 And thank you for taking the time this evening. I just want to introduce John Chochare, who is the acting director together with Dinyang of the International Policy Center here at the Ford School. And John will be our moderator this evening. And we've asked him to moderate a conversation between the speakers, which was biased you have. And we hope that this will be a dialogue. So thank you, John, for allowing us and for sponsoring this event. And before I invite you to the podium, I want to thank Théoreaux for organizing all of this. And I want to thank Patricia Padilla for her work, one of our students of our year. And I want to thank Kyo Tsutsui. That was the most, I was so stressed because of that. And Kelly asked you for, you know, supporting. Is that you, Kyo? I got it right. Thank you. John, please. Thanks, Izier. Thank you to you for coming with the idea for this exciting panel. And to Théoreaux for the organizational work as well as Kelly and Kyo. This is part of a series of events that we have this term at the International Policy Center. It will also include a regular series of seminars on economic development and security. It includes a new film series and includes a panel that we're putting together on ISIS and the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Today's panel will focus on issues of violence, voice, and transitional justice. And in particular, we're going to talk about some of the structural continuities and the consequent perpetuation of violence that often has accompanied transitional justice processes in a number of cases that we'll discuss. Our aim is both to critique those processes and also to contribute to an ongoing intellectual project to help deal with these challenges more effectively. So I'll very briefly introduce our panelists in the order in which they'll speak. Omaladeya Dunbi is a political anthropologist and assistant professor in U.M.'s Department of Afro-American and African Studies. His research focuses on issues related to resource distribution, governance, and human rights in post-colonial states, including a forthcoming book on Nigeria's oil region, Delta region that you can look forward to. Alejandro Castillo-Cuear, city closest to me, is a professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. And he is an anthropologist as well, studying violence, time, harm, and how they relate to one another. I think many of you were present, or at least some of you, at the excellent talk that he gave yesterday in Annenberg on historical injustices and the domestication of testimony in Colombia. Victoria Sanford, seated at the far end of the table, is a cultural anthropologist and a professor at Lehman College in the City University of New York. She also directs the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman. She studies human rights and issues of genocide, race, and gender in the Americas, in Guatemala, and in other states. And I think all of you know our own Yazir Henry, who teaches here at the Ford School. Yazir is both an intellectual and an advocate. His interests include issues surrounding voice memory and justice, and also some of the structural and administrative violence that can be institutionalized during processes of post-colonial transition and transitional justice in South Africa and elsewhere. So to encourage dialogue, I'm going to go around the circle twice. Each panelist will present some brief remarks for about 10 minutes each. We'll then go around a second time, and I'll allow panelists to comment and engage with one another's presentations. We'll then get to some Q and A from the floor. So with that, let me turn over to Omolotti to begin. Thank you, John, for that generous introduction, and thank you to the International Policy Center for inviting me here and to Yaz for putting this panel together. So I'm going to talk about what I call Proclaiming Amnesty Constructing Peace, Transitional Justice, and the Silence of Violence in Nigeria. In 1999, Nigeria made a transition from more than 15 years of military rule to an elected government. The first act the new government did was the establishment of a Truth Commission known as the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission. The commission headed by retired justice of the Supreme Court received over 10,000 petitions out of which more than 80% originated from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. And the Niger Delta produces the oil wealth that generates over 95% of Nigeria's revenue. From all the petitions submitted, the commission only slated 200 for public airing. Thousands of petitions from the oil-rich Niger Delta were reduced to only one because of what the commission perceived to be a general trend in all the petitions that emanated from the Delta. So while the commission was still conducting its public airings in 1999, a community in the Niger Delta was invaded and destroyed by a detachment of the Nigerian Army on the orders of the new civilian administration. This was in response to the alleged kidnapping of police officers by youths protesting against environmental degradation. The commission eventually handed its sit-ins and its recommendations never known because a former military dictator obtained a Supreme Court order stopping the report from being made public. Few years later, precisely 2005, insurgents such as Niger Delta People's volunteer force and movement for the emancipation of Niger Delta people emerged, making political claims regarding the ownership of oil and long years of injustice to the Niger Delta people. The activities of the insurgents succeeded in cutting down dramatically daily production of oil from 2.5 million barrels per day to less than 700,000 barrels. Oil revenue to the state became drastically reduced, forcing the Nigerian state to negotiate with the leaders of the insurgency. So fast forward to 2009, the Nigerian state proclaimed amnesty to all members of the insurgency movement. By the summer of 2011, leaders of the insurgency had been co-opted into government and many former soldiers had been moved to camps where they were being trained to become what the state called good citizens. Therefore, the amnesty program falls within the purview of a particular practice of finding ways to deal with past atrocities identifiable in most countries. Example, Colombia, El Salvador, Argentina, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and South Africa. So what I suggest is that the particularities of the Nigerian amnesty program are based on what I call three important processes that shape the construction of peace in a society in transition. Nigeria's amnesty produces what I identify as amnesty as co-optation, amnesty as dispersal and amnesty as incapacitation. Amnesty as co-optation is a process where the state incorporates former insurgency movement leaders into various positions in government, thereby rendering them immobile. And I use the word immobility to denote a process in which these former insurgents are rendered incapable of engaging in practices that cause oil revenue to the state. The process of co-optation is further reified through a systemic application of two interrelated practices, willingness and unwillingness. Willingness to participate in a process of co-optation that renders militancy unattractive is anchored on the provisioning of an incentive that is greater than what the act of insurgency offers its participants. Unwillingness to participate revolves around the notion of believing the liberation of the delta considered to be of a greater good to the environment and its inhabitants. It therefore becomes an opportunity cost where value of incentives from the state far outweighs that of continuous militancy. In considering whether to accept or reject amnesty, militants weigh the opportunity cost of foregoing militancy for greater incentives from the state. In contrast, amnesty as incapacitation suggests a process of temporality through the state's monetary inducement of insurgency cadres who may have the potential to revert back to arms. Because of the unwillingness of these soldiers to be co-opted, the state has to incentivize benefits to the cadres to forestall a possible return to the creeks in the future. The unwillingness of the soldiers is born out of what they call their patriotic desires to free the Niger delta from the claws of corporations and the state. Since their leaders have already been co-opted, there are two options led for them, either to accept the amnesty and the incentives that come with it or return their arms to their commanders. The former option is the most attractive for them considering that they stand to lose the allowances being paid to them by their commanders if they decide to take the option of returning their arms. By making this monetary inducement, the state is granted a temporary reprieve by insurgents from militant activities while communities whose resources are pillaged by the state and corporations continue to hope that things will be better in future. Amnesty as dispersal is a state