Truth Commission Impact: Insights from Recent Scholarship

In this talk, Onur Bakiner will provide an overview of the philosophical underpinnings, conceptual frames, and methodological choices informing the scholarship on truth commission impact to examine whether, how, how much, and why truth commissions influence policy, court decisions, and social norms. The findings of empirical scholarship range from partial confirmation of these bold and at times vague expectations to damning accounts of commissions’ failure to deliver.

What is more, scholars have set implicit and explicit standards for what coming to terms with the past truth a truth commission should mean: building liberal democratic institutions, transforming socioeconomic, gendered and racialized hierarchies, and reflecting local values, norms and power dynamics. Especially those studies that demand attentiveness to social justice and local justice have reported disappointment with truth commissions’ achievements.

Speaker profiles

Onur Bakiner

Onur Bakiner is Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle University, USA. His research and teaching interests include transitional justice, human rights, and judicial politics. His book Truth Commissions: Memory, Power, and Legitimacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) investigates the role truth commissions play in contemporary societies, and was awarded the Best Book Award by the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association in 2017.

Currently he has been working on a research project examining judicial actors during prolonged internal conflict. His articles have been published in the Journal of Comparative Politics, Negotiation Journal, Civil Wars, Journal of Law and Courts, the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Memory Studies, and Turkish Studies.

Cath Collins and Brandon Hamber

Comments will be provided by:

• Cath Collins, Professor of Transitional Justice at Ulster University and Director of the Observatorio de Justicia Transicional, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile
• Brandon Hamber, Professor at International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) and John Hume and Thomas P. O'Neill Chair in Peace, Ulster University.

Right to Truth Day

The International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims was instituted by the UN in 2010.  It is observed on 24 March in honour of Monsignor (now Saint) Óscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, assassinated by army-linked death squads on 24 March 1980 for his active defence of the rights of the poor and of victims of repression during El Salvador’s internal armed conflict.