Abstract
What would transitional justice that is determined by victims look like? This is precisely the question that readers confront in Simon Robins’ Families of the Missing: A Test of Contemporary Approaches to Transitional Justice. Robins’ ambitious book offers a ‘bottom-up’ challenge to the transitional justice paradigm, animated by globalized discourses of human rights and materialized in the one-size-fits-all mechanisms of trials, truth commissions and reparations. Robins advocates for a victim-centered approach to transitional justice that is grounded in victims’ own articulation of their needs, rather than rooted in abstract, alien discourses of rights. As such, responses to mass political violence must be contextual and locally driven, in contrast to an elite-driven ‘mimetic’ approach of superimposing internationalized models onto local contexts. Based on comparative ethnographies of Nepal and Timor Leste, Families of the Missing focuses on disappearances, understanding surviving families and community members as victims who exemplify both the egregious nature of harms experienced in times of political violence and the demands that victims may advance in the transitions that follow.
Robins’ objectives are both broadly oriented to testing the limits of current transitional justice discourse and practice, and more narrowly focused on the particularities of disappearance as it is experienced in his two case sites. Chapter 1 lays out the core arguments of the book, highlighting the disjuncture between current transitional justice and peacebuilding orthodoxies and the everyday lives of victims, while calling for transitional justice that engages the needs of victims. Chapter 2 elaborates the conceptual tools of the study, centrally the concepts of needs and ambiguous loss. Here, the author also summarizes criticisms of truth commissions, reparations, and trials from a victim-centered perspective, concluding that victims’ demands do not conform to the usual dichotomy of retributive/restorative justice, but take myriad, complex forms. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the context, events, and transitional justice efforts in Nepal and Timor Leste in order to set the stage for the detailed analysis of each case site. Chapter 4, focused on Nepal, and Chapter 5, focused on Timor Leste, are structured in parallel: Robins begins each case discussion with an examination of data, a profile of the local victim populations, a discussion of needs articulated by families and communities, followed by a critical analysis of transitional justice efforts in each context. This critique is deepened in Chapter 6, which explicates how in both Nepal and Timor Leste, national and international elite agendas shaped and limited transitional justice, rendering the mechanisms employed distant and irrelevant to victims. The paradigmatic emphases on legalism, therapeutic catharsis and the legitimation of successor regimes in transitional justice are at odds with victims’ needs for ‘undoing’ social and material exclusion. Chapters 7 and 8 outline a victim-centered approach to transitional justice that is rooted in victims’ agendas, employs local and traditional resources, and resonates with local belief systems. Such an approach to transitional justice may, for example, attend to the spiritual rituals of victim communities rather than fetishize human rights approaches. In both contexts, victims valued public, local memorialization and reparations that both honored the missing and provided economic recovery over distant goals of ending impunity or recording national truths. As emphasized in Chapter 8, victim-centered transitional justice must be participatory and transformative.
Families of the Missing is a highly original contribution to transitional justice literature, which has principally been rooted in normative claims-making with little reliance on empirical evidence. Empirical studies are largely limited to investigation of dominant mechanisms (e.g. truth commissions) and selectively involve relatively elite populations familiar with the globalized language of human rights. In contrast, Robins’ study is a participatory and activist ethnography of a representative cross-section of the population of each case country. As a participatory approach, Robins worked with victims’ organizations to develop both the form and content of the study; and, as action research, the study provides advocacy tools for victims and their organizations as they mobilize themselves. The emphasis on ethnographic evidence lends forcefulness to the conceptual claims advanced in this book. For example, the gap between global transitional practice and local priorities and meanings is detailed powerfully in the empirically grounded discussion of victims’ experience of spirit presence in their everyday worlds. Flying in the face of transitional justice discourse that medicalizes victims and assumes that narrow concepts of justice and truth lead to peace, the ethnographic account of Timor Leste vividly demonstrates how victims pin the viability of peace on putting spirits to rest. The ethnographic richness of this study, indeed, illustrates the gap between Western and traditional concepts and practices of justice.
