The living past in the lives of victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence: Temporal implications for transitional justice

Abstract

Issues of time and temporality are highly relevant to the field of transitional justice. The very concept of ‘transition’ and transitional justice processes more broadly reflect a linear and teleological understanding of time that moves in a particular direction. While building on existing temporal critiques of transitional justice, this interdisciplinary article makes two original contributions to this corpus of scholarship – empirical and conceptual. First, emphasizing what it refers to as ‘the living past’, it draws on qualitative interviews with victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda to explore empirically some of the various ways that the past experientially intruded into the interviewees’ present. Second, it utilizes the analogy of the coagulation cascade, a biological blood-clotting process, to reflect on how transitional justice processes might move beyond linear temporal conceptualizations to recognize lived experiences of time and the multiple ways that individuals – as well as communities and societies – continue to coexist and transition with the living past.