I situate Škvorecký’s novel as both a primary document in the historical record of transitional justice and as a literary creation in the author’s larger oeuvre. In creating this work of autobiographical fiction, Škvorecký deals with the ambiguities of a tumultuous historico-political moment and creates an appropriately complex work of art. I combine social science research with close-reading of the text in the tradition of new historicism. In the introduction I explain the historico-political background, specifically transitional justice and lustration in Czech Republic in the early 1990s, that engendered Two Murders. In my first chapter, I examine the book reviews, Czech and English, that appeared following the two language-respective publications of Two Murders. In the remaining three chapters I present my analysis of the novel based on close-reading and applied historical information. Chapters two and three discuss different but interconnected manifestations of distance. Chapter two examines memory as the temporal distance of the mind, while chapter three explores exile as spatial distance. Škvorecký invests memory and exile with enormous significance, and uses both concepts to depict his characters’ isolation. In the final chapter, I discuss rumor and reputation in the novel’s two distinct story-lines, demonstrating how they come together to create a cohesive artistic work. Approaching the novel as both a historical document and a work of art, I hope to critically examine this complicated historical moment and appraise Škvorecký’s contribution to the post-communist Czech dialogue. / text

This thesis focuses on the importance of truth and memory in the process of transitional justice, within the context of the aftermath of gross violations of human rights that occurred during the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 in Argentina. The military junta that ruled Argentina took power under the pretext of national security, arguing that an enemy threatened to destabilize and destroy Argentine society. During the period of the military dictatorship an estimated 30,000 people "disappeared"; relatives of those disappeared mobilized and formed human rights organizations to confront the military regime for its abuses. Once the dictatorship collapsed and democratic rule was reestablished these human rights organizations changed their focus, mobilizing once again to find their missing relatives, learn the truth, and prosecute those responsible of any crimes. A series of amnesty laws and pardons protected the perpetrators of many of the crimes of the military regime through most of the 1990's, until in 2005 the Argentine Supreme Court declared those laws unconstitutional. During the period before the 2005 ruling human rights organizations worked hard to gather the truth about the crimes of the military regime and ensure these crimes were not forgotten. Their initiatives included the famous weekly march to the Plaza de Mayo by members of Madres (Mothers), one of the most important human rights organizations in Argentina; escraches (reveal what is hidden) and public protests by HIJOS (Sons and daughters of the disappeared), actions in which members of HIJOS would go to the houses of known members of the military juntas and protest at their front doors; and programs to find missing grandchildren by Abuelas (Grandmothers), a human rights organization dedicated to searching for the missing children of the disappeared; and others. Because of the structure of terror during the military junta, most Argentines did not know exactly what was happening to the missing persons, and they were afraid to ask. The truth gathering initiatives and the official report of the commission charged with investigating the junta, CONADEP, came into being in response to this lack of knowledge. They helped to inform the Argentine people and the new generations of what had happened during the military dictatorship in hopes of making sure that such abuses do not occur again.

There is a growing literature in political science that focuses on the impact that policies, or mechanisms, of transitional justice (e.g. tribunals, truth commissions, and amnesty laws) have on future human rights abuses and democratization processes. However, this literature fails to differentiate between having a policy on the books and having a policy which is actually implemented. My project attempts for the first time to measure and assess how well two distinct types of transitional justice policies, truth commissions and ad-hoc tribunals, are designed and how well they are implemented. Variation in terms of policy structure (or institutional design) and implementation are currently unknown; knowing what the level of this variation is will enable us to understand the impact these transitional justice policies have on state-level human rights behavior. To conduct this analysis, I first offer a derivation of principal-agent theory and then assemble a new dataset of measures culled from primary and secondary data sources on over 40 different courts and truth commissions. For the data on the institutional design of these transitional justice policies, I collected and translated the legal mandates which create courts or commissions. I then coded the power, authority, and resource allocations which are designated in these mandates. For the data on implementation, I collected primary commission and court reports as well as secondary analyses and tracked the various activities and forms of engagement which were utilized in the process of carrying out each policy. These data were then compiled with a full set of economic, political, and social context measures and analyzed to determine whether policies with (1) more allocated authority/power or resources or (2) better implementation produced greater improvements in respect for human rights or reduced the likelihood of having additional instances of rights violations. Overall, I find that design and implementation measures are not strongly related to greater rights improvements or the reduced likelihood of violations, indicating that whatever positive changes may exist are not likely due to transitional justice practices. However, the use of transitional justice policies following human rights abuses is correlated with more positive outcomes. The ultimate goal of this project was to determine whether these policies can deliver justice and to initiate a dialogue on whether domestic populations are well served by high-cost policies (such as courts or commissions) or whether these priorities should be tabled in favor of addressing more immediate needs of these groups. The results of this dissertation appear to support the latter claim although these findings remain preliminary.

