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 the intersections between Indigeneity, Indigenization and CRT as paths to uncover structural racism and inequities, to resist and neutralize decolonizing ways. Indigeneity and Indigenization are grounded in radical remembering and reconceptualizing social work’s ethical and moral fortitude. They represent Indigenous identities, lifeways and values calling on us to examine all aspects of racism, power distribution, and wellbeing with the intent of strengthening communities. The dualism of CRT, white vs. black and other people of color, neglects Indigenous world views and perpetuates colonial dynamics by excluding ways of being and thinking beyond race. In this way, CRT detracts energy from restoration, securing of ancestral lands, revitalizing Indigenous languages and cultural practices, and impedes intergenerational healing. Indigenously defined social work practice holds the promise of universal wellbeing and opportunities to diversify a socially just agenda.

Connection to Country or traditional lands is critical to the life and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. In the Indigenous worldview, collective identity, stories, language, law/lore, ancestors, and all living things are intimately interconnected with Country, which provides the central pivot point around which all life revolves. Attempts by the ‘colonial project’ to disconnect Indigenous Peoples from their sovereign Country and distinct worldviews has undermined their source of wellbeing and generated traumatic social and health outcomes. Yet, Indigenous Peoples continue to resist. This chapter provides examples of how several Wiradjuri Elders and Wiradjuri Nation-rebuilders are resisting the colonial project through reclaiming the Wiradjuri language and building connection to Country to solidify their Wiradjuri worldview. We discuss the importance of an Indigenous sense of place for collective healing and wellbeing and how interconnection with Country informs a world where we face the potential for environmental crisis and collapse.

This chapter presents a scheme for best estimating the age of a fracture in a young child. It describes the features of healing fractures in children. It presents the current literature, addressing rates of healing, factors that may affect healing and how the radiographic findings change during phases of healing. In addition, the authors emphasize the role a radiologist plays in the establishment of an injury timeline. By understanding the contemporary literature, a reader will be able to estimate the age of fractures using the healing features depicted on a radiograph or series of radiographs.

Rib fractures are the most common fracture by number in the abused child. While posterior rib fractures bear the highest specificity for child abuse, rib fractures are rare in infants and young children from accidental trauma. In the absence of overt underlying bone disease or reliably witnessed trauma, any rib fracture in an infant or young child is worrisome and indicates the need for further evaluation.

Normal rib anatomy is presented. Rib fractures may occur at any location in the rib from rib head proximally to costochondral junction distally. Abusive rib fractures may be acute or, more commonly, in the healing state at presentation. Rib fractures are commonly accompanied by other abusive injuries. Lower rib fractures are not infrequently seen when there is abusive visceral trauma.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation in infants may cause rib fractures; however, such fractures are characteristically buckle fractures of the anterior or anterolateral upper and middle ribs and show no evidence of healing at presentation.

Religion is central to Seamus Heaney’s work. Alongside his preoccupations with Catholic and Celtic belief, ancient Greek and Roman religions are significant in Heaney’s methodological palette, in which ‘low intensity’ allusions to aspects of religious culture can inform operations of poetry and ritual. Greek and Roman culture provides Heaney with a repository of spirit-guide figures, symbolic characters such as Heracles and Tiresias, forms and tropes, including funerary rituals, burial, pilgrimage, and katabasis, and entire works which the poet reimagined, such as Sophocles’s Philoctetes and Euripides’s Antigone, in which civic and religious duties intersect in ways germane to the poet’s reflections on his own time.

The notion of truth is a powerful one within transitional justice, and truth-telling and truth-seeking are considered to be a necessary part of any justice pursuit. Also in the US, official government actors are creating truth commissions (or truth commission-like processes) in order to acknowledge and address a wide range of violent and discriminatory contexts, both historical and present-day. This chapter explores two such truth commissions operating at the sub-national level, namely in the states of Maryland and California. Drawing from participatory scholarship, the chapter evaluates these examples and highlights how current and future truth processes can better conceptualise and implement victim participation in order to have deeper engagement and impact with affected communities. Examining these efforts around agency and empowerment can shed light on broader developments around formalised participation, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the second generation of victim engagement in transitional justice practices in the US.

