This chapter conceptualises reconciliation and unreconciliation as two spaces. The chapter analyses Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana together with the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Bagosora et al. and Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife alongside the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Milošević. The reflective narratives depict geographical proximity, trust and shared culture or history as supportive of the space of reconciliation. Fear and mistrust, physical distance and forced forgiveness maintain unreconciliation, and fear may be symptomatic of the absence of the rule of law. Addressing fear and reconciliation simultaneously could be beneficial and a means to break the cycles of attitudes and behaviours which, for example, allow the lack of trust to prevent communication needed for establishing trust. While reconciliation takes place among and between individuals and different size groups in diverse societal spheres and contexts, the chapter positions the dead as an overlooked stakeholder group.

This chapter maps the overall picture of transitional justice in Rwanda and the former Yugoslav countries, which shapes how the future has been imagined. Since reflective narratives do not always align with the local, national and international actors’ understandings of post-atrocity realities, this chapter explores which mechanisms, policies and practices have sought to contribute to the transitional justice goals of truth, justice, healing and reconciliation. The chapter highlights that studies driven by goals of transitional justice can help identify complementary and contradictory aims and extend the wealth of research that focuses on specific transitional justice mechanisms.

This concluding chapter returns to the aim of the book to locate the conceptual contribution of reflective narratives in the field of transitional justice. It discusses the implications of the case study chapters, reiterating the ways in which the reflective narratives that imagine futures can help rethink existing conceptualisations and challenges of transitional justice. It explores the relevance of the findings to practitioners and policy makers. The chapter also identifies thematic connections of agency, silence, listening, and death or the dead that emerge as a web of spaces and touchpoints across the different chapters and goals of transitional justice. This contributes towards possible future research avenues and leads towards returning the focus on the individual human beings who live with the complex and evolving legacies of genocide and war.

This chapter argues for the need to recognise those who do not heal after atrocity. It analyses Gilbert Gatore’s The Past Ahead and Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una and sets them alongside the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Renzaho and the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Brđanin. The chapter distinguishes narration of pain from the narration of healing, suggesting that both can play a role in (narrative) healing. It shows that momentary relief or respite is a form of healing, and that the moment of death, in particular, a suicide, emerges as the end point of successful and unsuccessful healing. Drawing on pain and healing in trauma and literary studies, the chapter reminds the reader of the longevity of pain experiences and healing processes which are dependent of the person and their physical and social environment. Since the absence of healing may isolate from collective and societal change, this chapter seeks to increase the visibility of those who do not heal in the field of transitional justice and challenge assumptions of the permanence of decrease in pain.

This chapter examines truth, foregrounding the shared characteristics of different types of truth. The chapter brings together Boris Boubacar Diop’s novel Murambi, The Book of Bones and the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Simba alongside Goran Vojnović’s Yugoslavia, My Fatherland and the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Mrkšić et al. Building on insights from narratology, this chapter traces the dialogicality of truth through analysis of the construction of truth in dialogue, the ways in which truths are obscured in dialogue, the impact of the absence of dialogue, and truth that emerges in dialogue with objects and documents. The literary texts offer certainty that remains absent in the ambiguous and open-ended accounts is the legal narratives. Revising the dominant focus on differences between personal, social, legal and forensic truth, the chapter argues that these types of truth are social and partial.

The opening chapter outlines how reflective narratives can elucidate and extend existing conceptualisations of transitional justice goals. It traces the characteristics of historical, legal and creative narratives about the war and genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the different meanings these narratives have given to violence and its aftermath. Here reflective narratives – produced slowly in and through the arts and law – emerge as stories that imagine or help imagine futures different to the present. The chapter introduces the entanglement of the methods of ‘law as literature’ and ‘law in literature’ in this book. It also locates the arts and law in the field of transitional justice, arguing for the need to understand core goals from new perspectives that account for the interdisciplinarity of the field and for the inclusion of non-participatory arts in knowledge production. The chapter closes with an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter engages with critiques about international criminal tribunals that centre on dissatisfaction with justice. It argues that reframing the debate to focus on the bearable level of injustice would invite reflection over and help revise expectations of justice. Engaging with legal and transitional justice scholarship, the chapter analyses Raoul Peck’s film Sometimes in April and Kitty Felde’s play A Patch of Earth together with the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al. and the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Erdemović. These reflective narratives complicate the limits of criminal accountability, and the chapter approaches them through the themes of responsibility, blame and agency. Differentiating between justice and justness, the chapter demonstrates how perceptions of just justice are subjective and dependent on who else is held accountable and how. The chapter also moves outside of the ICTY and ICTR to examine alternative pursuits of justice: impunity through silence and revenge. This reveals that some gaps in justice processes are acceptable while others are unbearable.