led process aimed at recruiting youths in danger of becoming future insurgents by incorporating these youths into various training programs both in and outside Nigeria, the state aims to make these youths immobile. Rendering these youths immobile means making sure that they are never in a situation where they can organize an insurrection against the state. Sending the youths away from the creeks and of course from the country impedes the youth's capacity to organize. As a result, the state becomes the greater beneficiaries because revenue from oil will go up when insurgency goes down. In the end, many communities who had hoped that militancy would translate to access to oil resources they had been denied by the state and corporations for many years also become susceptible to not having the opportunity to organize against the corporations. A form of justice rooted in environmental rights and access to community livelihoods and of course oil resources becomes denied by the state and corporations. So the outcome of these three amnesty processes is that the state constituted amnesty program becomes permanent and succeeds in rendering insurgency against the state and corporations inert while the process of claim making by various communities of the delta continues. While amnesty provides a temporary respite for the state and corporations, Niger Delta communities remained entrenched in polluted environment. As one of my one informant sums up when I was conducting this research, quote, when Adaka Boru who was the first insurgent leader in the Niger Delta was killed, they thought they had finally put an end to agitation in the Delta. Ken Sarawua came introduced a new face and they also killed him and they thought that had hended agitation in the Delta. I can assure you the ashes just like Ken Sarawua said when he was being killed that these ashes shall rise again. So I can assure you the ashes shall surely rise again, unquote. So the Niger Delta shall not sleep until our environment is restored and we get benefits from what our ancestors gave us, quote, unquote. Therefore, while amnesty might have succeeded in co-opting, dispersing and incapacitating ex and potential militants, there remains a limitation to offer the amnesty program can linger as a permanent feature of the Nigerian state. The permanency of amnesty may turn out to be very temporal if the ashes rise again as they have risen several times in the annals of the Delta struggle for justice and control of the regions abundant oil resources. So while the Human Rights Investigation Commission was set up to look at some of the cases of violations of human rights and particularly environmental rights in Delta. So what it turns out to be is an elite project that ended up being theatrical and also ended up focusing on violations of rights of the elite while neglecting the most important rights which is environmental rights of many of the Niger Delta communities. Thank you. So now I would like to invite Alejandro Castillo who we are to address you. Good afternoon. I have to apologize because I didn't write. I'm not going to read. I'm going to sort of improvise around what I probably said yesterday to some extent. And what I like to say basically is I'm trying to pose a question here on the idea of whether is it possible to speak of decolonize transitional justice. And I would like to just make few remarks and perhaps take some of the points as I said that I mentioned yesterday that would help me perhaps to frame this question if it's possible. Even as somebody a few days ago tell me whether is there a colonial transitional justice project in all of these. So the first one is again the first one has to do with my interest in working on the ensembles of global discourses and institutional practices. And as I showed in my lecture yesterday I'm interested in how bureaucracies of transitional justice actually work and produce particular kinds of spaces. Legal spaces, productive spaces as my friend was just saying now. Sensorial spaces, subjective spaces and so on. And it's only by looking at these very specific everyday practices by the productions of interrelations between human beings is that I kind of realize that some of the assumptions or I get but not realize but I become aware of some of the assumptions on which transitional justice is based. So the first one of course would be that in the context of these global discourses which by the way I have a term which is somewhat strange I call it the global gospel of forgiveness and reconciliation in a very religious way because there is a lot of religiosity around these discourses in any case. One of the assumptions in these discourses to me at least is the production, the dialectics what I would call the dialectics between the past and the present, the dialectics between the idea of fracturing and continuity. I think that transitional justice discourses tend to produce a breaking line between an invented past and a new present and possibly a new future as well. So one of the criticisms that I try to establish is what are the mechanisms in which this line between past and present is actually produced precisely in the context of bureaucracies working in the everyday. And as I said yesterday where there are many ways in which this is possible. The consequence of that and it's going to sound a bit relativistic even the consequence of creating these dialectics between fracture and continuity is that by and large situations under transitions tend to be violence as a matter of the past and not as a matter of the present and not as a matter perhaps of how we imagined the future. There is a term that I tend to use a lot is the creation of a new imagined society, transitions in fact produce not only images but also imagine new societies in the way they deal exactly with the consequence of war. So in this fracturing, this line between fracture and continuity there is something that we call the past which is produced and in a way that past is produced is correlated to the idea of how we define violence. For example of course if we are talking with regards to Argentina or Uruguay and other countries which have had juntas in particular when transitional scenarios come when transitional policies are put into place and the dictators are taken out of let's say of office in whichever mechanism that usually relates to idea of violence that is connected to these juntas and therefore once that happens it is already located beyond behind. But in other context in which violence is not related to the workings of the state or the workings of a particular, like a particular pinnacle of power but it's also connected to long term relations of inequality it is very difficult to say there is something called the past and the present in a separated way, radically separated way and also that there is no continuity and there is no dialectics between fracture and continuity again. So in a way one way of let's say putting the question mark on transitional justice is basically putting the question mark on the idea of this rupture between the past and the present and that happens when we start to define in a different way what violence really means. That's and of course that definition of violence is also connected to different kinds of mechanisms like truth commissions and truth commissions in essence are ways of constructing certain historical narratives and they do depend on how certain kinds of events are related or correlated and collected, I'm sorry through different methodologies and in this way certain, as I said yesterday certain forms of aggression, certain forms of violence might be left out of the archive might be left out of the historical narrative and therefore in some ways grounds again this imaginary fiction between a violence that is in the past and a violence that is still happening now. So the question would then be if there are certain forms of let's say aggression that are beyond the archive then we need to rethink how we collect this information, how we redefine the concept of violence, how do we use different mechanisms in order to collect this information, how do we produce new, let's say new narratives that are in some ways complement, either complement or even severely criticize the categories that are usually in the transitional studies. So in the end I wonder if there can be other epistemologies to understand these processes if there can be other ways of thinking what violence means in the end and what other mechanisms could be put in place in order to do that, but certainly what I was as I was speaking with someone just a few minutes ago sometimes these mechanisms illuminate as much as they obscure. I don't know if in English makes any sense but in the way that by looking into them there are certain areas that in any case they keep to be, I'm sorry, they are still gray to some extent, they are still kept in the dark basically because of the epistemologies we use, I'm sorry, I have to like sing in here, the epistemologies that we need to use certainly are limited