How Truth Commissions Can Effect Transformative Change in a Polarized Age

Truth and reconciliation commissioners face the challenge of establishing legitimacy with survivors, victims and broader society, determining a way forward that will have longterm transformative impacts and completing their mandates. In this article, the author suggests ways for truth and reconciliation commissioners to ethically design activities around survivors voicing their experiences, creating space for management of fear, ethical learning, remembering and resurgence of epistemic resources. To do so, she engages with the work of several relational philosophers to propose areas of attention for newly appointed commissioners as they begin their work. How we understand memory, epistemic injustice, ethical fearing and calling in instead of calling out all lead the author to suggest that care around the design of processes around testimony, listening, sharing and responding will have the potential for transformation through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s activities

Developmental psychology · Political science · Transformative learning · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Psychology