attempt to overcome ethnic divisions, they nonetheless view Bosnia through an ‘ethnic conflict’ paradigm that sees resistance to constitutional reform by nationalist elites as an inevitable symptom of deeper divisions in Bosnian society. Based on this reading, I conclude that EU conflict resolution policy is much more conservative than those stressing the Union’s transformative power in conflict situations envisage.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Project MUSE – Documenting the Undocumented: Life Narratives of Unauthorized Immigrants
“This essay argues that Underground America, a collection of fi rst-person narratives of undocumented immigrants, advances the premise that the immigrants it represents are already part of the US “nation,” and that their claim to human rights ought therefore to be recognized on the grounds of national belonging.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Perceived Hostile Media Bias, Presumed Media Influence, and Opinions About Immigrants and Immigration – Southern Communication Journal – Volume 77, Issue 5
“This study explores hostile media bias and third-person perceptions of the influence of media coverage of immigrants using data (N = 529) from North Carolina, where the Latino population grew almost 400% in two decades. As hypothesized, anti-immigrant sentiment was significantly related to perceptions of “hostile” (pro-immigrant) news coverage. However, anti-immigrant sentiment was not directly related to belief in coverage effects on others. Analysis revealed two “paths” for relationships among anti-immigrant sentiment, exposure and attention to media coverage, perceived media bias, and presumed media influence or third-person perceptions.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Social Capital and Ethno-racial Diversity: Learning to Trust in an Immigrant Society – Stolle – 2012 – Political Studies – Wiley Online Library
“This article builds on the insights of the contact hypothesis and political socialization literatures to go beyond recent findings that racial and ethnic diversity have overwhelmingly negative effects on social capital, particularly generalized trust. Using the Canadian General Social Survey (2003), our results show that despite a negative relationship among adults, younger Canadians with racial and ethnic diversity in their social networks show higher levels of generalized trust. The results seem to confirm that youth socialization experiences with rising diversity and the normalization of diversity in a multicultural environment contribute to beneficial (instead of detrimental) effects of diverse social networks.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Negotiating the Social Citizenship Rights of Migrant Domestic Workers: The Right to Family Reunification and a Family Life in Policies and Debates – Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies – Volume 39, Issue 3
“This paper discusses the right of migrant live-in, 24-hour-care, domestic workers to a family life, particularly in relation to recent efforts to strengthen their rights. My argument is that national and EU policies that tolerate the irregular work situation of migrant domestic workers are a functional response to the specific intersection of family and paid work in this field. The familialisation of work implies the defamilialisation of the worker and the deprivation of the right to a family life. In order to understand the experience of defamilialisation, I discuss the specific tensions entailed in familialised, paid, domestic and care work and how these motivate migrant domestic workers to develop specific coping strategies. Beyond these strategies, I argue that broader social structures sustain the defamilialisation of the workers. Finally, I ask how the right to a family life appears in recent debates about the realisation of rights for migrant domestic workers, especially at the level of the recent negotiations for an ILO Convention on ‘Decent Work for Domestic Workers’.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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The implications for governance of migration linked to environmental change: key findings and new research directions
“Abstract. With this paper we draw conclusions from the contributions to this theme issue that all explored the links between environmental change, migration, and governance. We have three objectives. The first is to identify key themes emerging from each of the papers and to consider their significance. The second is to specify overarching implications of the work gathered in this theme issue. The third is to identify areas where future research would be beneficial in further enhancing understanding of the links between environmental change, migration, and governance in the context of adaptation. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Gender Differences in the Earnings Mobility of Migrants by Regina Flake :: SSRN
“This study analyses gender differences in the intergenerational earnings mobility of second‐generation migrants in Germany. Thereby it takes into account the influence of assortative mating and the parental integration. First, intergenerational earnings elasticities are estimated at the mean and along the earnings distribution. The results do not reveal large differences in the mobility — neither between natives and migrants nor between men and women. Second, intergenerational changes in the relative earnings position are analysed. These results confirm that migrants are mostly as (im)mobile as the native population. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Strategy and Tactics: Chinese Immigrants and Diasporic Spaces in Johannesburg, South Africa – Journal of Southern African Studies – Volume 38, Issue 4