This research examines the process of memorialisation around the Indian Residential School System in Canada to draw connections between the fields of transitional justice and professional urban planning. For over a century, government and churches in Canada operated a system of residential schools that removed Indigenous children from their families and communities. Today, many Indigenous communities struggle with the intergenerational impacts of this system, and as a society we are attempting to heal the damaged relationships that have resulted. This research presents a comparative case study of two processes of memorialisation surrounding the residential school system. Through site observations, interviews, and analyses of documents, this research examines the transformation and memorialisation of the Mohawk Institute, a former residential school, into the Woodland Cultural Centre, a First Nations-run centre located in Brantford, Ontario. I compare this example with the national Commemoration Fund, set out in the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (2006), which settled lawsuits filed by residential school survivors against the federal government of Canada and several church organisations. This research underlines some tensions inherent in memorialising the human rights abuses experienced in the residential schools. A significant difficulty is establishing balance between leaving ownership of stories of the residential school experiences with survivors, while acknowledging the responsibilities that the whole of society must carry if reconciliation is to be achieved. I conclude that the process established through the Commemoration Fund does not adequately reflect this balance, leaving a heavy burden on survivors and their communities without providing adequate support. I further argue that the timelines established through this fund do not allow for the longer-term evolution that may characterize effective memorialisation projects. These themes link to theories around collaborative planning, and considerations of social justice and procedural fairness. In recent decades, collaborative planning has been seen as a way to make planning practices more inclusive. However, in the context of planning with Indigenous Peoples, collaborative processes may not be a sufficient response to rights claims. This has important implications for professional planners, as we work towards decolonization, reconciliation, and establishing just-relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in Canada. / Thesis (Master, Urban & Regional Planning) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-08 13:19:55.027

This thesis analyzes the development of national justice processes in Uganda in the wake of war in order to address key theoretical dilemmas that have recently emerged in the field of transitional justice. I focus on closely connected debates over the exclusion of socioeconomic justice, the relationship between international, national and local actors, the role of transitional justice discourse, and ultimately, the future of the field itself. Based on fieldwork undertaken in Kampala, the Acholi district and the temporary international arena created in Kampala for the 2010 ICC Review Conference, this thesis traces the role of local, national and international actors in the war itself, the search for peace, and the current post-conflict period. I examine the ways in which actors at all levels narrate the northern conflict and accordingly negotiate and contest the nature, scope and course of post conflict justice. I argue that the struggle for a meaningful approach to transitional justice is global in dimension. The power to define and perform postwar justice is concentrated in the hands of the state. A high risk persists that Uganda's transitional justice policy will prove an empty performance of 'victor's justice.' International and domestic actors alike have shaped and justified the Ugandan Government's self-interested approach and facilitated the dominance of international criminal justice. Conversely, civil society actors at all levels in Uganda draw on transitional justice as a radical language of resistance to fight for meaningful change. As long as it fails to address socioeconomic issues and structural violence however, transitional justice discourse will ultimately fall short of giving political voice to local priorities, and activating long-term social transformation. I argue that the field of transitional justice must be re-envisioned to embrace socioeconomic justice, in order to impel the endless pursuit of a just society. This task will require the collective efforts of a global constellation of actors.

The questions of business involvement in human rights violations in countries facing civil conflict, as well as access to remedy and accountability for these violations have generated a considerable amount of attention from academia and practitioners. While most theoretical efforts on access to remedy and accountability have focused on identifying the obstacles to access to justice, these do not explain the unlikely case of Colombia, where despite all structural obstacles being present (e.g. armed conflict, corruption), the country has positioned itself as a leader in the region in terms of judicialisation and convictions of economic actors for their complicity with grave human rights violations committed in the course of the 50 year internal armed conflict. This thesis is a theory building and theory-testing project that looks for alternative explanations to the outcomes registered in Colombia, focusing on the agents involved in these cases and how the variation in the power of the people (claimants) and the power of businesses (defendants) explains access to justice. This thesis uses the most comprehensive datasets in existence of business involvement in human rights violations (the Corporations and Human Rights Database and the Corporate Accountability and Transitional Justice Database) to present a novel and much needed systematic analysis to identify the factors explaining why and when remedy and accountability is possible. The results of the study suggest that the variations in the power of people and the power of business do offer a plausible alternative explanation to the unlikely case of Colombia. The Colombia data analyzed in this thesis suggests that while an increase in the power of the people (through the support of global actors and political opportunities) is necessary to secure judicialisation and remedy, these results are only possible when they face an economic actor with reduced veto power.

