Education and Transitional Justice: Building a Research Cluster

This project seeks to develop a research cluster centered on the linkages between education as a sector and transitional justice, a field traditionally dominated by political scientists, international affairs, and legal scholars. Dating back to the 1980s, there have been more than forty truth commissions, a key transitional justice mechanism, organized in states across the globe. The aim of truth commissions is implicitly educational in that the reports they produce are oriented around facilitating a public narrative, envisioned as a form of shared recognition for past crimes and a commitment to the prevention of their recurrence. Yet we know little about how truth commissioners approach questions of formal, informal, and non-formal education; the extent to which commissioners envision their role as educational; and the impact of education-related recommendations made in commission reports. This project draws on semi-structured interviews with global leaders of transitional justice initiatives, aimed at better understanding the myriad ways that education is positioned and envisioned as a transitional justice process.