Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of Transitional Justice Processes in the Aftermath of Argentina's Dirty War

纽约大学博士生Venkatesan Natarajan将在Sally Merry博士的指导下，对内战后的过渡时期司法进程和国家建设进行人类学研究。他观察这些现象的视角是构建对政治暴力负有责任的人的类别，以及被认定为负有责任的人理解、处理和协商这种标签的方式。目前，世界上许多国家都开展了过渡时期司法和国家建设运动，要了解这些运动如何以及是否成功，需要对受影响的人进行深入的地方一级研究。Natarajan将在“肮脏战争”（1976-1983）后的阿根廷，在布宜诺斯艾利斯和图库曼市进行这项研究。研究人员将关注两个截然不同的社会群体，他假设这两个群体都对战后社会的建设做出了贡献。第一类是军事人员，他们把独裁统治的历史当作国防的历史来教授，并继续把自己理解为国家的捍卫者。第二类是家庭，其中许多也来自军队，他们收养了战争期间政治上“失踪”的妇女所生的孩子。一些养父母继续与他们抚养的孩子保持联系，而另一些养父母和他们抚养的孩子已经断绝了一切联系。这两组的样本都将被纳入研究。研究方法将包括长期参与观察、生活史收集、社会网络数据收集和分析、结构化和半结构化访谈、档案人权和媒体报道分析。这项研究的结果将有助于从社会科学的角度理解国家在政治暴力之后的恢复和重建过程。这项研究很重要，因为它将有助于更广泛地讨论内战结束后存在哪些可能性。它还将有助于了解过渡时期司法方法是否是各国在着手重建社会生活时使用的最适当的模式。资助这项研究也支持了社会科学家的教育。

New York University doctoral student Venkatesan Natarajan, supervised by Dr. Sally Merry, will undertake anthropological research on transitional justice processes and nation-building in the aftermath of civil war. The lens through which he will view these phenomena is the construction of categories of people held responsible for political violence, and the ways people identified as responsible understand, deal with, and negotiate this labeling. Transitional justice and nation-building movements are now found in many nations of the world, and understanding how and whether they are successful requires intensive local-level research with those affected.Natarajan will carry out this research in post-"Dirty War" (1976-1983) Argentina, in the cities of Buenos Aires and Tucuman. The researcher will be focus on two contrasting social groups, both of which he hypothesizes contribute to the construction of post-war society. The first group are military personnel, who teach the history of the dictatorship as one of national defense, and continue to undestand themselves as the defenders of the nation. The second group are the families, many of them also from the military, who adopted children born to women who were politically "disappeared" during the war. Some adoptive parents continue to maintain ties with the children they raised, whereas other adoptive parents and the children they raised have cut off all contact. Samples of both groups will be included in the study. Research methods will include long-term participant observation, the collection of life histories, collection and analysis of social network data, structured and semi-structured interviewing, and analysis of archival human rights and media reports. Findings from this research will contribute to social scientific understanding of the processes through which nations recover and rebuild themselves in the aftermath of political violence. The research is important because it will contribute to broader discussions about what possibilities exist for closure in the aftermath of civil war. It also will help to understand whether the transitional justice approach is the most appropriate model for nations to use as they go about rebuilding social life. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.