and the question of changing epistemologies to other perspectives is also in my view a way of saying whether we can think of a decolonized TJ and this would be a very heated debate I know in the TJ agenda I suppose. So I just want to leave that because I don't want to repeat again myself and I'd rather open the space later for more conversation among us, thank you. Thank you and next up I'd like to invite Victoria Sanford. Thank you. Well I want to thank John and Yazir especially for organizing this and also to say it's really an honor to follow Abulade and Alejandro because I thought their talks were both really fascinating. I'm going to talk about Guatemala and this is a project that I'm working on with my colleague Sophia Duyos who's a human rights lawyer in Madrid. We worked on this genocide case together and we're writing a book that's called Maya Women as Targets, Gender Violence, Memory and the Guatemalan Genocide. I'm going to skip this because we have limited time. Today I'm going to talk about the Ischil area which is right here. So just remember that part a little bit later because I'm going to show you some other maps but not right now. And this is General Efren Andrios Mont after he came to power through military coup. This is in the National Palace on March 23, 1982. This set off the bloodiest era in the Guatemalan conflict and it escalated to a genocide during his 17 month reign. And this is a photo of the Neba area in September of 1982. And 30 years later in 2013, Jacinto Raimundo testified in what was the historic genocide trial of General Efren Andrios Mont. He remembered what it was like in July of 1982 in Neba Quiche. Jacinto Raimundo is five years old. He is at home with his two brothers, his sister and his mother, Magdalena Jacinta. He hears gunfire as the army enters the village. His mother tells the boys to go hide by the river. The army hears Jacinto's baby sister crying and shoots directly at the mother and baby. Jacinto realizes that his mother and sister are dead. Jacinto and his two brothers are captured by the army. They witness the soldiers firing more rounds of munition at their mother and baby sister then attacking their lifeless bodies with machetes. In the trial Jacinto recalls being taken to a place where there were many other children and then taken to another place. He testifies, I remember that I was scared to death. This is a photo of Jean-Marie Simon-Chuk in Rio Azul, which was a village north of Neba. That smoke you see behind is a village burning. This is the beginning of what the army called model villages after they decimated an area. And this photo was shown to a former army officer in a sworn deposition in Madrid in Spain in the International Genocide case. He was asked what he thought the likely destination of this truckload of civilians would have been in September of 1982. His response, they would have been taken to the military base, interrogated, tortured and killed. So what was the impact of what was called la violencia in the past? The findings of the Historical Clarification Commission, 626 villages massacred, 1.5 million people displaced, 150,000 fled to refuge in Mexico and more than 200,000 dead or disappeared out of a population of about 8.9 million people at the time. So imagine that, 1.5 million displaced out of 8.9. So one out of every eight people in this room is without a home. So the Guatemalan army in this period, it carried out a generalized and systematic attack on the civilian population. The army campaigns were specifically directed at the indigenous population with the goal of extermination. This was a planned genocide. It wasn't some rogue officers. So I'm not gonna go through the legal definition of genocide, but point your attention to article one that states that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or war is a crime under international law, which they, the signatories, which was almost every country in the world in 1948 when the genocide convention was signed, undertake to prevent and punish. In Guatemala, the genocide lasted really from 1978 to 1990. There were three phases. The first phase were massacres. The second phase were hunter battalions that went up in the mountains, shooting and seeking to destroy survivors. And the third phase was the forced concentration of massacre survivors in concentration camps. Remember where Neba was earlier in that part of the map in Qichay up here, Guatemala City is here. That's Neba. This is killings 1959 to 1970. Each dot represents a killing. This is 1971 to 1980. This is 1982 to 1983. That's the height of the genocide in Guatemala. And the violence continued on. We can talk about that later. What's the history of genocide in Guatemala? In 1999, the Truth Commission, the Cee Aache, concluded that genocidal acts were committed by the army, but that's not a legal category. In 2004, the Inter-American Court found that genocide had been committed in Planta, Sanchez, but ruled that it wasn't the right body to make a final decision about the overall genocide, but they named the state responsible in Efra-Andreos Mont in particular. In July of 2006, the Spanish court, following its responsibility to prevent and sanction and punish, they issued international arrest orders for genocide, for terrorism, torture, assassination, illegal detention, for a number of military officers, former military officers, including Efra-Andreos Mont. And this was Judge Pedras who issued the arrest warrant. These are images of the generals who were named in it. Of course, the next day, Reos Mont said that Judge Pedras must have ties to ETA, the Spanish Bass Terrorist Organization, because that's what you do in Guatemala if you don't like what someone says, you say that person's a gorilla. And of course, Judge Pedras was not tied with ETA, and jurists in Guatemala said there's no amnesty for genocide, because Reos Mont's lawyer said, oh, but the general, they all have amnesty, they gave themselves amnesty, and said the very evening that this article came out, Reos Mont had a press conference, and he claimed ignorance. He said, I didn't know anything about it. I had no idea. No one told me a thing. I could tell you, he did know, and I could tell you why later, but I only have a few minutes, so I'm just giving you a fast run through this court hearing. So who committed the violence? 93% of the acts of violence in that period were committed by the army, 3% by the gorilla, 4% is unattributable, and who were the victims? 83% of the victims were Maya, 17% were Ladino, but still 17%, that's 34,000 people when you're talking about 200,000. This is a huge amount of violence. But genocide is a gendered atrocity, and this is one of the things that we know, because it's distinguished by the intention of those perpetrating it to destroy a cultural group. So you destroy the material bases, but also the reproductive capacity. So women and girls become primary targets of genocide. So one way to establish the height of the genocide is to look for its apex, and the apex is at the moment when women become primary targets. And that point right there where women being killed crosses over the line past the men being killed is in July of 1982 in the third month of the Riesmont regime. 99% of sexual acts of violence that were committed were perpetrated by the state. And this is an image taken by Jean-Marie Simon of a woman who was being held at the base in Naba'a in 1982, this is a girl. These are women being rounded up and taken to a base. We don't know what happened to them afterwards. So youth started organizing saying we have the right to know the truth. And in 2000, a lawyers group called the Ache, they brought together a lawsuit of genocide, but it sat in the courts for 11 years until Claudia Pazipas became the attorney general. And it was under her courage and bravery that the case was put forth in Guatemala. The first time that a head of state is tried for genocide in the national court of the country where it took place. And so Riesmont presented himself in the court in December of 2012. And he said, well, I want to know what the charges are. But the reason he presented himself is because he didn't have immunity. He was no longer a congressman. And he couldn't leave the country because of the genocide case in Spain. So there's an important interplay between local, domestic, national, and regional courts here. These are the tribunal that tried him. These judges, they played a key role in making sure that he was heard, that all of the survivors were heard. And this is Judge Jasmine Barrios who was the head of the tribunal. And there's Patricio Bustamante and Paul Chitumil who were incredibly brave. Their houses were fire bombed while they were working on these cases. They held 28 sessions and hearings. Riesmont was accused of 13 massacres and killing 1,771 people. Fully one-third of the 626 massacres were committed during his regime. The court heard 102 witnesses. These are the lawyers who were working on the prosecution of the case. They were lawyers from an