After Sierra Leone’s civil war, President Kabbah oversaw creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission despite his government’s previously strong preference for amnesty, seen as a precondition to rebels’ non-relapse into violence, just before the intervention of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. An unexpected candidate for concealing – one would expect it to recruit, as it normally does – the country successfully concealed a de facto, targeted amnesty for most combatants. Confusion and rumours surrounding the TRC and its relationship to the SCSL limited the amount of truth that would be told, thereby also limiting the information available to the SCSL, leaving it less able to indict. The British, who set the tone for other European donors, had strong incentives to overlook whatever evidence of this amnesty did rise to the surface. If they challenged the Kabbah government on this point, the result could be state collapse and the British might be called upon to intervene in addition to gaining a reputation as a global bully. Because Sierra Leone’s dissembling and its success in doing so both derive from the country’s extreme fragility, the case draws particular attention to the problems of framing its “invitation” of the SCSL as truly consensual.

This chapter provides the relevant background on conflict and recognized transitional justice mechanisms in Sierra Leone. It explores individual and communal experiences of peace, conflict and justice during the civil conflict and in the post-conflict era. The first half illustrates the diversity of war-related experiences and highlights the creative ways people managed their everyday challenges in conflict. The second half discusses recognized transitional justice mechanisms, including the DDR program, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and reparations program. It explores how institutions understand local ownership and contrasts this with Sierra Leonean perceptions and the (intended and unintended) ways in which they engaged with these mechanisms. This chapter provides broader insights into how people navigate their circumstances in conflict and post-conflict societies and the various ways in which recognized transitional justice mechanisms can be interpreted and engaged with in diverse ways and at different points in time.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) concluded that Canada had committed “cultural genocide” in government-supported residential schools that aimed to forcibly assimilate First Nations peoples since the nineteenth century. The TRC’s finding of cultural genocide in Canada can inform our understanding of American Indian boarding schools in the U.S. given the similarities and connections between the two systems. Both countries founded their schools with the aim of achieving total assimilation, or cultural genocide. Both, however, did much more than forcibly assimilate Indigenous youth. At the root of U.S. and Canadian Indigenous education project rests a genocidal truth: they may have committed all of the genocidal crimes enumerated in the UNGC. School administrators held people year after year with full knowledge of how lethal the schools were and an explicit plan to commit cultural genocide. This chapter demonstrates how scholars of the American Indian boarding schools can learn from the TRC, consider how we may evaluate the schools under the UNGC, and ultimately conduct additional data-gathering in order to reach a better understanding of what happened in these institutions.

Chapter 6 argues that inquiries, whether traditional public inquiries, to more innovative and participatory forms of truth and reconciliation commissions, can enable episodic uses of power from victim-survivors and advocates, evidenced in the nature and extent of consultation and ownership of the process and the opportunity to engage with and influence the inquiry’s operations. Inquiries may shape the nature and function of the articulated emotions of victim-survivors but also have a significant emotional and potentially retraumatising effect for victim-survivors. The chapter argues that these episodic uses of power and experiences of emotional disclosure in well-designed inquiries or commissions will necessarily raise the expectations of victim-survivors for other elements of justice, including structural justice, to be addressed through and beyond other mechanisms of transitional justice.

This chapter focuses on the success of the Liberal Party under its new leader Justin Trudeau in rising from its third party status in 2011 to win a majority of seats in the 2015 election. Promising to abandon austerity budgeting and boasting that “Canada is back” on the world stage, Trudeau embarked on progressive policies relating to Indigenous relations, international affairs, gender equality, climate change, admission of Syrian refugees, child care, and infrastructure spending. His progressive thrust was soon compromised by countervailing forces emanating from provinces, corporations, social conservatives, and American president Donald Trump who demanded a renegotiation of the NAFTA agreement, embroiled Canada in a trade war with China; and treated Trudeau and Canada with open contempt. Unable to square national environmental policies with demands from Alberta and Saskatchewan for more pipelines to carry their oil and natural gas to distant markets, Trudeau was brought low by his government’s decision to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline to expand Alberta’s exports of heavy oil and by energetic efforts to protect SNC-Lavalin, a multinational corporation based in Montreal, from being persecuted for its corrupt practices in Libya and elsewhere. With Trudeau’s claims to transparency and commitment to environmental sustainability called into question, Trudeau lost the support of many progressive voters, who turned to the Green Party and the NDP in the October 2019 federal election.

