Truth Commissions and International Law

Abstract

<p><em>Truth Commissions and International Law</em> responds to increasing world-wide interest in better understanding the operation of Truth Commissions, and their legacies. To date, over forty Truth Commissions have been established around the world, and there are increasing calls to establish new ones across the Global North and South. Truth Commissions are post-conflict institutions established to deliver an account of violent events that occurred in a specific place and time. In this role, the overarching expectation is that the Truth Commission’s account will help to prevent a repetition of the conflict. The book examines how Truth Commissions create an authoritative account of violent conflict, and how they deal with the plurality of (rival) accounts that exist across communities. The book focuses on three of the earliest and most influential Truth Commissions: in Argentina (1983-1984), Chile (1990-1991), and El Salvador (1992-1993). The book argues that these Truth Commissions drew on international law to authorise their accounts of violent conflict, and that this had the consequence of privileging a ‘global’, internationally-authorised truth over other ‘local’ truths, while strengthening the authority of international law over the post-conflict state. The book shows how the Truth Commissions did that in three main ways: by invoking international law’s post-conflict promises (Argentina); by using the language of international human rights law (Chile); and by linking the Truth Commission to the identity and status of the United Nations (El Salvador). In developing this argument, the book focuses on three ‘cultural objects’ connected with the work of the Truth Commissions: a literary prologue (Argentina), a museum of memory (Chile), and a tapestry (El Salvador). These objects provide a way to analyse how the Truth Commissions drew on international law in the creation of their accounts. At the same time, the book shows how these objects gave continuity to the Truth Commissions’ accounts (in the case of Argentina and Chile), or countered the official account (in El Salvador). The research is based on in-country visits, original archival research, and engages with scholarship on the history and theory of international law, the jurisprudence of jurisdiction, and law and humanities. Overall, the book offers a new legal, historical, and cultural analysis of Truth Commissions that draws attention to how these powerful institutions engage with international law to produce official accounts of past violence, which conditions how communities live together in the aftermath of violent conflict.</p>