NGO working with the prosecutors. The lawyers for the defense filed more than 100 appeals during this trial. But I want to move forward to the survivors as I close here, because each of the women for the first time were heard. And while no survivor testimony can ever be forgotten, one of the 12 survivors of the sexual violence was particularly shocking. And these testimonies were heard throughout Guatemala and internationally on live feed, on television, on radio, and were printed in the newspapers. Elena de Paz Santiago testified, I was 12, I was taken to the army base with other women. The soldiers tied my feet and hands. They put a rag in my mouth and started raping me. I do not even know how many soldiers had a turn. I lost consciousness and blood ran from my body. When I came to, I was unable to stand. Now, people who've worked on the genocide, we knew these stories, but the country in Guatemala, people were shocked and there was a shift in public perception. And during the trial, people like Jacinto Raimundo, who testified, they learned new information as well, because he learned that the death of his mother and his sister was planned by the army of Rios Mont. And he learned that their deaths were even contained in reports that were filed as part of the army's plan operation, SOFIA. And it's a plan that included the killing of defenseless people, where adult Isiles were referred to as cucarachas and children were referred to as chocolates and orders would say, kill all the cockroaches, leave no chocolates. Pretty stark orders. But what they also learned is because the names and ranks of each member of the operation were listed, Jacinto learned that the man who adopted him and his two brothers was Commander Castellanos Guangora, who was the head of Operation SOFIA in the Isile area. And his sister and mother are among those 200,000 who were lost. So what happened to wrap up here? Here's Rios Mont making fun of the court on the final day. But on May 10th, 2013, after many procedural obstacles and overt pressure by the military and oligarchy, the tribunal found Efrain Rios Mont guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. And he was sentenced to the maximum penalty of 50 years imprisonment for genocide and 30 years for crimes against humanity. And the full courtroom broke out first in silence and then into song, singing the words, Akin No Yorro Nadia, here no one cries, we just want to be human. And the tribunal found that racism played a key role. You can ask me more about that at the end if you want. But of course, it wasn't left there. And Casif, which you see the name there is basically the Chamber of Commerce of Guatemala. They organized and demanded that the constitutional court annul this finding to annul the conviction of Rios Mont. And so the first sentence for genocide issued by a national court against the head of state was illegally annuled 10 days later. Military and economic elites asked the constitutional court to annul the judgment and so it was annuled, reminding us all of the entrenched power that continues to exist in Guatemala and its relationship to corruption, the military, and the oligarchy. But it also showed us that a trial can happen. Someone climbed up on the constitutional court and placed this banner that says the resolution of the constitutional court is a national embarrassment. People manifested in the streets and marched. In March through March through 2014, Jasmine Various, the judge on the tribunal, received the International Woman of Courage Award. The response of the Guatemalan government was that the constitutional court ruled that Attorney General Clivea Pazipaz could no longer have her job and a month later Judge Various was suspended from practicing in Guatemala. And so the battle in Guatemala continues and people continue to march and put the names of disappeared in the center of Guatemala City and continue on asking for justice and the reason that they do that is because even if the current president of Guatemala, Otto Perez Molina, who was the commander of the army base in Neba at the time of the genocide, he declares there was no genocide. In fact, those of us who work for justice and believe the testimony of survivors know that yes, there was a genocide. And this beautiful image is a photo that Daniel Hernando Salazar made. And this was on buses and banners all over Guatemala. It says si ubo genocidio, yes, there was a genocide. Thank you. Thank you, Victoria. And last but never least, my friend and colleague Yizir Henry. No, that's not a silent movie. I just need to looking at this picture, compose myself before I rush on to the next speech. Once there helps me technologically, a lot of my students know that I can't think and speak and handle technology at the same time. So now you also know that. Can you hear me? Okay, before you don't, please play. Will you play that for me? So this is my attempt at making movies and it's going to begin my talk in 10 minutes. The voicing of South Africa's development story today finds its originary sounding power inside of the historical and epistemic continuities of the colonial and apartheid temporality translated as settler and imperial time. Settler and imperial times of development. The afterlife of this violent sounding power has continued into the present and the time of what is now known as the developmental state. The politically imposed concept of the new nation after April of 1994. I want to argue here and I want to argue publicly has failed to foster the promise of an accounting for the horrors that constitute the land now called the Republic of South Africa. I live around the corner from that movie. I've documented photographically over the last three years as I returned back to South Africa and come back home here to America. My words speak to the memory of those people displaced in that community. They now live in the periphery of our cities. This act, this process, this two minutes happens now as I speak. The documentation is for the sake of posterity to continue the record of human rights violations. Sometimes narrowly defined in the context of the laws of war. What I'm concerned with now and what I was concerned with during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process in South Africa is how will perpetrator and beneficiary communities be held accountable for what they have done and how will we as a people tired of war begin to implement in real and active terms the ideals of justice and human rights. The state as an arbiter, curator and mediator of power has a model responsibility beyond the promise of human rights. Stories of truth, stories of reconciliation has substituted stories for the story of an imagined future peace. The people who inhabit the geosphere of the new nation now called the Republic of South Africa as dialogic collectivities have been able in my opinion to transcend the social language of war and militarism. The official language of Truth and Reconciliation as well as the narrow divisive language of development and modernity, I mean a language which excludes a discussion of political norms of civility, humanity as they are cast and accorded at a particular time in our political experience and history. Regeneration and denial can sometimes come to be pursued as a facile language incapable of transgressing the horrors of the genesis of a nation, the genesis of nationhood based on the ideals of peace, justice, accountability and human rights. The language of the ideal promise, the language of recognizability and the language of recognition where we see each other equally across and past and post conflict as human beings has to truthfully account for its entirety as this entirety is attached as human experience to a landedness, to the land that's known administratively as the Republic. Without such a language capable of more truthfully accounting for the horrors of colonialism and apartheid the violent sightings of those previously participating in the conflict will continue. If this language is not found and shared the responsible yearning locations, what I mean here the responsible legal administrative space where we year each other as human beings and listen responsibly will continue inside of the material and the epistemic frames and coordinates that maintain as model edifice the yearning in public spheres. It follows then the story of discovery of creation of civilization and development as meta ethical frame of the telling of the story and the justification of the material existence of what is known administratively as the nation, the Republic of South Africa. And it is this meta ethical and administrative framing that I want to address here as it speaks to the constitutive horrors of colonialism, of imperialism and of apartheid. What it means to live the experience of the developmental state. In this case, the state of post war, the state of liberation or the state of the post colony in Southern Africa. I want to address the lives and memories but also the ghosts still there inside of a haunting