This chapter describes the 2010–11 revolution that kick-started Tunisia’s democratic transition and the initial transitional year that followed. It illustrates the two major axes of polarization that would define Tunisian democracy: one between the old regime and the revolutionaries, and the other between the secularists and the Islamists. It then describes the initial attempts to bridge these divides through compromise and consensus. Interim Prime Minister Beji Caid Essebsi initiated major compromises on the revolution’s demands of anti-corruption, security sector reform, and political lustration, finding consensus between the old regime and the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, the winning Islamist and secular parties in the 2011 elections likewise chose consensus, agreeing to govern in a grand coalition. These choices to share power and find common ground facilitated Tunisia’s early transitional years, allowing the political elite to rein in polarization and uncertainty and avoid spoilers that may otherwise have thwarted the transition to Tunisia’s first-ever democratically elected government in December 2011.

This chapter illustrates the dark sides of continuing to pursue power-sharing after establishing the rules of the game. It outlines why the major political parties in Tunisia decided to keep governing together through another grand coalition government between 2015 and 2019, and how these efforts both worsened polarization and sparked the rise of populism. It first shows that the decision of Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda to enter into a grand coalition ceded space for the emergence of hardline parties on either end of the spectrum, worsening polarization. Second, the extended power-sharing inadvertently sparked populism as well, by tainting all of the mainstream parties as part of the establishment and fueling the rise of populist outsider Kais Saied. Drawing on interviews and original election surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, I show that the grand coalition led the party system to collapse, with frustrated voters shifting to populist and extremist forces instead. Had the political parties not entered into a grand coalition, they may have kept Tunisians invested in the two major, moderate parties and staved off the rise of these populists and extremists.

This chapter describes how the 2011–14 grand coalition government in Tunisia navigated growing polarization in 2012 and especially 2013. That year, two major political assassinations and dueling protests led to fears of a coup or a descent into civil war. But the political elite’s norms of power-sharing, compromise, and consensus helped to bring them back from the brink and strike a grand bargain that put the transition back on track. Through an inclusive national dialogue mediated by civil society, Tunisia’s Islamist and secularist forces found common ground over a new, progressive constitution that was approved by near unanimity. Meanwhile, the revolutionary and old regime forces likewise compromised to include the old regime in elections but allow a transitional justice mechanism to hold the worst abusers accountable. Power-sharing thus enabled Tunisia’s transition in 2014 to establish a new constitution and electoral law – the rules of the game that would govern its new democracy.

This chapter engages with a Colombian performance action by a group called Cuerpos Gramaticales, or Grammatical Bodies. Members of the collective symbolically sow themselves in public places, planted for six hours with their lower bodies under mounds of dirt and their upper bodies rising as trunks, stems, and leaves from the earth. The action is undertaken to denounce violence, achieve collective catharsis, and (re)align relationships among body, territory, and memory. That is, it is an exercise putting the body at the center of a project to restructure – and to synthesize – ethical, spiritual, ecological, and political grammars that guide sensemaking about violence, life, and death in Colombia. The action was first initiated to denounce a joint state-paramilitary urban massacre two years before Colombia ratified peace accords ending a fifty-three-year armed conflict with its oldest guerrilla army. The chapter discusses actions taken in the early stages of the accords’ implementation, as surviving kin of victims of state-perpetrated crimes against humanity struggled to make state and society acknowledge the significance of their loved ones’ lives and the cruelty of their deaths.

This chapter examines an alternative mode of public deliberation in post-revolutionary Tunisia by focusing on a group of left-wing militants who organize grassroots discussion initiatives, most notably the ciné-club – a gathering that blends film screenings with political debate. The ciné-club serves as a space for reclaiming Tunisia’s suppressed legacy of protest and its involvement in the global radical movements of the long 1960s. In contrast to official forums such as transitional justice hearings, which attempt to reconcile revolutionary ideals with the liberal democratic transition, ciné-club discussions assert the continued relevance of revolutionary leftist culture. They resist the depoliticizing pull of liberal norms and instead propose a different political temporality: one in which the revolutionary past informs an open-ended, insurgent present. By doing so, the ciné-club disrupts dominant narratives of linear democratic progress and reclaims space for alternative political imaginaries.

This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

The book concludes with a short chapter that invites readers to re-consider the relationship between Truth Commissions and international law. It emphasizes the consequences of this relationship for the quality of state-society relations in the aftermath of violent conflict. It also highlights the importance of paying attention to who is authorizing the inclusion of local cultural expressions of violent conflict in the accounts produced by Truth Commission; who benefits from such inclusions; and what ends are being served.

Although criminal trials are primarily designed to repress individual acts, a new role has emerged with the third generation of jihadist trials. They have become a ‘forum’, giving voice to different actors in order to reconstruct a socio-historical phenomenon in all its complexity, as we have seen with truth commissions in post-conflict countries. These trials have become a space where the defendants recount their path to radicalization, the victims relate their trauma and expectations, the experts situate the phenomenon in a political, social and medical context, and the police and security services expose their work and their difficulties. The rich narratives exposed by the different stakeholders, and most notably by hundreds of victims, are at the center of this organic process, which is being constantly developed by the actors themselves. Obviously, the trial was strictly framed by criminal law procedure, but this framework was partly circumvented, enriched, and even subverted during the trial. This chapter discusses the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan trials and the emergence of a hybrid procedure, which introduced important elements of restorative justice.