Publication

This report by the United States Institute of Peace critically discusses the effectiveness of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC). The author draws on her ethnographic research in post-conflict Sierra Leone, and claims that the idea of "truth telling", the public recounting of memories of violence, draws on problematic assumptions about the universal benefits of verbally remembering violence. Instead, societies may choose to forget, and this "social forgetting" may in fact serve the reintegration of ex-combatants - many of which are children - in some societies better than TRC's do.