“Migration studies in South Africa have partially taken the spatial turn, giving some attention to questions of territoriality and spatial relationships. Recent literature has drawn on de Certeau’s distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the subordinate, revealing for example how migrants occupy hidden spaces to evade control and social hostility. Within the broad aegis of de Certeau’s work, we engage the historical and contemporary spaces of the Chinese diaspora in Johannesburg. We describe a highly differentiated grouping of migrants that has deployed, and continues to deploy, varying tactics over time and across space. There are, for example, processes of clustering and processes of dispersal. There is also the use of visibility and cultural marking as a spatial tactic, as well as of invisibility and hidden spaces. We also reveal that the spatial practices of the Chinese migrants do not only relate to the strategies of the powerful but are also a response to the competition and threats posed by other subordinate individuals and groupings in society, including other Chinese migrants.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Taylor & Francis Online :: Anti-Immigrant Parties, Local Presence and Electoral Success – Local Government Studies – Volume 38, Issue 6
“Does the local organisational presence of anti-immigrant parties affect their chances for electoral success? In order to answer this question, the article explores the potential of a supply-oriented explanation to anti-immigrant party success by examining the electoral advancements the Sweden Democrats (SD) made in the 2006 and 2010 elections. Our results indicate that traditional demand-side explanations to anti-immigrant party success can be successfully complemented by an ‘internal supply-side argument’ to make the electoral fates of these parties more intelligible. Whether the SD had a local organisational presence had a substantial effect on its results in the national election and on the probability of gaining representation in local councils. Thus, the party’s fate in the national as well as local elections was largely determined by whether or not it had a local organisational presence in Swedish municipalities.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Cities, Migrant Incorporation, and Ethnicity: A Network Perspective on Boundary Work – Springer
“In this article, I am interested in the different types of boundaries emerging in a city characterized by a highly diverse population. The analysis of the personal social networks of 250 inhabitants of a small Swiss City—different types of migrants as well as non-migrants—supplemented by data from qualitative interviews brings to light the important categories for the creation of boundaries and the place of ethnicity among them. The inhabitant’s network structures display specific network boundaries that are translated into symbolic and also social boundaries: four different clusters emerge among the population, pointing to their stratified social positioning in this city. Hereby an interplay of nationality, education, local establishment, mobility type, “race,” and religion are the most important structuring factors. It becomes clear that the common ideas of assimilation cannot grasp the complexity of the “categorical game” at place in this city when it comes to migrant’s incorporation.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Immigration in Italy : Between Economic Acceptance and Political Rejection | Archivio Istituzionale della Ricerca
“Italy, especially in its richer regions and cities, is experiencing a profound contradiction in its relationship with the immigrant component of its population: it is becoming even more multi-ethnic in terms of the number of residents (5.3 million), participation in the labor market (more than 3 million), transitions to selfemployment (213,000 business owners), and immigrant students in schools (about 670,000). In their cultural representations, Italians tend to deny this reality. They do not want multi-ethnic cities. Faced with the widespread use of a workforce of regular and irregular immigrants, in families and enterprises of the urban economy, the prevailing opinion rejects the idea of giving a place to immigration in the nation’s social organization, and this position is strengthened by political forces and media that reflect and exacerbate the reaction. Immigrants seem to be accepted, perhaps, on an individual plane, where they have a name and a definite place in society—helpful, modest, possibly invisible. They are frightening when they become visible communities, when they settle in urban settings, when they look for places and opportunities for socialization. Italian society, as a result of tensions between markets, politics, and culture on the issue of immigration, is facing a dilemma: how to reconcile interests and feelings, head and heart, individuals and communities: how to rebuild sufficient social cohesion in a society that is increasingly differentiated and heterogeneous.”