Families of the Missing also uniquely examines the notion of ambiguous loss in non-Western settings. Ambiguous loss describes the experience of disappearance, characterized by the simultaneous presence and absence of the missing. In both Nepal and Timor Leste, the recovery of remains – or at least an answer or accounting of what happened – offers the possibility of ending ambiguity. This study shows that the experience of ambiguous loss is local and shaped by multiple forces, including structural inequalities. In Nepal, for example, ambiguous loss produces problems of identity construction that are acutely gendered. Wives of the missing occupy precarious positions within missing husbands’ households. The ambiguity of the loss produces tension between the social expectation that a woman comport herself as a widow and a woman’s self-identification as a wife. The decision to wear the accoutrements of a wife may be read as a political demand for answers about the fate of men who have been disappeared. The lens of ambiguous loss makes legible the demands of families who must revise their attachment to the missing such as victims in Nepal who seek memorialization as a form of justice that honors the missing without formally accepting death. What is accomplished is not ever-elusive closure, but normalizing and learning to live well with ambiguity. Interpreting victims’ experiences through the lens of ambiguous loss highlights the particularity of victims’ needs.
It has become commonplace in the literature to criticize transitional justice for failing to address structural conditions and distributive injustice; however, Robins’ focus on needs not only represents an innovative way of framing this criticism but opens the door to a strategic set of solutions. Despite the global hegemony of human rights, victims articulate their demands in the language of needs, which are necessarily contextual as they arise from everyday realities. Addressing victims’ needs is the key to peace as victims’ unmet needs may give rise to renewed conflict. Nonetheless, Robins does not jettison the notion of rights entirely, for example, drawing on Sally Merry’s theorization of rights as a resource to be vernacularized in local contexts, and as one of many frameworks that might be mobilized by local actors; yet, Robins draws attention to the limits of universalistic rights discourse as an abstract constellation of ideas that construct victim identity through a narrow lens and that consolidates power in the hands of knowledgeable elites while producing relations of trusteeship. Moreover, rights threaten to co-opt more radical demands (captured in the language of needs) that may transform social order. In Nepal and Timor Leste, needs were articulated by victims differently; yet, there were also important commonalities. Victims expressed needs in relation to economic support, acknowledgment, and memory, as well as psycho-social, identity, and spiritual issues. Importantly, Robins’ lens of needs highlights the heterogeneity of victim populations; for example, in Nepal, the poorest, most marginalized, rural and female victims within the larger population were most likely to emphasize economic needs.
The needs articulated by victims in local contexts explain the importance of certain transitional responses over others. For example, in Timor Leste, the valorization process that included awarding medals to families of missing veterans represents both material compensation and a symbolic recognition of the role loved ones played in the resistance. In contrast, victims saw little value in the CAVR (the Timorese truth commission). In Nepal, victims expressed a need for memorialization to honor the missing as martyrs, which is not part of the larger transitional justice package. Thus, the disjuncture between the needs expressed by victims and the transitional justice delivered by international and national agendas underscores the importance of striving for a victim-centered transitional justice. Robins outlines a set of principles underpinning the concept of victim-centered transitional justice, in particular that it must be rooted in the everyday and steered by victims and their organizations. Rather than instrumentally involving victims to share stories (as in truth commissions) or give testimony (as in trials), victim participation must be fundamental to the process, outcome and evaluation of transitional justice, with victims setting the benchmarks that define success. Victims must represent themselves and transitional justice should reflect the language and priorities of victims. Victim-centered transitional justice, moreover, must be ‘emancipatory’ through the prioritization of victim agency to counter the lack of agency in relation to disappearance. Victim-centered transitional justice thus becomes a site of identity reconstruction through empowerment, solidarity with other victims, and collective action.
Families of the Missing is a richly detailed, theoretically textured work that draws resources from varied disciplines (including psychology, development studies, and anthropology) to make an original contribution to transitional justice scholarship that advances important critiques of transitional justice orthodoxy and the internationalization of liberalism, while also productively driving at solutions. Robins’ analysis also provides a subtle account of differences among victims, such as the differential experience of victims whose loved ones were disappeared by the resistance rather than the state. Similarly, inequalities among victims form a thread running through this analysis, in particular along the axes of gender and rural/urban geography. As such, more examination of the implications of heterogeneity within victim populations would have further strengthened this analysis. Specifically, notwithstanding Robins’ assertion that the local and traditional should not be romanticized, how can a victim-centered approach to transitional justice resist implication in local power relations that limit the quotidian possibilities of women or the young? Moreover, in many transitional settings victims and perpetrators are not distinct categories. How would victim-centered transitional justice account for victims who also were complicit in violations? Given that perpetrators are often community members or conationals living with inequality and marginalization, how does victim-centered transitional justice address perpetrators as complex actors? Finally, can local, traditional practices extend demands for social justice beyond the local to the global? A comprehensive challenge to the current transitional justice paradigm and a complex account of the experience of victims, Families of the Missing is a powerful and necessary book that merits the attention of transitional justice scholars and practitioners.