legal administrative and social silence at once the voice and muteness of sound, of inaudibility, sight, recognizability, a blindness as many of us have stated already a blindness of the law, a blindness of the model edifice and founding of the developmental state of the post colony or the post war or the post liberation of what is now known as the Southern African state or the Republic of South Africa. The mask of the development state is more than just a mask story. It is a part of an administrative architecture which justifies and legitimates the totality, a totality which mediates the daily lives of people, citizens, those apart of its legal constitution as well as those who are rendered illegal in the new state. It's illegal subjects. What I'm exploring is why after the peace, after the constitution of what is the ideal, the promise of human rights, do people continue to live this experience that you saw on screen and there's a multiplicity of experience, the experience of benefit as well as the experience of loss is what I'm wanting to explore and the dialogue that I'm wanting to have. How do we as citizens continue to understand ourselves after war when the administrative architecture and process that continues successfully defines what I want to call a system of damage, the law of pain, really. In the last 20 years, South Africa has successfully implemented a system that reproduces, in my opinion, another form of physical, social, physiological, economic and political division normalizing what is a complex nature, in my opinion, of a chauvinist law operating as the rule of law. The post-apartheid coloniality of the liberation state system continues its evolution along, contours created during both the apartheid and the colonial systems. The lived materiality of violence in South Africa has a voice, one loud enough, made so audible that it's able to morally justify the extremes of wealth and the extremes of its poverty, of its daily engagement in simple lived moments like the one I put on screen where hearing and speaking exists inside of the legal silencing of people previously written as victims to the oppressive state. In this case, the formal architecture of the apartheid state, now an illegal state, yet after the peace, a social process continues and the state, the liberation state, now the curators of that project continues to dislocate, relocate and excise the humanity which it includes in its voice, its official voice, its legal voice, and its administrative voice. The policies of the developmental state no longer the policies of what was the promise of the repressive state, the state that begins to repair the damage of the war just passed. It has nearly time in two minutes or one, just two. As you know, I'm very keen on concept, so okay, one minute. The extra language, the extra psychic language of the state, it's urban, rural and peri-urbanscape spoken through what I call the official sound, the sound of law, allows for a telling, both silent and loud, which corresponds to the inner experiential architecture and life worlds of our citizens, backed historically to a morality and an administrative sociality of domination and violence, which I want to say is, which is what I'm exploring here, the policy framework of a horrific modernity, horrific modernity. And I want to conclude by saying the injustice of the present, sometimes the injustices of the present sometimes quietly slip through, cloaked in the story of peace and development, normatively grounded within the implications of what is foundational developments that envelop yet another violent language form. And this violent language form of justification is followed by a practice, the business of the everyday. And it's that, that I wish to explore and continue the dialogue with you, so that we have some answers in addressing why after the promise of human rights is said to have been experienced, people continue to suffer and in this way. I'd like to introduce very briefly a couple of connections that I see as somebody who covers an entirely different part of the world and focuses on Southeast Asia. And I'll use just the country case of Cambodia to draw a few connections between things that my fellow panelists have said. There are a lot of themes that I could touch on, but I'll mention two that are particularly resonant. One is the degree to which transitional justice processes invariably produce a narrative that is a very limited and partial one in societies in which conflict is widespread and violence enters people's everyday life in a myriad of ways. In Cambodia where a period of civil war was followed by egregious rule by the Pol Pot regime and then by interstate conflict and a whole host of other difficult periods, the transitional justice process that you'll hear about is one that has resulted in the trials and convictions of just three people from a regime that was responsible for an estimated 1.7 million deaths. A very, very partial view of a complex history within one temporally defined frame 1975 to 79 saying nothing at all about the welter of atrocities that were committed before and after the Pol Pot era. And the second theme that I'd like to introduce or not introduce but really to pick up on is the related one that these partial narratives are not of course independent or chosen independently of the existing power distribution in a society and indeed internationally. And that these narratives in many ways are used in order to justify many of the continuities that my colleagues mentioned. In Cambodia, a narrative about the Pol Pot regime being at the center of Cambodia's contemporary political and economic problems is one that's been appropriated by the incumbent leadership to justify a system that's marked by continuing repression and inequality, not to mention a very, very uninclusive system for people to be able to tell stories about continuing as well as past violence that they've suffered. And so I don't wanna speak too long about this but just to say that I think the themes that we've heard addressed resonate well beyond the regions that we've covered thus far. So with that I'd like to turn over to our panelists and your that they presented for some brief reactions. I think just to follow up on what John just mentioned, I think there are common themes in transitional justice generally which has made transitional justice to become a huge transnational network. And if you look at the map of transitional justice which started from Latin America then migrated to South Africa after apartheid then to Nigeria and then Sierra Leone and other spaces of injustice then you see a transnational network that emerged during that period. And for example, the example of Nigeria is a clear indication of how this transnational network function. For example, when the Human Rights Evaluations Investigation Commission was set up in Nigeria, what the commission did was to literally copy the terms of reference of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa then just by replacing where South Africa is mentioned with Nigeria. But at the end of the day, the transnational network of NGOs were those who supported this process of setting up the commission just like it happened in South Africa too. So at the end of the day, it became an elite process where even some of the hearings that were slated by the commission became focused on the elite politicians and former military rulers. So those who actually suffered injustice in the hands of military dictators never had their chance to present their case before the commission. So many of those who lost power became the focus of the commission. And if you look at other places or other sites where transnational justice had taken place, in almost all the cases, it follows the same pattern. So it becomes a way of silencing violence for a moment so that the state can continue its business as usual. Great. Yes, I think there are quite a lot of topics here that I would really like to comment and I'm just going to take a few seconds. I am puzzled by the idea of Jaseer's developmental state in the sense that as I remember at least my life in South Africa, what was negotiated in the end was political power to some extent. I mean, the restructuring of the state, the capacity of the people to vote, et cetera, et cetera. But in the end, the structures of exclusion, economic exclusion were really part of the debates and the negotiations there. So what, and after that, my sense is that what it wasn't really negotiated, what wasn't really restructured, that is, let's say the economy, was left to the developmental experts. And it seems to me that development as a general category has been what has taken the place of debates in societies which should have been more profound and which should have been more influential in restructuring society in general. So we have a lot of development experts who are going to deal with poverty, with inequality, because in any case, transitions didn't do that. So then we leave it to the experts, and I'm sorry to say