tags: newjournalarticles
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Children Abroad: Immigrant Children’s Development in Worldwide Perspective – Karger Publishers
tags: newjournalarticles
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SOVEREIGNTY MATTERS: AFRICA, DONORS, AND THE AID RELATIONSHIP
“This article critiques the predominant opinion that aid undermines the sovereignty of African states. This claim implies not only that a recipient state’s policy autonomy is curtailed by development assistance, but also more fundamentally that the politico-legal independence of the state itself is being challenged. While the former is often the case, the latter is not. Drawing a conceptual and analytical distinction between sovereignty as a right to rule and national control over policy and outcomes, the article develops a more accurate identification of the areas in which aid, as a particular form of external influence, does and does not have an impact on recipient states. It argues that sovereignty as a right to rule constitutes the very basis of the aid relationship, and endows African states with the agency with which to contest the terms of aid deals. The article thus provides a new reading of the politics of aid and, by reasserting the centrality of sovereignty as an organizing institution in contemporary aid relations, supports rather than questions the relevance of the discipline of International Relations to African studies. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Problematizing the Protection of ‘War Refugees’: A Rejoinder to Hugo Storey and Jean-François Durieux
“Why has the plight of “war refugees” been problematized? The Handbook of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees describes them as “special cases”. Neither International Refugee Law nor International Humanitarian Law finds a happy home for them. Article 15(c) of the European Union Qualification Directive 2004/83/EC, denotes them in a way that one commentator has described as “nonsensical”. “War refugees” languish precisely when their numbers increase in Afghanistan, Iraq to Syria. Yet, the international community provides at best muted protection for them. There is consequently complete and utter confusion over key questions, such as how “armed conflict” is defined’? Whether, “indiscriminate violence” is proven by its intensity, the frequency of its attacks, or its cumulative effects? Or, what should be the basis for “individual threat” to civilian life? This Essay argues that if there is any hope of achieving the “minimum standards” of “international protection” which the Qualification Directive envisages, it lies in focusing on communities that are “imperilled by endemic violence”. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Borders in Motion: Concept and Policy Nexus
“This article is based on the hypothesis that the relationship between politics and borders is being reshaped as a consequence of the movement of people between States. This process of redefining the concept of “border”, present in both the new approaches to managing migration and the public perception of immigration, is closely linked with the image of “border” projected by politics. For this reason, the ability to manage borders can create or modify a particular image of migration. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to explore the link between the concept of the “border” and policies aimed at managing human mobility from the perspective of political theory. Assuming that there is still no Political Theory of Borders in the strict sense, in this article I will argue that in order to establish its foundations, border must be considered as a concept and as an approach (section 3), as well as a political category (sections 4 and 5). Finally, I will review some arguments regarding human mobility and border control (section 6). “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Poverty and Livelihoods Among Unhcr Registered Refugees in Lebanon
“Lebanon has very few legal provisions addressing refugees’ and asylum-seekers’ concerns, thus the majority of them (with the exception of Palestinians) rely on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for social assistance – 96 per cent of the registered refugees being Iraqis. This article aims to provide information that relates to the socio-economic status of registered refugees, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the social and economic services provided to support them. We present results of a representative household survey conducted in February 2012 covering 700 refugee households living in Lebanon registered at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, mainly in and around Beirut. More than a quarter (27 per cent) live below the poverty line, and less than half are economically active. Furthermore only about 7 per cent hold a higher education degree. Almost a fifth of registered refugees suffer from a chronic illness. In the short term it is unlikely that refugees will return to their home country and settlement in Lebanon is legally impossible. Hence, third country resettlement and a prolonged refugee status are likely, implying that refugees will rely on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees services and protection for some time, to come. The effectiveness of their programmes, briefly reviewed in this paper, are hence of crucial importance. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Should I Stay or Should I go? National Identity and Attitudes Towards Local Integration Among Liberian Refugees in Ghana
“In the summer of 2009, focus groups and interviews were conducted with Liberian refugees living in the Buduburam Refugee Camp, Ghana. The purpose of this study was to learn about the national identity of individuals in protracted refugee situations, and how this influences attitudes towards durable solutions. Using a grounded theory approach, I develop a framework of Liberian national identity and evaluate how these conceptions of identity generate support or opposition to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-supported local integration programme. Three main themes regarding identity are identified by the participants: ethnic or cultural identity, civic identity, and liberal identity. The results indicate that national identity is an important indicator about a refugee’s desire to remain in Ghana, and those with strong ethnic and liberal national identities, as opposed to civic national identities, are the least likely candidates for local integration. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Durable Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons in Burundi Within Reach
