Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence

Abstract

ing behind the numbers the complexity of these perpetrations. 2. Truth accounts: truth commission and transitional justice processes Within the field of human rights studies, as transitions from authoritarian, totalitarian, and/or racist regimes (in the case of South Africa) to – at least procedurally – democratic regimes took place in Latin America and Eastern Europe, expert practices and theories on what has been called transitional justice were developed. While these studies did not make explicit use of heuristic tools from the STS field or its antecedents, as we shall see below, some critical research has devoted analysis to the procedures by which truth commissions have established their truth accounts. In this sense, these analyses contribute to a fruitful dialogue between human rights perspectives and STS studies, accounting for the social processes through which truth accounts about past crimes are constituted, and showing the mechanisms through which the objectivity of violence is constructed, without simply considering it self-evident or defining it normatively, according to moral and/or legal principles. The practices and theories of transitional justice consist of producing a truth account of political crimes, outside the judicial arena, as a political response to what is called the “right to truth” of the victims (Mendez 2006). Transitional justice refers to a conception of justice based primarily on the reparation of victims and not criminalizing those responsible for human rights violations, other than in exceptional cases. In this way, transitional justice aims to reconcile the interests of former officials of authoritarian/totalitarian/racists regimes with the demands for justice of the victims, their families, and human rights organizations in order to rebuild the nation-state and legitimize institutions. Truth and reconciliation commissions are themost popular device of this type of restorative justice (Lefranc 2002). During the last decades, a plethora of studies on truth commissions has been published. Schematically, we can identify two bodies of research. First, those that describe the public work of commissions and their concordance, or not, with the self-declared missions of these devices, without delving into the performative practices that these infrastructural devices perform (Hayner 1994, 2001; Teitel 2000, 2003). Most of these studies endorse the therapeutic objective that the political discourse of the democratizing elites ascribes to these commissions and their reports, namely, to heal the nation and thus achieve reconciliation. The second group of studies, mostly based on the analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Buur 2001; Wilson 2001) examined the political effects 4 O. BERNASCONI AND P. DÍAZ