to the policy experts. So that's one point that I'd like to really just to mention here. The issue of gender, I find it also possibly in Colombia. For example, I was interviewing paramilitary leaders few years ago, and I remember in one particular courtroom somebody accused one of these guys of being a rapist. And he answered in the following way. He said, I assume that I killed people. I assume that I murdered, I produce massacres, in a very radical way. Colombia is known for its, I mean, the unit of analysis in Colombia is the amount of massacres that we have had. So he says that I assume and I take the responsibility for massacres, but I never raped one woman. So in the sense that it was completely crazy to say that he was willing to assume responsibility for killing, but that he had a taboo against being responsible for abusing women, and that I found particularly strange because they did abuse many women. So I was wondering why it was such a moral statement and he was willing to put it in that balance there. And yeah, and the other question that also, it has to do also with development is what are the connections between, again, we were talking this afternoon, I was saying that all transitional processes end up for some reason, end up in restructuring societies within global capitalism. And I was just wondering if in some cases exclusion and global capitalism have been part of conflict itself. Why do we transit from here to a certain state of things in which we replicate, yet again, the same conditions? And I find profoundly ironic that in Colombia, for example, the future of the economy will be petroleum and oil again in the regions that have been really excluded because of the power relations there. So I just leave that because I don't want to take more time and there are other topics interesting, but I just, okay, thanks. Thanks. Thank you. Well, I just thought that everything was so interesting and I was, I'm sure everyone else would have just kind of gripped listening to each person speak. So thank you so much for sharing your experiences and ideas. You know, I'm a forensic anthropologist slash cultural anthropologist and I've been working in Guatemala since 1990 and worked on the first exhumations there and now they've done hundreds of exhumations, but so I have like a frame of reference to Guatemala from these rural communities where massacres happen and then kind of expanding outward to the more quantitative data. But the Truth Commissions are an interesting place to start with. If we want to think about the Transitional Justice Project because the first Truth Commissions in Latin America were done secretly and the first reports weren't done, they weren't mandated by the state, they were done by the Catholic Church, they were done by lawyers collecting information who were representing people who'd been tortured by regimes in the Southern Cone. So you have the Nunkamas Report, the Never Again Report from Uruguay, you have one from Brazil and then you get the Reddit Commission which is the report in Chile which is a state mandated and you get the report in Argentina which is state mandated, but those aren't reports that came out of any kind of peace accord happening. So there was a really participation of different sides so like a government mandate we're gonna do these reports. But these reports were stunning because they happened in countries where the government denied that anyone disappeared or the government denied that it killed anyone even though they had concentration camps and people roaming in the street. When the Truth Commission happened in El Salvador it was out of a negotiated agreement between the FMLN, the Guerrero Organization and the government. The FMLN controlled a third of the country when they sat down to negotiate with the government so they weren't a weak force per se but they never were able to take the capital. So they had a negotiation and when that Truth Commission report came out I was in Guatemala in July of 1994 and I remember when that report came out because it was amazing because they named names in the report and in July 1994 when they were negotiating the peace accords in Guatemala we would drive up to the place we were working on the estimation took like eight hours to drive up and we'd listen to the really bad national radio and each day we'd be like ooh the military controls the government today ooh no the civilians have a chance like you could kind of feel it in the way the news coverage was you never were quite sure what was happening and when that accord was being negotiated about the Truth Commission the commission in Guatemala the report in El Salvador named a justice from the Supreme Court as being a leader in the death squads in El Salvador and it also named Joaquin Villalobos who was one of the guerrilla leaders who people really thought would be the next president if there was gonna be a guerrilla president because he was seen as an intellectual he had in fact published articles in academic journals in the United States he was also handsome and articulate but he had apparently ordered the killing of a beloved poet in El Salvador because we were like uh-oh all this news this is gonna be a problem for the Truth Commission in Guatemala and up until that moment each time a Truth Commission came out with a report each Truth Commission told a little bit more about what happened in the country so in Guatemala we thought wow they're really gonna do something this time here and then everything fell apart in El Salvador what do you think they did in the Truth Commission in Guatemala they didn't name names right they didn't name names they named institutional responsibility but nonetheless it was a really significant Truth Commission report but while that research was being done the TRC was happening in South Africa and everyone in Guatemala was saying oh my god could you imagine that happened in Guatemala if it was on television and everyone thought that it was really a wonderful thing and then later in 1999 in Cape Town this is when I met Yazir we were at a conference at the University of the Western Cape we were talking about that and in fact the TRC wasn't a wonderful thing that revealed everything that happened in South Africa and the Guatemala Truth Commission although it didn't have the teeth to prosecute it actually did end up naming names and charging Rios Montes being responsible and angered the US Ambassador so much that he said that they had exceeded their mandate because they talked about historical responsibility dating back to the US backed coup of democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz and President Clinton actually apologized to the people of Guatemala afterwards so the Truth Commissions are a really mixed bag and out of South Africa we get the Truth versus Justice dialogue which I think is tainted so much because in Central America when people were struggling for truth they were struggling for recognition that people had been disappeared that massacres had happened that people were assassinated and the response of the government was always like oh they've gone to Cuba or they're up in the mountains and it's the same in Colombia these kind of discourses that happen and people wanted the truth because they thought then they would get justice they didn't want the truth so there could be a report the truth was seen it wasn't like we're taking truth instead of justice we want truth on the way to justice if we can't have justice today then we want truth thank you Victoria who's here I am a policy expert and I will be and I will be happily held accountable for it I mean I think the reason I chose this very narrow word and I work with this idea of administrative atrocity is because in my own research I was shocked when I found that there were very few atrocities that were not legislated in some way or the other that it was people that committed atrocity and oftentimes created stories to justify why they had the authority to exercise power in the way that they did and as the systems grow so the administrative context of the atrocities had further reach and having lived and grown up under a system of atrocity that was normalized in my youth I didn't know that it was an atrocious system until much later I like I said on this picture and on the my attempt of a movie I live around the corner this group of people were that have now been displaced were survivors they were the one group they were 500 families that survived the apartheid forced removals from the inner city and they survived so expected I was very curious as to why the survivors are feeling and experiencing this process again when the discourse of transferring power and transitioning from one system of injustice to one that claims the ideal of justice be it in South Africa or Nigeria or Colombia or Guatemala or anyway really and its abstract and philosophical terms has to be implemented and how do we implement that? We implement it through policies and we choose policies to implement that that we say should