“Burundi has made comprehensive efforts to find durable solutions for those who were forced to flee their homes in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of civil war. In the aftermath of the conflict, which erupted in 1993 and lasted for 12 years, the Government initially focused on the reintegration of more than 500,000 returning refugees. It then developed a socio-economic reintegration strategy and set up a working group to implement durable solutions for the 100,000 internally displaced people who, as of 2005, were still living in settlements the Government established for them during the war. This article covers the latest developments in the strategy, including the elaboration of an action plan on durable solutions based on a comprehensive profiling exercise of the internally displaced population. Drawing on extensive interviews with Burundian Government officials, representatives of United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations, displaced people themselves, and members of their host communities, it presents the main findings of the profiling exercise and analyses the options pursued thus far. It then makes recommendations to further reintegration, with a focus on land issues and tenure security, which are crucial to achieving durable solutions in Burundi. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Reinvention of Tradition: New Configurations of Gender Identity and Economic Strategies Within Roma Communities in Italy
“This article explores the outcome of longitudinal research conducted in Italy between December 2005 and March 2007 with nine women from four Romanian Roma communities. Specifically, the study investigated the links between the economic strategies of Roma women settled in Rome and the dynamics of gender identity within the Italian anti-Roma context. The qualitative fieldwork for this research was conducted during the political campaign for the election of a new prime minister in April 2008. At the time, immigration and anti-Roma feelings were being strategically employed by both left- and right-wing coalitions in order to gain political consensus. To do so, openly racist and xenophobic anti-immigration laws were enacted and aimed to “sanitise” Italian society from the “dangerous” foreign presence. Roma communities, coming from Eastern Europe, were identified as one of the main targets of the political campaign, transforming Italy into what Agamben calls a temporary “state of exception”. The aim of this article is to highlight particular forms of agency enacted by some Roma women in this hostile environment. Through processes of mediation and negotiation between moral values demanded by their “belonging” community and new economic tools and opportunities offered by the host society, these women have excavated exploitable economic niches in order to achieve a better lifestyle, despite the racism and segregation experienced in everyday life. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Mapping Perpetrator Prosecutions in Latin America
“This collaborative article examines how two academic institutions and one nongovernmental organization cooperated to map recent trial activity for past human rights violations, applying social science techniques to assist survivors’ and relatives’ groups as well as litigators in making informed strategic choices in their interactions with the formal justice system. The article discusses how methodologically rigorous data collection and data requests to public bodies can be used to advance a proaccountability agenda. The authors show how a range of civil society and state actors have changed justice system outcomes in Argentina, Chile and Peru and highlight some lessons learned about engaged, policy-relevant research. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Transitional Justice and the Prevention of Torture
“In the 20 or so years since transitional justice first emerged as a field of practice, its objectives and the contexts in which it is applied have expanded greatly. However, its dual role of acknowledging the commission of past violence and human rights violations and seeking to prevent their recurrence remains central. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the impact of transitional justice in practice and also to critique its purported narrow focus on civil and political rights. Recommendations have emerged that transitional justice should address a broader range of violations, such as violations of economic, social and cultural rights, on the basis that this would more appropriately acknowledge the full ambit of past violence and also provide a stronger basis for preventing a return to the violence of the past. Through the case study of torture, this article suggests that before expanding, stock should be taken of transitional justice’s current contribution to prevention. It suggests that while transitional justice has generally prioritized certain types of torture, it has not taken a preventative approach by failing to identify and analyse the full extent of the practice and the way in which it supports institutional structures. The article assesses the extent to which transitional justice can overcome these deficiencies and proposes a possible framework for doing so. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Scope and Bounds of Transitional Justice and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission
“The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools allows us to rethink the scope and bounds of transitional justice. Once we expand our notions of injustice and transition, the Canadian case is not so far apart from paradigmatic cases, which too often overlook structural violence. The article argues for settler decolonization as a path of reconciliation and in so doing directly engages structural violence and instantiates theoretical arguments to more securely anchor the field of transitional justice to positive peace. The article analyzes the decolonizing potential of the TRC in its ability to invoke ‘social accountability’ through its approach to truth and in its grassroots potential. Although the TRC has some capacity to advance decolonization, its progress is hampered by the conservative political environment, its weak public profile and to some degree its own emphasis on survivor healing, which provides a ready focal for settlers to individualize Indian residential schools violence as something of the past. Yet, Indigenous healing is intrinsically connected to structural transformation and reconciliation depends upon remedying colonial violence in the present. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Fatal Knowledges: The Social and Political Legacies of Collaboration and Betrayal in Timor-Leste
