Claims to ignorance as a form of participation in transitional justice

© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Transitional justice is premised on participation that allows local publics to construct, critique and have some ownership over the process. The current scholarship assumes that individuals openly express their views of the process, or that they remain silent. The scholarship has neglected a third, significant form of participation: active withholding of views by saying “I don’t know”. This article examines such claims to ignorance and argues that they can provide insight into participation. While both qualitative and quantitative researchers of transitional justice have observed a pervasive pattern of high “don’t know” responses, such claims to ignorance have not been studied. This article develops a theoretical framework that shows that “don’t know” responses are a valuable source of information and argues that they are often an expression of a lack of willingness to respond, rather than genuine ignorance. Drawing on an original corpus of data collected through inter-ethnic focus groups and surveys conducted in four former Yugoslav countries, the study demonstrates how claims to ignorance are constructed as novel manifestations of resistance, restraint or disentitlement. These point to a rejection of transitional justice, which needs to be addressed if individuals are to feel like legitimate participants in the process.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Mismatch in the Classification of Linear Subspaces: Sufficient Conditions for Reliable Classification

This paper considers the classification of linear subspaces with mismatched classifiers. In particular, we assume a model where one observes signals in the presence of isotropic Gaussian noise and the distribution of the signals conditioned on a given class is Gaussian with a zero mean and a low-rank covariance matrix. We also assume that the classifier knows only a mismatched version of the parameters of input distribution in lieu of the true parameters. By constructing an asymptotic low-noise expansion of an upper bound to the error probability of such a mismatched classifier, we provide sufficient conditions for reliable classification in the low-noise regime that are able to sharply predict the absence of a classification error floor. Such conditions are a function of the geometry of the true signal distribution, the geometry of the mismatched signal distributions as well as the interplay between such geometries, namely, the principal angles and the overlap between the true and the mismatched signal subspaces. Numerical results demonstrate that our conditions for reliable classification can sharply predict the behavior of a mismatched classifier both with synthetic data and in a motion segmentation and a hand-written digit classification applications.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

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This thesis investigates the expressivist, or extra-legal, effects of the transitional justice process in Croatia that began following the 1991-1995 conflict. It analyses how international and domestic war crimes trials, as well as civil society efforts, have led to deliberation over norms and narratives related to the war. This is based on a deliberative understanding of the transitional justice process, which focuses on the potential for trials to initiate public deliberation that involves multiple representations of the past. The primary method of data collection was focus groups with teachers, pensioners and members of war veterans' groups across several locations, while follow-up interviews, a brief survey and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) were used to verify results. The results of the analysis question theories of human rights norm cascades, since in the case of Croatia stronger "everyday" narratives have undermined the trickle-down effects of transitional justice narratives advocated by authorities. Chief among these highly trusted "everyday" narratives is the predominant Croatian war narrative, one of defence against a larger Serbian aggressor, which permeates across Croatian society and aspects of which are not questioned at all. The effect of this is that transitional justice efforts work in an atmosphere of cynicism and distrust with institutions, unless their narrative is in line with "everyday" expectations, and they therefore struggle to compete with personal and local narratives. These narratives strongly affect how the Croatian public understands the rule of law and history, as well as how it regards the Serb minority in the state

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