Youth Movements, Alternative Spaces & Dealing with the Past

Graffiti near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.
Graffiti near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.

Transitional justice has long grappled with the challenges of traditional post-conflict and post-authoritarian mechanisms, such as war crimes trials or truth commissions. However, the role of youth in this processes is less clear. In his lecture, Dr. Arnaud Kurze, one of the school’s organizers, explored the creation of alternative transitional justice spaces in post-conflict contexts, particularly concentrating on the role of art and the impact of social movements to address human rights abuses. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia, post-Mubarak Egypt and post-authoritarian Tunisia, he scrutinizes the work of contemporary youth activists and artists to deal with the past and foster sociopolitical change. His research has taken him across the former Yugoslavia, Egypt and Tunisia, interviewing youth leaders and focusing on their performance-based campaigns. Drawing from different case studies and context, he argues that this performance activism has fueled the creation of a new spatiality of deliberation—so called strategic confrontation spaces—to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts. He recently published an article with the Oxford International Journal of Transitional Justice called “#WarCrimes #PostConflictJustice #Balkans: Youth, Performance Activism and the Politics of Memory”