Kirsten McConnachie

Victimology in transitional justice: Victimhood, Innocence and Hierarchy

Although addressing the needs of victims is increasingly proffered as the key rationale for transitional justice, serious critical discussion on the political and social construction of victimhood is only tentatively emerging in the field. Drawing from Anglo-American victimology, the first part of this paper suggests that victims of crime as a category are often perceived as the mirror opposite of perpetrators of crime. It suggests that such a perspective narrows the notion of victims’ rights or needs so they become intrinsically linked to the punishment of perpetrators; that victims and perpetrators are reified and distinct categories; and that ‘true’ victim status demands innocence. The second part of the paper takes these insights and applies them to the context of transitional justice. In particular, it questions the notion of ‘innocence’ as a prerequisite for victim recognition and explores the ways in which victims and perpetrators are not always easily identified as distinct categories in conflicted or transitional societies. The paper concludes that incorporating blame in the calibration of human suffering results in the morally corrosive language of a ‘hierarchy of victims’.

Victims and Transitional Justice: Voice, Agency and Blame

This article explores the construction of victimhood in transitional societies. Drawn from fieldwork in a dozen jurisdictions as well as elements of criminological, feminist, sociological, philosophical and postcolonial literature, the article focuses in particular on how victimhood is interpreted and acted upon in transitional contexts. It explores the ways in which victims’ voice and agency are realised, impeded or in some cases co-opted in transitional justice. It also examines the role of blame in the construction of victimhood. In particular, it focuses upon the ways in which the importance of blame may render victimhood contingent upon ‘blamelessness’, encourage hierarchies between deserving and undeserving victims and require the reification of blameworthy perpetrators. The article concludes by suggesting that the increased voice and agency associated with the deployment of rights discourses by victims comes at a price – a willingness to acknowledge the rights and humanity of the ‘other’ and to be subject to the same respectful critical inquiry as other social and political actors in a post-conflict society.

Camps of Containment: A Genealogy of the Refugee Camp

Abstract: What is a refugee camp? Existing definitions have focused on logics of power and institutions of governance. This article argues instead that refugee camps are best understood in relation to their purpose of containment. It posits ‘camps of containment’ as a specific form of encampment consisting of three primary categories: prisoner-of-war camps, internment camps and camps for forced migrants. This genealogy sheds new light on the origin of the refugee camp and reveals camps of containment to be an evolving politico-military strategy related to changing patterns of political conflict and to shifting anxieties about national security.

Securitization and Community-Based Protection Among Chin Refugees in Kuala Lumpur:

This article examines refugee-led community organizations among Chin refugees from Myanmar in Kuala Lumpur. It uses a structuration analysis that recognizes refugee-led organizations as complex governance entities engaged in a dynamic relationship with (among others) national policies of securitization of forced migration and international humanitarian governance. This approach expands the existing literature on the securitization of forced migration by exploring refugees’ lived experiences in a context of south–south migration. It expands the literature on community-based protection by going beyond recognizing the existence of refugee-led organizations to analyse their construction, constitution and consequences. Three primary areas of work by Chin refugee groups are analysed in relation to their immediate activity and longer term effects: organization (‘building ethnic unity in adversity’), documentation (‘asserting a bureaucratic identity’) and socialization (‘learning to be illegal’). These long-term effects indicate the possible impact of local protection activities on macrostructural processes such as identity construction and migration choices.

Book Review: Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (eds) Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, £19.99 pbk (ISBN: 9780521677509), 358 pp

work of Stuart Hall are explored in chapters about identity, representation, articulation, community and resistance. Sociologists will probably focus on Hugo van der Poel’s lucid chapter on sociology and cultural studies. He argues that leisure encompasses goals and activities people choose to fill their least obligated time. People may spend their time freely but not under conditions of their own choosing. So social research is all about the conditioning of freedom. David Crouch’s authoritative overview of geographies of leisure raises similar theoretical issues. Leisure research started with an interest in ‘distance, location, distribution, accessibility, kinds of places and their attraction to users and consumers for leisure’ (p. 125). But more recently there has been growing interest in theorizing leisure by studying body, performativity, consumption and space. The duality between individual freedoms and political constraint is a recursive feature of leisure policy, particularly in the UK. Fred Coalter’s chapter on leisure policy highlights the ill-defined political quest for active citizenship whilst putting increased pressure on leisure providers to evaluate policy outcomes in the context of government ‘crosscutting agendas’ on health, crime, urban regeneration and education. One rarely starts a new book by turning to the index and meticulously reading the list of entries. This book’s index boasts 31 double-columned pages and such detail and accurate referencing are major functions of any handbook. It is no easy task to write a comprehensive accessible guide for students and it is made no easier by the elusive concept of leisure. A swift glance down the entries for N reads as follows: nationalism, native Americans, natural, nature, Nazis, needlework, negotium (p. 565). So it is perhaps not surprising that this is the first Handbook for Leisure Studies to be published. The paperback version should prove invaluable for students as they have to come to terms with complex fields of study taught in what some educationalists following George Ritzer term ‘McUniversities’.