Description
Truth commissions are currently seeing a new wave of enthusiasm – alongside sustained criticism. Though they are promoted as “victim-centred” transitional justice instruments, a major critique has been that they fail to centre victims’ and survivors’ voices and demands. Our paper sets out to illustrate and explain key processes behind such “failure”. Based on interpretive research on three internationalized truth commissions (the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Kenya Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission, and the Tunisia Truth and Dignity Commission), we develop an empirically grounded concept to describe the pressures that shape the work of committed experts and professionals who produce the key outputs of truth commissions, their final reports. Intersecting global hierarchies bear on their work and gear it towards a specifically bounded contingency. Though it is never exactly predictable how a commission will work and what its final report will look like, the interplay of unequal pressures emanating from these intersecting hierarchies – including professional and funding pressures, threats of violence and intimidation, and grassroots demands – renders certain outcomes extremely unlikely. First among these unlikely outcomes are reports that would actually prioritize victims’ and survivors’ voices and demands.