Catholics continued to make pilgrimages, near and far, during the early modern period, despite the challenges of the Reformation. Drawing on examples from Western Europe and beyond, this chapter follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

Chapter 1, the introductory chapter, outlines the development of psychotraumatology or traumatic stress studies, in which the author was also partly involved. It traces how it came about that the author Brave Heart and others have been presenting concepts on historical trauma since the early 2000s. An operationalized definition with two basic criteria and five consecutive criteria is presented. The following eight contexts from all parts of the world are presented and their selection justified. The first four are typical configurations of historical trauma because they fulfil all the criteria without exception. The last four historical traumas fulfil only some of the criteria, but are each particularly revealing, for example when it comes to the minimization of the victim narrative for political reasons. The method of the coupled scoping review for the book is explained and the target groups of readership are described.

The final chapter of the book offers a reflection on the overarching dimensions that guided the selection of the eight Historical Trauma contexts. Here, the emphasis is placed on the concept of multi-directional memory, a notion derived from memory studies that can be employed to circumvent victimhood competition. Selected concepts related to the HT definition criteria are compared across the different contexts. To this end, a series of flowcharts were developed to illustrate the historical trajectories of the concepts discussed in the book, including conspiracy of silence, victim identity, and value compilations. The comparison of social pathologies and reconciliation is given a broad scope. The concept of healing is addressed, and it is noted that the social and cultural science literature has been reticent to engage in discussions about the reasoned use of the concept that is consistent with evidence-based health interventions and comprehensive psychological and holistic approaches. The outlook addresses the prolificacy of the concept of historical trauma, and the potential dangers associated with its overuse.

The final chapter examines how a new kind of shamanism developed in the riverbank settlements and attracted peoples across the colonial and Indigenous spaces. Although shamanism was a feature of Amerindian societies, the Portuguese also had a tradition of healing and folk curing. Riverine shamans from Indigenous communities were highly active in the eighteenth century, and modified Indigenous practices and Catholic symbols to meet the needs of their clients from all backgrounds seeking their ‘merciful’ work. Shamanic curing and healing connected the three spaces as shamans moved between each one and provided clients with relief from their suffering.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce racial trauma, radical hope, healing, and Black reparations. It begins with the story of Laverne Cox, a Black transgender woman, actress, and trans civil rights activist who wrote an essay on the impact of White supremacy on multiple generations of her family. The story of Laverne illustrates racial trauma, the emotional responses rooted in structural racism that have an intergenerational impact on health. Informed by a reparatory justice approach, this chapter examines radical healing, hope, and reparations to deal with racial trauma and achieve justice. Radical does not mean violent or extremist but is the notion that complete change is necessary to address political problems. It discusses some features and popular myths about reparations, and examines five principles for reparations: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on how education may increase support for Black reparations. It ends with a discussion of Laverne Cox and finding hope in our ancestors.

Up to this point, Part II has considered Origen’s approach to particular Gospel passages without invoking parallel narratives from more than one Gospel. In the process, it has become clear that Origen’s view of the figurative nature of the Gospels does not originate merely in noticing discrepancies among the four received Gospels. Having established this more fundamental point, we may now attend to the occasions where his reading does proceed by way of comparative reading of parallel pericopes. The cluster of narratives surrounding Jesus’s ascent(s) to Jerusalem provides an especially textured model of Origen’s approach to Gospel difference. Here, Origen does not simply exhibit an inchoate awareness of the various critical difficulties that arise when one reads the four Gospels synoptically; he engages these challenges in great detail and develops a sophisticated account of the Gospels’ literary formation in light of them. Still, whatever differences or discord one discovers among the Gospels on the level of history, narrative, and even in their very ideas of Jesus, there remains, for Origen, a more fundamental agreement – a harmony of spirit – among the four Evangelists’ visions.