From a Duty to Remember to an Obligation to Memory? Memory as Reparation in the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Commemorations and reparations are central elements of the transitional justice agenda. The inclusion of memory-related measures among the steps that states are expected to take along the transitional process has been progressively translated from the transitional justice domain to the language of international law. Judicial and quasi-judicial human rights instances have required states to make and undertake memorials, commemorations and public acts of remembrance, both as an instrument of reparation for the individual victim and as a mechanism to warn against the repetition of the same abuses in the future. As a result of this trend, memory-related measures have progressively become part of the state obligation to provide reparations to victims. The inclusion of memory-related measures in the scope of the international obligation to repair, however, raises some thorny issues. This review of the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in relation to memory-related orders and analysis of the case of the memorial El Ojo que Llora in Peru critically assesses the emerging trend of using memory-related initiatives as measures of reparation determined by judicial organs

Translating transitional justice: the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission

This paper contends that although the Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission replicated the structure and operation of a truth commission based on a globalised and placeless theory of best practice in transitional justice, it was not adequately contextualised or integrated with local approaches to reconciliation and peacebuilding and therefore fell short of its ambitious mandate. Introduction The Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first truth commission in the Pacific, established under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 2008  (TRC Act) in an effort to ‘promote national unity and reconciliation’ following the civil conflict which troubled the country between 1998 and 2003. The commission was publicly launched in 2008 by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Chair of the South African TRC, and officially began operations in 2010 for two years. The commission presented its five-volume final report to Prime Minister Gordon Darcy Lilo in February 2012; however, the report has yet to be publicly released or presented to parliament, despite requirements in the Act to do so. The ongoing silence of the government led to the editor of the final report, long-term Solomon Islands resident Bishop Terry Brown, unofficially releasing the report electronically in early 2013. The TRC conducted exhumations, research, closed hearings and statement taking across six of the nine provinces,  overcoming financial constraints, logistical challenges and difficult terrain. Several regional and thematic public hearings were also held and broadcast on the radio. The final report was handed over to the prime minister within the allocated two-year time frame. In light of these achievements, the Solomon Islands TRC could be considered a ‘success’ insomuch as it fulfilled its mandated duties and produced a final report — a challenging and remarkable achievement itself. This success, however, was arguably superficial, a performance of reconciliation in the theatre of post-conflict peacebuilding. A wider perspective of post-conflict peacebuilding and reconciliation in the Solomon Islands shows the TRC was a minor player on a crowded stage. Many Solomon Islanders were unaware of the TRC, and those familiar with its acronym or name were often unaware of its role or mandate. This paper contends that although the Solomon Islands TRC replicated the structure and operation of a truth commission based on a globalised and placeless theory of best practice in transitional justice, the TRC was not adequately contextualised or integrated with local approaches to reconciliation and peacebuilding and therefore fell short of its ambitious mandate. The commission did, however, produce a final report which in and of itself may serve as a positive outcome of the commission’s work. The experience of the Solomon Islands TRC demonstrates not only the conceptual and practical challenges faced and friction experienced of implementing a truth commission, but also the potential that truth commissions offer for promoting reconciliation and peacebuilding in post- conflict contexts in Melanesia. This paper is divided into six parts. First, a brief background of the Solomon Islands conflict is outlined. Second, the recent evolution of the peacebuilding and transitional justice fields are discussed to offer a background for the Solomon Islands TRC. Third, the various conflict management and reconciliation practices in Solomon Islands are outlined, leading to the fourth part which introduces and describes the background of the Solomon Islands TRC. The challenges of and failures to adapt the TRC to the local context are illustrated in the fifth part, with a discussion focused on the mistranslation of the meaning and value of both ‘truth’ and ‘reconciliation’ in post- conflict Solomon Islands. Finally, the sixth part argues that despite being initially championed by civil society actors, rather than becoming a ‘hybridised’ institution, the commission had a veneer of adaptation, and was ‘replicated’ according to normative transitional justice discourse

Technology-Facilitated Domestic Abuse in Political Economy: A new theoretical framework

