Transitional Justice in a non-Western Setting

2002年，塞拉利昂长达11年的残酷内战宣告结束。目前正在努力巩固和平。对这一项目至关重要的是司法部门的举措，包括试图改革地方法院、审判冲突策划者的国际战争罪法庭、以及真相与和解委员会，以恢复受害者的尊严，并在可能的情况下使他们与肇事者和解。问题是，这些举措在塞拉利昂这样的国家是否合适，在那里，当地文化的某些方面，如对超自然事物的强烈信仰和对神秘美德的信仰，似乎与国际司法标准不符。该项目的实地考察使用了人类学观察、访谈和问卷调查，以调查国际和当地正义观念之间的文化冲突是否证明是压倒性的，或者是否有证据表明存在跨文化交流。它发现，国际正义理念在当地文化中取得了一些成功，但它们并不总是以支持者想象的方式取得成功，而且国际正义远未殖民塞拉利昂的当地文化。拟议的研究将通过案头研究和对审判与真相委员会记录的分析来补充实地工作的结果，并将结果撰写为研究专著。

In 2002 Sierra Leone's brutal 11 year civil war was declared over. Efforts are now underway to consolidate peace. Critical to this project are initiatives in the justice sector, with attempts to reform the local courts, an international war crimes tribunal to try the masterminds of the conflict, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to restore dignity to the victims and if possible reconcile them with their perpetrators. The question is whether these initiatives are appropriate in a country such as Sierra Leone where certain aspects of local culture, such as strong beliefs in the supernatural and a belief in the virtue of secretiveness, seem at odds with international standards of justice. The fieldwork for this project used anthropological observation, interviews and questionnaires to investigate whether the cultural clash between international and local ideas of justice proved overwhelming, or whether there was evidence of a cross-cultural exchange. It found that international ideas of justice find some success in local culture, but that they don't always succeed in the ways their supporters imagined, and that international justice is far from colonizing the local cultures of Sierra Leone.The proposed research will supplement the results of fieldwork with a desk study and an analysis of trial and truth commission transcripts, writing up the results as a research monograph.