Storytelling, resilience and transitional justice: Reversing narrative social bulimia
| Author | Janine Natalya Clark |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620933230 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620933230
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620933230
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Storytelling, resilience and
transitional justice: Reversing
narrative social bulimia
Janine Natalya Clark
University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
This article is about storytelling and transitional justice. Utilizing the late Jock Young’s
concept of social bulimia, it uses the author’s fieldwork with victims-/survivors of
conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina to demonstrate that storytelling
can become a social bulimic process of absorption and expulsion. The article’s key aim
is to explore ways of addressing this. In so doing, it draws on the neurological concept
of plasticity. Emphasizing the importance of ‘narrative plasticity’ in the sense of giving
victims-/survivors more control over their stories, and linking the concept to resilience,
it argues that narrative plasticity can help to address the absorption and exclusion
dynamics of social bulimia—and thereby contribute to moving transitional justice in a
new ecological direction.
Keywords
Conflict-related sexual violence, narrative plasticity, resilience, social bulimia,
transitional justice
Introduction
As the process of dealing with a legacy of past human rights violations, transitional jus-
tice places a strong accent on the value of storytelling (Hackett and Rolston, 2009: 357;
Sander, 2008: 348–349). Storytelling is associated, inter alia, with establishing the truth
(Webster, 2007: 581), giving victims a voice (Simpson, 2007: 89), restoring their dignity
(Godwin Phelps, 2004: 55), healing (Androff, 2012: 38) and the reconstruction of self
Corresponding author:
Janine Natalya Clark, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Email: j.n.clark@bham.ac.uk
933230TCR0010.1177/1362480620933230Theoretical CriminologyClark
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(3) 456–474
(Baines and Stewart, 2011: 258–259). Notwithstanding these purported benefits, story-
telling can be a psychologically challenging process (King and Meernik, 2017: 128). It
can also create ‘labyrinths of disappointment’ (Fields, 1987: 80) when people who have
experienced highly traumatic events, such as displacement, sexual violence or witness-
ing a massacre, are required to recount their stories multiple times, often without seeing
any concrete benefits (Shaw, 2007: 203). In the poignant words of a member of the
Khulumani Support Group in South Africa:
I am sick of telling my story. It makes them [those working in the field of transitional justice]
feel good to show that they are helping us. They don’t really want to change things and what
good does telling our stories over and over do?
(cited in Madlingozi, 2010: 213)
The author has often encountered similar arguments during years of fieldwork in
Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) (see, for example, Clark, 2014: 17, n19), in particular with
victims-/survivors1 of conflict-related sexual violence (Clark, 2017a: 16, 233, 2017b:
426–427). These field experiences provided the central idea for this interdisciplinary
article. Utilizing and adapting the late Jock Young’s concept of social bulimia, and focus-
ing specifically on conflict-related sexual violence (although the arguments have a wider
application), the article offers an original analysis and critique of storytelling as a social
bulimic process of absorption and expulsion. It maintains that the ready ‘consumption’
of stories of sexual violence by actors involved in transitional justice processes—includ-
ing non-governmental organizations (NGOs), media, police and prosecutors—can impart
to victims-/survivors a sense of being socially included and valued. Ultimately, however,
these individuals may be left feeling used and rejected—and, additionally, socially
excluded when they live in environments where they face stigma and blame (see, for
example, Clark, 2018).
The article seeks, therefore, to explore ways of countering, or at least reducing, what
it terms ‘narrative social bulimia’—a storytelling extension of Young’s construct.
Drawing on the neurological concept of plasticity (Huttenlocher, 2002) and transposing
this to a social science context, the article calls for ‘narrative plasticity’ within transi-
tional justice practice in the sense of giving victims-/survivors more control over the
stories they tell and what they talk about. This is important for addressing the absorption
dynamics of narrative social bulimia. Additionally, by drawing attention to the interac-
tions between individuals and their environments, narrative plasticity is highly pertinent
to the exclusion dynamics of narrative social bulimia. Positing a linkage with resilience,
as ‘the reciprocal interplay of individuals in relationships and environments’ (Bottrell,
2009: 323), the article’s overall argument is that narrative plasticity can offer vital
insights into some of the ecological structural and systemic factors that both facilitate
and impede processes of resilience. In this way, it has the potential to contribute to new
structural inclusion and absorption dynamics within transitional justice, and, by exten-
sion, to play a role in developing the field in a novel ecological direction (Clark, 2020a).
The article’s first section provides background information about the underpinning
fieldwork and introduces the thematic of storytelling fatigue in BiH. The second section
457
Clark
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