abstract: Over the past decades, Colombian society has endured the impact of a longstanding political conflict among different actors and outrageous expressions of violence, especially among left wing guerrillas, right wing paramilitary groups and the state government. Drawing on socio-legal studies in transitional justice and human rights, this research attempts to analyze the recent experience of transitional justice in Colombia. The main purpose of this research is to understand how political, institutional and social actors, especially the government, the courts, the human rights and transitional justice NGOs, and victims associations, frame the mechanisms of transitional justice and use legal instruments to transform the conflict and reach what they consider "justice." It also attempts to understand the relations between politics and law in the context of a hegemonic discourse of security and give account of the expressions of resistance of human rights networks. In doing so, this research advances theory on literature about law and society and transitional justice by means of applying and expanding the theoretical framework of socio-legal research via the process of transitional justice in Colombia. The dissertation presents information gathered in the field in Colombia between July 2009 and July 2010 through a qualitative research design based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with members of different international and domestic human rights organizations, victims' organizations and national institutions. The research explains how these organizations combined political and legal actions in order to contest a project of security, and more specifically a project of impunity that came from negotiations with the paramilitary groups. The research also explains how the human rights networks not only mobilized internationally to gain political support from the international community, but also how these organizations contributed to transform the political debate about victims' rights. The research also explains how the human rights organizations and victims' groups articulated the global discourse on human rights and the local and domestic meanings constructed by the emerging movements of victims. Finally, the research analyses the relevance of legal practices consisting on strategic use of law in order to protect the victims of human rights violations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Justice Studies 2011

Recent debates on transitional justice have concerned whether the field responds to the needs of victims who have suffered serious crimes. At the global level, the International Criminal Court (ICC) serves as the most visible institution of transitional justice and is most famous for its prosecutions of war criminals. Critics of the Court question its relevance to victims and allege that it embodies a Western form of justice, prioritizing retribution over restoration of victims' lives and societies. Often overlooked, however, is the Court's sister organization, the Trust Fund For Victims (TFV). Also established by the Rome Statute, the TFV is mandated to deliver court-ordered reparations to victims as well as to provide assistance to those affected by crimes under ICC jurisdiction. This assistance mandate creates a novel opportunity to reach a wide scope of affected individuals and to bring international justice directly to those who need it most. This thesis reviews research on transitional justice and employs the Trust Fund as a case study of localizing transitional justice through reparative assistance. This study concludes that the reparative assistance, when designed to respond to victims' needs, has material and symbolic significance to victims that meet the goals of transitional justice.

The aim of this thesis is to probe subnational varieties in compensation enacted for war victims in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current literature in transitional justice posits that mainly the nature of previous conflicts, democratic and economic development, international normative pressures, and the regional clustering of justice explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to victims (Olsen et al. 2010; Kim 2012; Risse and Sikkink 2013; Powers and Proctor 2015). While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across states, they do not explain why only some victim categories within a state secure compensation. Drawing on a large database of qualitative data ranging from interviews to newspaper articles collected during fieldwork in Bosnia, this thesis explores compensation for military and civilian war victims, victims of torture and sexual violence, and families of missing people. By zooming in on these victim categories in the Bosnian context, this thesis advances a new understanding of compensation for victims as an outcome of complex political, external, and economic influences exerted on the main domestic policymakers. This thesis uses a new analytical framework about the inter-category varieties in compensation that draws upon arguments about bounded agency of war victims who are constrained by the parameters of post-war political structures that to a large degree shape their strategies. I show that the different compensation outcomes can primarily be explained by the varying effectiveness of victims in convincing domestic political authorities that compensation is in their political interest by using framing and advocacy strategies at the domestic and international level. While such strategies are limited by the political and socioeconomic characteristics of the state, victim categories that are able to strategically frame their demands and access resources to mobilize are more likely to secure compensation adoption. Therefore, this thesis introduces three tools that victims can leverage - international salience, moral authority, and mobilization resources - that are shaped by both structural conditions and the victims' agency.

This paper aims to review the model of transitional justice applied in Chile as part of a growing critical assessment has been formulating the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in its jurisprudence about the way that the states resolve the issues of truth, justice, reparation of victims and institutional design in processes of democratic transition and democratic consolidation. We will try to show that the conflict is a consequence of the characteristics of gross and systematic violations and political limits imposed transitional processes characteristics. The way this tension is resolved is what sets a model of transitional justice that fulfill or not the international standards on human rights. / Este estudio busca revisar el modelo de justicia transicional aplicado en Chile en el marco de una creciente evaluación crítica que ha ido formulando la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, en su jurisprudencia, contenciosa de la forma en que los Estados resuelven los temas de verdad, justicia, reparación de las víctimas y cambios al diseño institucional en procesos de transición democrática o consolidación democrática. Se intentará demostrar que la tensión se produce a partir de las características propias de las violaciones graves y sistemáticas y los límites políticos que imponen los procesos transicionales. La forma en que se resuelve esta tensión es lo que configura un modelo de justicia transicional acorde o no a los estándares internacionales en materia de derechos humanos.