Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221134965 |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Moving Beyond Formal
Truth Practices and
Forensic Truth in the Syrian
Conflict: How Informal
Truth Practices Contribute
to Thicker Understandings
of Truth
Brigitte Herremans
and Tine Destrooper
Human Rights Centre, Faculty of Law and
Criminology, Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract
Truth is a central concept in the struggle for justice for Syrians. Many justice actors have
turned to the tools and rhetoric of transitional justice to further the quest for justice
and truth. Yet, while doing so has allowed them to generate some international attention
for victims, the transitional justice paradigm has several pitfalls. For one, the dominant
understanding of truth and truth-seeking embraced in formal mechanisms tends to be
narrowly defined as forensic truth. We argue on the basis of interviews with Syrian just-
ice actors and artists that informal, including artistic, practices can entail a thicker under-
standing of truth. They have the potential to disrupt several shortcomings of forensic
understanding of truth and formal practices. They can ‘presence’experiences of
harm, accommodate multivocal truths, and enable epistemic resistance. Therefore, we
consider how transitional justice as a field of scholarship and practice could better
engage with truth-seeking in inconclusive contexts where formal truth mechanisms
may be unavailable.
Corresponding author:
Brigitte Herremans, PhD candidate at the Human Rights Centre, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Ghent
University, Universiteitsstraat 4 - 9000 Gent- Belgium.
Email: Brigitte.herremans@ugent.be
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2023, Vol. 32(4) 519–539
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221134965
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Keywords
Syria, transitional justice, truth, arts, literature
Introduction
When Syrians took to the streets in 2011, their aim was to usher in a new polity. A decade
later the likelihood thereof seems more distant than ever as the Assad regime tightened its
grip through the ruthless repression of the protest movement. Despite the regime being
the main perpetrator of atrocity crimes, the transformation of the conflict and the emer-
gence of the (so-called) Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have deflected international
attention from the regime’s violence. This, in combination with the international stale-
mate and the primacy of feasibility politics, has entailed a gradual international acquies-
cence of the Assad regime.
Against this background, Syrian and international justice actors, by whom we mean
both civil society -including victim organisations- and institutional stakeholders, are pur-
suing opportunities to seek justice and accountability for, and recognition of this vio-
lence. Some of these justice actors have –sometimes pragmatically –embraced
transitional justice as a paradigm that could further their struggle, given its versatility
and its promise of initiating justice processes and disrupting cycles of violence.
Despite the absence of a transition and the prevailing international passivity, these
justice actors argue, transitional justice initiatives could provide some modicum of
justice. For this reason, they have invested in innovative documentation efforts, criminal
justice proceedings, and, crucially, truth-seeking initiatives such as a campaign to set up a
mechanism for the missing and disappeared. Artistic practices, e.g., in the domain of
cinema, literature and visual arts, have also engaged with the notion of truth. As informal
truth-seeking initiatives take place in a non-standardized transitional justice setting in
which civil society actors rather than formal stakeholders are mostly at the forefront,
they have displayed much higher levels of multi-vocality and disruption, both in terms
of processes adopted and in terms of the understanding of truth being promoted. The
way these initiatives and artistic practices engage with and renegotiate the core concepts
of the transitional justice field have to date been under-researched.
This article sets out from the normative position that justice processes generally, and
truth-seeking specifically, must seek to accommodate the complex, volatile and multi-
layered experiences of victims, which entails foregrounding their needs, expectations
and epistemologies. First and foremost, we attempt to recast how truth is commonly
understood in formal settings such as courts, truth commissions and institutional
efforts (such as the work of UN bodies), that adopt a forensic understanding of truth.
We use the notion of informal truth practices to refer civil society initiatives aimed at
unearthing experiences of harm (such as the work of CSOs or artistic practices). While
these informal practices might be very different from formal truth-seeking efforts, they
are crucial in contexts where standardized mechanisms are unavailable and because
they recast what is understood as truth. Based on empirical research (see below) we
will argue that these truth-seeking initiatives have the potential to disrupt some shortcom-
ings of forensic understandings of truth and formal practices, in the sense that they can
520 Social & Legal Studies 32(4)
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