Transition and Trauma
On the Construction and Politics of Expertise in Transitional Justice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17831767 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Auchter (0000-0002-2686-5948, Université Laval, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Global Studies Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2634-3797 • E-ISSN: 2634-3797 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/isagsq/ksag057 |
| OpenAlex | W7154483751 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 63 |
This contribution seeks to think about how expertise and crisis are intertwined in the way atrocity is represented and studied. Specifically, it examines who the experts are relative to transitional justice, and then seeks to describe how this expertise is constructed in such a way as to reify particular understandings of justice that are connected to moments of crisis that can be “moved on from” with the right practical (legal, institutional, psychological) tools. Following on previous work that has argued that this desire to move on can be actively harmful to those who have directly experienced violence, the first section of the paper traces how, in the practice of transitional justice, the centralization of particular types of expertise and the silencing of survivor voices are mutually reinforcing. It then examines expertise in justice in the academy, arguing that the privileging of the “terrain” model of field work often requires that academics operate in place solely to claim legitimacy and expertise, not to further our understanding of justice itself. This centralizes the event itself in the particular retellings that are told in specific kinds of contexts, to foreign scholars who typically visit for short time horizons, and yet are able later to claim expertise in that context. The author probes her own experiences in Rwanda through this lens. In the end, the contribution asks after what justice can emerge out of alternative ways of knowing and alternative imaginings of expertise
Economic Justice · Legitimacy · Politics · Transitional justice · Cambodian History and Society · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Law in Society and Culture
Global Corpse Politics
The Seductions of Quantification
History and Memory after Auschwitz
How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights
Memory, Trauma and World Politics
Assembling Exclusive Expertise
Madness in International Relations
The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development
Necropolitics
To Know Where He Lies
Security Expertise
Trauma and the Memory of Politics
Peaceland
On Transitional Justice Entrepreneurs and the Production of Victims
Local Memory Practices in East Timor
The pressures of getting it right
The Transformation of International Transitional Justice Advocacy
The dead as memory workers
Of Justice and the Grave
Forensics, body and state power in South Asia
The concept of instrument constituencies
Forensic culture as epistemic culture
The use of forensic archaeology in the investigation of human rights abuse
Producing Expertise in a Transitional Justice Setting
Trauma Advocacy, Veteran Politics, and the Croatian Therapeutic State
The Folding of Trauma
Diálogos Entre La Antropología Social Y Las Ciencias Forenses
The Local Turn in Peace Building
The performance and persistence of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity
The politics of knowledge
Mapping the intangible
Transitional Justice as Global Project
Towards a spectral forensics
Demystifying trauma in international relations theory
Visualizing War through Satellite Footage
The trauma of genocide
Objects at Work
Knowledge Machineries and Their Objects of Expertise. Knowing Bodies, Moves, and Moods through “Mobile Health” Data
Objects of Expertise. The Socio-Material Politics of Expert Knowledge in Global Governance
Critical methods in International Relations
Unpacking the local turn in peacebuilding
Speaking trauma
Human rights, human remains
Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of the Holocaust Film
Pure Corpses, Dangerous Citizens
The politics of methods in transitional justice knowledge production
Emotional Reconciliation
What One Sees and How One Files Seeing
Enactments of Expertise
Evidential Regimes of Forensic Archaeology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |