The Art of Remembrance and Peace: Transitional Justice and Reconciliation in Post-conflict Societies

The project investigates how the arts and creativity can be employed to serve reconciliatory ends and transitional justice, especially in "frozen conflict" contexts categorised by entrenched social and political divisions running across two or more generations. Moreover, it will explore what ethical considerations of war and peace does a fusion between the arts and culture of remembrance in post-conflict societies necessitate? The geopolitical contexts relevant to the project range from the former Yugoslavia (in particular Bosnia and Kosovo) and Northern Ireland, in Europe, to several post-genocide, post-conflict and post-apartheid societies in Africa (e.g., Rwanda, Southern Sudan, South Africa), Asia (e.g., Cambodia, Myanmar, India-Pakistan), Latin America (eg Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador) and the Middle East (e.g., Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Syria…). Recently, there has been a paradigm shift - both in theory and in practice - with transitional justice increasingly abandoning an exclusively legalistic perspective and opting, instead, for multidimensional and multidisciplinary perspectives and approaches. One of the non-conventional approaches has been the use of arts in reconciliation efforts in post-conflict societies. The arts have the power of creatively expressing both the anguish and the elation - as well as anything in between- of the human condition. Moreover, apart from the intrinsic aesthetic function, the purpose of the art can be, and often is, manifold: art is not merely mimetic or cathartic, it can perform sociocultural, historical, religious and ideological functions transgenerationally, transculturally, and transnationally. The PhD researcher will engage in a qualitative study (incl. ethnography/fieldwork) of one or more of the post-conflict contexts looking at how reconciliation and the arts intertwine in post-conflict societies. 

• Hariz Halilovic
• Elizabeth Kath

2024-ongoing 

• Global Reconciliation (Melbourne)
• KUMA International (Sarajevo)
• UNDP (Sarajevo)