The Meanings of Justice: Authoritative Knowledge and Lived Experience

• In Event: La ‘clase media’ and urban life in Buenos Aires: knowledge, critique, belonging

Abstract

This paper explores the multiple and overlapping meanings of “justice” in contemporary Argentina. It looks specifically at the history of activism surrounding the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. While each of the four factions within this body of activism share basic fundamental principles over what constitutes justice, the relative ranking that they assign each priority directs their understanding of appropriate and necessary action, or how “justice” can and should be achieved. I show that justice for this event, which left 85 dead and hundreds wounded, is seen to necessarily include 1) a legal reckoning of events, condemnation of the perpetrators, and the assignation of the corresponding punishment within a fair and impartial judicial process; 2) full disclosure and understanding of what occurred; 3) the preservation and continual invocation of the memory of the event , those that lost their lives, and its effects on the community; 4) the maintenance and strengthening of community institutions in facing such attacks. However, it is the relative emphasis given to each of these factors that influences what is seen as appropriate action in working to secure justice.
How activists, participants, and their allies position themselves in relation to one another and to the state, community, and international institutions to which they make their appeals also reveals a multiplicity of ways within which authoritative knowledge about the attacks and the investigations that followed it is constructed, debated, and accepted or rejected. I argue that the difficulty in achieving a sense of closure following public traumatic events is directly related to these debates over authoritative knowledge. I seek to make a connection between the desire to fulfil justice in the fullest sense of the term and the disconnects that occur and can linger when what constitutes authoritative knowledge remains in dispute.

Author

• Karen A Faulk, Carnegie Mellon University