be the ideal of truth the ideal of accountability the ideal of justice or we do a little bit of both or we don't so in that sense I was interested because we were finding similarities that social and economic rights were being discarded in the process that other commissions have to be created for that and so philosophically under the abstraction of what is called the rule of law in the terms of modernity and why I call it a horrific modernity is all of a sudden because we have a chain political rights everything else is settled the justice that Victoria speaks of that Alejandro and Omoladi and John speaks of and we are interested in engaging here with you is a living justice as well but it doesn't mean there's only injustice there's also people struggling to understand why such injustices occur continuously and what the continuity is administratively in terms of policies of state lay what did you say it like yesterday lay past the justice lay the justice pass for example the law of reparation the law of reconciliation has a promise and the reason why I today chose to go with sounding power because I had a sense I didn't want to repeat everybody because we have similar stories in each country both good and bad and so I want to open it up to this idea that it's important for us as policy experts to begin the abstraction the process of intellectually thinking what does it actually mean to live with justice what are the type of policies that have to be implemented why do these permissions that come at the end of war in certain contexts promise one thing and produce a part of the promise only not the whole of it what is what does it really mean and so that's not stopping thanks yeah okay we've got time for well I'd like to take one round of questions and please keep the questions very very concise I'll take four or five questions and then we'll have we'll have the panelists respond to them as a bunch and I think that we'll go on a little bit after 7.30 I understand some of you may need to leave at 7.30 but we'll take a second round of question at that point for those of you who can say so the first question here on a card is can we ask or expect that transitional justice processes address the structural violence that gave rise to the conflict conflict in the first place if others have have questions you can you can raise your hand and I'll call you stand and address us but if not we'll we'll let the panel start with that while you formulate other questions maybe we should start if we start with I have an immediate and fast response that that's a great question and the reason that it's a great question is it's because those who have a vested interest in the transitional justice industry will say no right off the bat no like there's no reason why the truth commissioner transitional justice should address deeper structural issues and and my response to that would be that's true and it's not true it's true if we don't make a truth commission the end game if we see the truth commission as a step in a process towards justice then that's perfectly fine but when it gets set up in a way that we're going to have a truth commission instead of justice because that just makes everybody happier then that becomes to me kind of a bankrupt argument although it's one that's frequently made thanks I think the concept of transitional justice itself is based on the on the notion that if you find a way of dealing with the past then you can continue with the status quo so it is not it is not even though it has justice attached to its name it is not designed to provide or to to to answer the question of justice in many countries in transition so it's just a way of continuing with the status quo in another way by giving the people false hope false hope that there could be justice if you tell the truth if you know the truth but the truth as we have seen in many of these cases that we're talking about today the truth in most cases doesn't lead to justice and that is the limit of transitional justice itself just quickly as well can I see that again? Sure Transitional justice as a concept and epistemology is linked very closely to justice as a concept and epistemology and structural there's not just structural violence we speak of structural violence when systems and policies and laws come together to produce violence and some nations as they are generated are generated out of conflict like I said the republic of South Africa as a name was generated through war its structure is that of war and the war continued until not so long ago the issue here is that we that one has to at same time as we hold accountable that that continues as injustice is to remember and to celebrate what the ending of the war was which structures were ended and I don't want to sound like I'm only because I speak sometimes very passionately from there I don't want to sound that I've lost this idea that certain structures and certain structural continuities of what was an apartheid violence ended and people sacrificed very seriously for their lives their thoughts their beings and so if those the reasons for the war which were those of the first structure the structure of apartheid they were the reasons for war that's why people went to war they were ended new ones and if we do not address this ideal we do not slowly begin to create a repetitive framework that allows for a peace these structures these violent structures continue and policies get perpetuated that allow for that allow them to continue anything you'd like to add? I'd like to say that the benefits of some portions of society are direct directly connected to the lack of other portions in society some people that have one sees that how economic systems may work are deeply entrenched and are intertwined with the lack of others and so I would say yes it would be I don't think a truth commission can actually deal with these kinds of issues particularly because of the epistemologies where they are actually a conform but at least they should be the basis for a more social debate at least they should be helping in having a serious discussion of what that all that means and if that doesn't happen I think he's in a way extremely limited so yeah thank you so I'll take I'll take one more small round of of questions thank you Thea and maybe we'll wrap up with responses brief responses please from the panelists on these two the first one is this a case of silencing of violence or silencing of protest through state violence often in collaboration with capital examples include the Niger Delta Cape Town gentrification or the Marikana massacre and the second question are there any cases where in transitional justice has worked and constituted a step in a positive direction towards a more just society so why don't we go in the same direction each panelist would respond to either one or both of those very briefly well I'll I'll respond to both of them with a very brief story Plendis Sanchez 1994 exhumation that's the case that went to the inter-american court it took the inter-american court 10 years to decide in favor of the families of Plendis Sanchez where the army massacred 268 people in July of 1982 during the Riosmont regime but the inter-american court is non-binding and it doesn't send anybody to jail but they did name Riosmont and the national security strategy and the government ponied up a little bit of money for the people but not that much in any case Don Ben Hamin from that community was the person who was elected by the survivors organization to speak at the genocide trial in Guatemala City last year and I saw him in Washington DC when he and those lawyers you saw all had to leave the country because of death threats after the verdict was vacated they were in the United States speaking and they had gone to DC to meet with people from the State Department and then come up to New York to meet with people at the UN and I saw Don Ben Hamin and this is someone who I had seen year in and year out after we were first doing the estimation what does truth mean in the community does it you know what it does it matter and it matters in the local community because it made a difference in how people live it ruptured local power structures that were part of what allowed the massacres to happen there but nonetheless they didn't get justice and I I said to Ben Hamin Don Ben Hamin what what what's going to happen next and he said Hi Victoria, yeah it's normal you know now it's just normal this is what we're used to we'll just continue fighting you know and I think for for all the young people who want to go and do something you should all go do something and put your heart into it and continue doing it and not do it for a day or for a week but to try to do it for longer and make that your commitment to work with a community because most of the places that you might go to work people don't expect outsiders to go in and save some community and that's a colonialist way of looking at the world it's impossible but what you can do is accompany people in their struggles and