This paper presents a new theoretical framework around technology-facilitated domestic abuse (TFDA) in identifying four distinct types of omnipresent behaviour. Perpetrators are increasingly drawing upon networked technologies likes smartphones, social media and GPS trackers in monitoring, controlling and abusing survivors. There is considerable academic literature developing in response to this. Whilst this scholarship is valuable, this paper argues that TFDA must be understood as a neoliberal manifestation of patriarchal legacies of misogyny and sexism. A failure to recognise this will serve to prioritise abusers’ freedom to do harm over rights of survivors to be protected from harm

Collective memories of Portuguese colonial action in Africa: representations of the colonial past among Mozambicans and Portuguese Youths

Social representations of the colonization and decolonization processes among young people from a former European colonial power (Portugal) and from an African ex-colony (Mozambique) were investigated through surveys using open- and closed-ended questions about national history, focusing on the identity functions of collective memories. Hegemonic and contested representations were found of the most prominent events related to Portuguese colonization of Mozambique, arousing a range of collective emotions. A central place is occupied by memories of the Colonial War, which ended with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the subsequent independence of the Portuguese African colonies. Overall, the depiction of colonialism was more negative for Mozambican than for Portuguese participants. The violent effects of colonial action were very salient in Mozambican memories, which stressed the most oppressive aspects of the colonial period, associated with slave trade and brutal repression. On the Portuguese side, the idealization of the voyages of discovery persisted, obscuring the most violent effects of colonial expansion. However, collective memories of colonization of former colonizer and former colonized do not simply stand opposed. Both Mozambican and Portuguese participants reported ambivalent feelings towards the colonization process.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

“When a bad thing happens…you are better only when you are home”:Alienation and mental health challenges experienced by Congolese and Somali migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa

This article explores the link between migration and alienation and its impact on the mental health and wellbeing of Congolese and Somali asylum seekers and refugees—two of the largest populations of displaced migrants in South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic research in Johannesburg, we highlight the various ways alienation is both imposed upon and experienced by migrants and argue that systemic disintegration, or acts of alienation, can be seen as deliberate and active policies and practices that are instrumental in excluding asylum seekers and refugees from everyday life. The experiences of marginalization and othering narrated by Congolese and Somali migrants highlight ways in which alienation and disintegration from critical social connections including family, community, and familiar contexts fundamentally impact wellbeing and mental health as well as strategies of care-seeking, and other forms of relational resilience. While conceptualizations and metrics of integration may in some ways capture the fallout of disintegration, such as access to livelihoods, housing, education, and healthcare, we suggest that this does not adequately assess the profound damage by acts of alienation on crucial relationships. The alienated psyche of innumerable migrants in South Africa results in the feeling that “when a bad thing happens…you are better only when you are home.” This pain, or feelings of alienation, we argue, are a crucial aspect to our understanding of alienation and in turn, highlight the importance of alienation as an apt analytical tool through which experiences of asylum-seeking in South Africa can be understood.</p

Directional Dense-Trajectory-based Patterns for Dynamic Texture Recognition

International audienceRepresentation of dynamic textures (DTs), well-known as a sequence of moving textures, is a challenging problem in video analysis due to disorientation of motion features. Analyzing DTs to make them "under-standable" plays an important role in different applications of computer vision. In this paper, an efficient approach for DT description is proposed by addressing the following novel concepts. First, beneficial properties of dense trajectories are exploited for the first time to efficiently describe DTs instead of the whole video. Second, two substantial extensions of Local Vector Pattern operator are introduced to form a completed model which is based on complemented components to enhance its performance in encoding directional features of motion points in a trajectory. Finally, we present a new framework, called Directional Dense Trajectory Patterns , which takes advantage of directional beams of dense trajectories along with spatio-temporal features of their motion points in order to construct dense-trajectory-based descriptors with more robustness. Evaluations of DT recognition on different benchmark datasets (i.e., UCLA, DynTex, and DynTex++) have verified the interest of our proposal