Truth Commissions and education systems: Time to look back

• In Event: Education Reform for Healing, Co-Existence and Human Rights in Transitional Justice Environments

Abstract

Dr. Paulson will begin with an overview of the myriad ways truth commissions, a key transitional justice mechanism, that have engaged with formal and non-formal education around the world. This overview, covering the period of 1980 to 2014, explores and seeks to explain changes in the depth and type of engagement with education over time. Paulson will illustrate these changes in the quality and implementation of recommendations by drawing on ethnographic and interview-based research conducted in Guatemala and Peru, along with document analysis. Changes in truth commission mandates, growth in the number of truth commissions and the exchange of best practice around them, as well as increased attention to the role of education in the recovery from conflict are all suggested to have contributed to an increased engagement with the educational sector by truth commissions.

The analysis shows the forward-looking elements of education, in particular, are increasingly mobilized by truth commissions (e.g. curriculum projects, human rights education, legacy activities). Paulson and Bellino raise the question, however, about whether transitional justice and education actors have engaged sufficiently with the backward-looking element of truth seeking, in order to uncover and address the ways in which education may have contributed towards violent conflict. They argue that this backward-looking engagement is important for the success of forward-looking initiatives and to the overall contribution of both truth commissions and education to justice after conflict.

Authors

• Julia Paulson, Bath Spa University

• Michelle Bellino, University of Michigan