“This article considers the case of Timor-Leste, occupied by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, to elucidate the conditions that bedevil transitional justice processes in the aftermath of massive and long-running political violence, when a perpetrator state enjoys impunity because its wartime strategies facilitated denial of its responsibility, political violence was organized through the militarization of local society and individuals operated between the state and the resistance. The continuing social memory and knowledge of such conflict coupled with its judicial invisibility have significant consequences for rebuilding everyday lives. International agencies and processes have not only failed to attend to these dynamics in Timor-Leste but also replicated and perpetuated them, making the restoration of trust on which social reconstruction depends even more difficult. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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The Victim’s Address: Expressivism and the Victim at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
“This is an interrogation into what an international(ized) court can hold. Expressivism teaches us that by trying those responsible for mass losses, criminal courts send moral messages on the value of the rule of law that strengthen community attachments. In this performance of ritualized grief and condemnation, the court must hold the victim: the dead victim who remains in images inside and outside the court; the surviving victims whose desire to bear witness stands in tension with the constraints of the legal process in victim participation; and the communities whose victimization is the court’s focus as they are engaged through outreach programs. In this article, I question whether expressivism is a viable rationale for international criminal law by examining victim appearance at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. I argue that expressivism relies on simplified representations of victimhood that do not adequately address victims. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Reconciliation through Remembrance? War Memorials and the Victims of Vukovar
“Memorials remain a relatively under-investigated dimension of transitional justice. Seeking to address this gap, this empirical article focuses on the Croatian town of Vukovar to examine whether war memorials can aid postconflict reconciliation, defined as the restoration and repair of relationships and the rebuilding of trust. It argues that Vukovar’s numerous war memorials are obstructing reconciliation between the town’s Croats and Serbs in two main ways. First, they are encouraging selective memory through the erasure of Serb victims. Second, they are contributing to a problem of too much memory, which is preventing society from moving forward. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Remembering Complexity? Memorials for Nazi Victims in Berlin
“How do memorials shape who we think we are? And how are our identities involved when we debate, create and interact with memorials? This article engages in a conversation with scholarship on intersectional identities and memorial practices in Berlin. Intersectionality scholarship, with its roots in US critical race feminism, has much to offer for thinking about the complexity of identities, yet it does not consider the role of memory, time and temporality. The scholarship on memory and memorials, in turn, does not sufficiently consider the complexity of identities of those who are memorialized and of those who visit memorials. The article asks how two different memorials for Nazi victims in Berlin allow for or facilitate the memory of complex identities, illustrates that memorial practices can be crucial in contemporary identity politics and social movements and calls for a more self-reflexive approach to the role of identities and complexity in memorial scholarship and practice. “
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Denial, Silence and the Politics of the Past: Unpicking the Opposition to Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland
“There has been considerable and protracted debate on whether a formal truth recovery process should be established in Northern Ireland. Some of the strongest opposition to the creation of such a body has been from unionist political elites and the security forces. Based on qualitative fieldwork, this article argues that the dynamics of denial and silence have been instrumental in shaping their concerns. It explores how questions of memory, identity and denial have created a ‘myth of blamelessness’ in unionist discourse that is at odds with the reasons for a truth process being established. It also examines how three interlocking manifestations of silence – ‘silence as passivity,’ ‘silence as loyalty’ and ‘silence as pragmatism’ – have furthered unionists’ opposition to dealing with the past. This article argues that making peace with the past requires an active deconstruction of these practices. “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Judgment, Imagination and Critique in the Politics of Reconciliation
“The field of transitional justice theory has, since its rapid expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, become inundated with interventions. The two books under review supply reliable compasses for navigating the vast, murky waters of this literature. What is more, they deliver powerful accountings of their own. Marked by elegant phrasing, supple insight and rigorous research, Bronwyn Leebaw’s Judging State-Sponsored Violence is a timely and welcome contribution. The book is a triumph – beautifully rendered and rich with provocations that will likely quake the foundations of thinking on transitional justice. Yasco Horsman’s Theaters of Justice, expansive in its range and scope and populated with articulate and careful readings, is likewise vivifying for the field.
