Transition and Trauma: On the Construction and Politics of Expertise in Transitional Justice

Abstract This contribution seeks to think about how expertise and crisis are intertwined in the way atrocity is represented and studied. Specifically, it examines who the experts are relative to transitional justice, and then seeks to describe how this expertise is constructed in such a way as to reify particular understandings of justice that are connected to moments of crisis that can be “moved on from” with the right practical (legal, institutional, psychological) tools. Following on previous work that has argued that this desire to move on can be actively harmful to those who have directly experienced violence, the first section of the paper traces how, in the practice of transitional justice, the centralization of particular types of expertise and the silencing of survivor voices are mutually reinforcing. It then examines expertise in justice in the academy, arguing that the privileging of the “terrain” model of field work often requires that academics operate in place solely to claim legitimacy and expertise, not to further our understanding of justice itself. This centralizes the event itself in the particular retellings that are told in specific kinds of contexts, to foreign scholars who typically visit for short time horizons, and yet are able later to claim expertise in that context. The author probes her own experiences in Rwanda through this lens. In the end, the contribution asks after what justice can emerge out of alternative ways of knowing and alternative imaginings of expertise.