Gendering Transitional Justice: A Racialized Construction of Victimhood in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

Abstract

InSeptember 2018, amemorial to honor women under Tunisia’s pre-revolutionary dictatorship was set up in downtown Tunis at the initiative of an international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The memorial exhibited works created jointly by victims and artists, under a particular theme: namely the traditional Tunisian basket. This everyday life item for Tunisians, in the context of the memorial, wasmeant to represent the suffering of female relatives of former political detainees, as they were responsible for bringing food when visiting family members in prison. The choice of such an emblem to represent political violence against women, raises questions on the way in which gender projects are set up in the contexts of political transitions. In the course of its post-revolutionary journey, Tunisia has adopted a transitional justice process. This international label squares with a set of mechanisms to promote the recognition of victims and of the violations committed against them as the bedrock of a free and peaceful society. To that end, Tunisia created a national commission, the Truth and Dignity Commission (2014–2018), and undertook a collaboration with two international organizations and a US-based NGO: respectively the United Nations Development Program, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). Whereas expert literature often presents transitional justice as a highly localized instrument because of the permanent presence of national truth commissions in