Spreading the Truth: How Truth Commissions Address Human Rights Abuses in the World Society

• In Event: 590 - Regular Session. Transforming Institutional Practices of Human Rights

Abstract

In the last thirty years, truth commissions have proliferated worldwide and become a standard component of the international peacebuilding repertoire. As a result, diverse post-conflict states with disparate histories of human rights abuses have established the same institution. Drawing on world society theory (WST), this research explains why truth commissions have become a global paradigm for addressing crimes committed in vastly different contexts. Data from 34 founding charters reveals that truth commissions have increasingly been established to pursue four rationalized myths. Tracing the history and prevalence of the two most central myths— truth commissions 1) provide the complete truth, and 2) promote reconciliation— this paper shows that transnational institutional pressures, rather than a state’s particular conflict or political transition, shape commission objectives. This research refines WST to demonstrate that the diffusion of truth commissions is not a passive top-down process, but rather distinct actors from both the core and the periphery have developed and promoted different rationalized myths, spreading a multifaceted, uneven, and changing global truth commission model.

Author

• Saskia Nauenberg, University of California-Los Angeles