Tag: art

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New book by Summer School scholars

Check out the latest publication by several of our Summer School scholars:

This edited volume was inspired by lectures, discussions and workshops held over the past few years on the island of Cres and helps to critically re-conceptualize the way we perceive and interpret the field of transitional justice based on new, innovative case studies.

Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.

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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”