The two authors hail from similar schools of thought. For both, reconciliation in the aftermath of historical violence ought not to resolve or foreclose the past. Surviving trauma does not mean mastering the past but rather, as Horsman puts it, confronting a force ‘in the face of which we are thrown out of joint’ (p. 140). On this reading, transitional justice measures are not neutral devices through which commonly accepted legal standards can be applied. Rather, they actively shape and reshape what constitutes justice and injustice in an ongoing way. They engage in a process of reimagining the very basis of political community.1
Leebaw and Horsman both rely on close examinations of legal trials conducted in the aftermath of atrocity and are interested in illuminating what gets hidden by these institutional frameworks. Political and moral judgment stand at the center of both discussions of what engagement with responsibility, mediation and justice means for societies working through past abuses. At stake for the authors is nothing less than a radical revisioning of what reconciliation means. For Leebaw and Horsman, inhabiting an aftermath that refuses to … “
tags: newjournalarticles
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Transitional Justice: Power, Symbols and Political Science
“The rapid growth of transitional justice, in both scholarship and practice, has generated an increasing interest in explanatory and evaluative studies of transitional justice dilemmas confronted by transition elites.1 In particular, postcommunist encounters with transition witnessed the emergence of various practices of lustration, criminal trials and truth commissions. Thus, it is not surprising that the region’s diverse historical and political experiences provide rich ground for the study of transition. The books reviewed here build upon a long tradition of scholarly engagement with postcommunist transitional justice to provide political science perspectives on dilemmas of transition that taken together provide important contributions to transitional justice scholarship through context-rich and lucid multicountry case studies.2
To be sure, both Brian Grodsky’s and Roman David’s texts are ambitious in scope. Grodsky’s Costs of Justice provides cross-national case studies that attempt to address two underlying weaknesses in transitional justice scholarship identified by the author: a tendency to focus on single-country case studies and a narrow focus on transitional justice dilemmas that does not take into account the broad range of policy challenges facing transitional elites, from establishing new institutions of governance to economic restructuring. David’s Lustration and Transitional Justice, like Grodsky’s text, presents multicountry case studies. Unlike Grodsky, however, David seeks to explain the emergence and effects of lustration in particular and offers policy-relevant advice as to how to deal with the legacy of inherited personnel.3
Explanatory studies of transitional justice are at the core of political science inquiry into the field.4 They were initially embedded within a wide body of literature that sought to understand the political transitions in Latin America, East Asia and Central and Eastern Europe during the latter half of the 20th century. While attempts to understand, or evaluate, the social and political effects of transitional justice … “
tags: newjournalarticles
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State, Non-Governmental and International Organizations in the Possible Peace Process in Turkey’s Conflict-Induced Displacement
“Turkey has experienced several different internal migration periods since its foundation in 1923. However, the internal displacement of the 1990s brought to the forefront the divergent discussions on whether this wave of internal displacement can be approached from a traditional developmentalist approach or whether critical issues pertaining to the Kurdish Question also need to be addressed, requiring a broader understanding of what peace means to IDPs and different actors. This article studies these two approaches which are taken by the Turkish state, local non-governmental organizations and international organizations. It discusses Turkey’s internal displacement issue and Kurdish Question and analyses these actors’ different perspectives on the policies related to the areas affected by the conflict, and to addressing internal displacement. It argues that internal displacement is an important issue to be addressed in peace processes. Without acknowledging different perspectives presented by different actors neither peace nor development is possible.
Key words
internal displacement
Kurdish Question in Turkey
Non-Governmental Organizations
International Organizations
peace process
“IDPs are the proverbial ‘canaries in the coal mine’—their conditions and prospects are key barometers of whether peace will take root and development will take off, or whether conflicts will re-emerge and another spiral of violence will ensue (O’Neill 2009: 152).”
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Journal of Refugee Studies (2012) doi: 10.1093/jrs/fer057 First published online: February 17, 2012
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