sometimes there are people in communities who aren't able and we were just speaking about the Maasai where you've been working and there are people who will ask you to help them and the assistance that they really want is to be accompanied and so I don't think that you should walk away from here thinking oh gosh there's nothing we can do there's nothing to be done there's a lot to be done but we were only effective if we look at what has been done and what is being done with the most critical eye that we can possibly bring thank you um good question um is a silencing of violence or silencing of protest through state violence in collaboration with capital and that we can replace capital with corporations in my own situation but I think why did I decide to call it silencing of violence in the delta it is basically because for the first time in the history of organized protests in delta so protests turned into insurgency and they succeeded in cutting the most important nerve of of the state which is oil revenue and when the insurgency was going on the state couldn't sustain itself anymore and that was the first time in its history that the state had been threatened and that was because the insurgents could match the state arms for arms so but silencing of protest well we could say well protest can be silenced but the state is successful in doing that in silencing protests because once protest happens in most cases it doesn't directly affect corporations ability to extract oil because once there is a protest all the state would need to do is to draft soldiers or police to the place then get get get everyone all the protesters arrested and oil will continue to flow to the international market but in this situation it was silencing of violence because the state had to find a way of managing the crisis and that was why they had to resort to declaring amnesty and co-opting leaders of the insurgency into government and also those who could who could potentially become insurgents in the future paid off and dispatched to places like Sri Lanka to South Africa Ghana and the rest of the world Russia in the name of vocational education and at the end few weeks ago I was reading in one of the blogs in Nigeria where the group that were sent to us Russia were protesting at the Nigerian embassy against the inability of the state to pay their tuition so that incapacitated that protest could only happen in Russia and if they if they go further than they went then the Russian state will arrest them and put them in jail so that incapacitated their their capacity to organize within the Delta region and in a way that could incapacitate the state then the second question any cases where transitional justice has worked I'll say well in many cases you could make the argument that it has actually worked it has worked for the elite because it is designed to in a way to guarantee successful transfer of power from one elite regime to the other so it has not worked for those whose rights are actually violated but it has worked for the elite whose interest is just the transfer of power and the continuation of the status quo thank you miss here yes I do not narrowly want to define a collectivity as capital I think it that it leads us away from the conversation that I want to have because it narrowly it narrowly creates a victim group that it doesn't that that this word doesn't apprehend and it narrowly creates a beneficiary group the beneficiary groups of such system they are vast and and real and human violence is not just a concept violence is lived just like peace whatever that may mean administratively for me the the responsibility to the second question successful cases of successful cases of transitional justice there is no such thing as a narrow case of transitional justice there is the process of state of the building of collective imagination of a nation successful nation building what does that really mean the concept of transitional justice oftentimes oftentimes takes one's analytic eye away from the broad idea which is the creation of a state that is honest to the rights that promises because the state as I said is both arbiter curator and actor in this case the state is not some imagined thing far away we are the state therefore it is inside of the dialogue that produces the state and the nation that the ideals of what is often stated as the promise of transitional justice is located and it's important for those of us who are concerned with peace and humanity and human rights to maintain our analysis and our analytic analytic eye there as it's been stated it's not just to complain but our voices is also part of the dialogue even if our dialogue is very unique you know in a directional right now but that dialogue is can be the dialogue of war it can be the dialogue of peace it can be a dialogue between two people depending on where you in policy terms in legal terms in administrative terms place the limit of what it means the limit of its meaning and as an intellectual and a philosopher that was born into a war I woke up one morning in that area in my mother's arms and there was a war already it's already existed so did the peace process succeed in South Africa yes was it beautiful yes does it have uh horrible continuities that I already spoke to yes what are we going to do about it is really the question how are we going to understand it only one or the other no they both exist they coexist they live together just as we as human beings are complex it's not just to complain I think it's my intellectual responsibility as an expert in what is known as policy to speak the truth of my people and that's all I'm doing and I want to celebrate that with you like Pittorio said we shouldn't walk away uh demoralize we should walk away happy because we can speak the complexities of such a dialogue even if it's not in the countries that we represent here because we at the end of the day and this is the problems of international international human rights law and international humanitarian law is that based on the principle of universal equality we as human beings are now all equal in a legal sense thank you Alejandro just two words um if there is any case of succeed a successful transitional justice I remember a few a couple of years ago perhaps in a conference like this one somebody saying that Colombia was a successful case of transitional justice because we were implanting transitional justice in the middle of conflict and I found that a very funny even argument and then I realized that I because of the kind of work that I was doing and the kinds of connections and conversations that I realized how after years we have been having how at one point I decided that I would bring the bad news into the successful story of transitional justice in Colombia and every time that I had to speak about for example South Africa everybody wanted to hear this successful story of South Africa because in any case it was an icon a world icon as he circulated circulating in all academic media and so on and I always again I always say there is a truth to the story that there was change in South Africa of course it would be just naive if one denies that but in other ways there wasn't changes at the same time and that has to be for me at least the center of the analysis the connections between again fracture and continuity and stepping and being inside that critical discourse makes you a very uncomfortable person in the face of these courses of successful transitions and so on but as you say I think we have the responsibility not only to be critical I guess but also to say that that there is a nothing wrong with opening the spaces for new ways of conceiving these problems and in a way criticizing the hegemonic way in which experts I'm sorry to say experts have been really implanting literally like a human body implanting policies all over the world like packages of technology or technologies of governance and so I decided one day that I would yeah I would step in that space and I would say what I have to say and that yes there are some interesting cases with things change but there are other aspects of these processes in which we have a sort of a more negative perception and that's the opening of a new I suppose of new reflections and even sometimes I think of something that we could call critical studies on transitional justice or decolonizing transitional justice etc etc and so that's all thank you I'll close with just just one remark and that is to pick up on a theme that Yazir emphasized the challenges that we're talking about on this panel are not some impersonal and abstract force they're the products of human interactions we are humans who are involved in this discussion in this space and so as Yazir said let's keep this conversation going we hope that this panel inspires you to talk to one another and to talk to us about ways that we can make these processes work more successfully so with that I want to thank you all for staying and also of course to thank my fellow panelists and me organizers