Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Transitional Justice Social Movement

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Transitional justice programs tend to advocate for truth commissions to protest impunity and to prevent future human rights violations. This project examines transitional justice as a transnational social movement. The central research question is how a transnational social movement sets its agenda initially and how that agenda evolves over time. The study focuses on the internal dynamics among movement participants, the external political forces that shape movement strategies, and the processes by which truth commission goals are formulated. The first phase involves a broad based survey of 850 self identified movement participants, followed by in depth qualitative interviews with key informants. Studying self-identified movement activists will provide insight into how the movement defines its goals and chooses its strategies as well as into tensions among movement activists. The second phase of the study is a comparative ethnographic study of current truth commission efforts regarding paramilitary violence in Colombia and torture policies under the Bush administration. The co-PI utilizes participant observation fieldwork with several organizations that are promoting truth commissions to redress state sponsored violence. She also conducts qualitative interviews with key informants and archival research on media reports to analyze how the movement agendas are set and evolve over time in these two countries. The findings will increase our understanding of how a social movement emerges and reveal competing goals and strategies to redress human rights abuses.