Although Brecht entered the South African repertoire only in the 1950s, 1930s political theater drew communists and other leftists local and expatriate including Kurt Baum who worked with Piscator and thus in the same milieu as Brecht in 1920s Berlin. Despite notoriety as a leftist writer, Brecht featured as a star of European art theater and a sign of high culture on university stages in the1950s and in subsidized theaters in the 1960s striving to represent “Western civilization” against alleged threats from communism or African nationalism. In contrast, the anti-apartheid theater of the 1970s–1990s from Fugard and Serpent Players to Junction Avenue Theatre with Purkey, Makhene and others, and the Market Theatre with Simon and others deployed the Lehrstück, epic theater, and Brechtian pedagogy to challenge the power of state and capital with activists and workers as well as professional performers. Postapartheid theater has borrowed from Boal as well as Brecht to create participatory dramaturgies for tackling crises such as AIDS, gender violence, and corruption in state and local government.

Sierra Leone was the first country to simultaneously deploy what are traditionally thought of as alternative post-conflict justice mechanisms: a special tribunal to prosecute crimes, and a truth and reconciliation commission to promote national healing and reconciliation. This chapter assesses the important Special Court jurisprudence on this topic and its implications for other post-conflict situations in Africa and around the world. In the first part, the chapter compares the similarities, and differences, in the mandates of the two institutions. The author then discusses how the TRC began its operations in 2002 at the same time as the Special Court was carrying out its investigations and issuing indictments against suspects accused of committing international crimes within the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Second, the chapter addresses the question of hierarchy and primacy between the two institutions: with the TRC being a domestic program and the Special Court maintaining an international authority. Finally, the chapter addresses the attempted testimony of a key SCSL defendant, or rather lack thereof, at the TRC and the tussle between the two bodies regarding protection of the fair trial rights of the suspects and the implications for future similar situations.

The Indigenous languages of North America once constituted the entire human linguistic landscape of the continent, and played a vital role in the early relationships between Indigenous peoples and European explorers and traders. In the modern national era, however, those languages have been relegated to a footnote, and the few efforts to include them in legislation and policy have done little to change their marginal status. In this chapter I examine the increasing prominence of linguistic issues in Indigenous political and cultural movements in North America, together with relevant aspirational declarations and policy statements. From this foundation, I argue that reconciliation, as a political and social process aimed at achieving greater parity and justice between Indigenous and settler peoples in North America, offers more promising grounds, ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically, for the management of language diversity in general, and suggest some specific policy directions for more detailed exploration.

Despite surface-level changes to the Heritage Languages Program in Ontario, heritage language instruction continues to exist at the margins of school life in Ontario. Public deliberations over this policy have led to intense, racialized conflict among stakeholders. At their most fundamental level, these conflicts have centred on who has – or should have – the power (or the “right”) to determine linguistic and cultural practices within publicly funded schools. To address this question, the chapter builds on my previous work sketching out a political-economy perspective on language policy analysis. Most salient is this theory’s insight that, while capitalism relies on human labour to create all profit and value, it has no internal system for reproducing that labour in the first place. I situate language socialization within this contradiction. When speakers of minoritized and/or racialized languages make demands for access to their languages in the public sphere (be it at work, at school, etc.) they directly challenge this separation between production and social reproduction. Understanding this contradiction moves us beyond searching for better metaphors for framing language policy, and towards concrete political strategies for undermining language-based oppression.