Onur Bakiner

Since the 1980s a number of countries have established truth commissions to come to terms with the legacy of past human rights violations, yet little is known about the achievements and shortcomings of this popular transitional justice tool. Drawing on research on Chile's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and exploring the scholarship on thirteen other transitional contexts, Onur Bakiner evaluates the success of truth commissions in promoting policy reform, human rights accountability, and the public recognition of human rights violations. He argues that although political elites often see a truth commission as a convenient way to address past atrocities, the findings, historical narratives, and recommendations of such commissions often surprise, upset, and discredit influential political actors. Even when commissions produce only modest change as a result of political constraints, Bakiner contends, they open up new avenues for human rights activism by triggering the creation of new victims' organizations, facilitating public debates over social memory, and inducing civil society actors to monitor the country's human rights policy.

Bakiner demonstrates how truth commissions have recovered basic facts about human rights violations, forced societies to rethink the violence and exclusion of nation-building, and produced a new dynamic whereby the state seeks to legitimize its central position between history and politics by accepting a high degree of societal penetration into the production and diffusion of official national history. By doing so, truth commissions have challenged and transformed public discourses on memory, truth, justice, reconciliation, recognition, nationalism, and political legitimacy in the contemporary world.

This article offers a critical rereading of Şerif Mardin’s center–periphery framework. This cleavage has offered a simple and politically appealing theoretical foundation to scholarly and journalistic works for several decades. Empirical evidence, however, suggests institutions and worldviews have not been continuous across time, as the center–periphery framework suggests. Furthermore, disagreements and conflicts among groups perceived as peripheral, the fluidity of relationships between peripheral and central actors, and the lack of cohesion within the institutions of the center leave no reason to maintain the center–periphery cleavage as an organizing framework. The authoritarian turn in Turkey in the 2010s under the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi invites further scrutiny of the framework. Future research should take into consideration historical patterns and events that do not fit into the binary framework, pay attention to micro-level dynamics within and between social actors and institutions, incorporate strategic decision making into theoretical models, acknowledge the interconnectedness and hybridity of ideologies and worldviews, and conduct comparative research.

When do judges initiate public action outside the courtroom? What kinds of political activities do they engage in? What are the consequences of their interactions with social and political actors? This article investigates judges’ efforts to influence law and policy as opinion leaders, protesters, and network builders. In light of recent devevelopments in Turkey, I argue that intrajudicial conflict, that is, the increasing salience of hitherto dormant tensions inside the judiciary, is the primary source of off-bench judicial mobilization. Participants in off-bench judicial mobilization seek to maintain, reform, or transform judicial institutions in ways that enhance their ideational and strategic goals.

This article explains whether or not, and the specific ways in which, truth commissions established during a political transition in fact transform lessons from history into political and judicial impact, defined as influence on government policy and judicial processes. It isolates impact from the causal effects of similar postconflict institution building and other transitional justice and conflict resolution measures. Drawing upon the existing literature, it examines several causal mechanisms through which commissions are expected to influence politics and society. These include direct political impact through the implementation of recommendations and indirect political impact through civil society mobilization. Truth commissions may also have positive judicial impact by contributing to human rights accountability and negative judicial impact by promoting impunity. The article concludes that truth commissions do promote political and judicial change, albeit modestly, especially when human rights and victims’ groups pressure governments for policy implementation.

There is unprecedented domestic and international interest in Turkey's political past, accompanied by a societal demand for truth and justice in addressing past human rights violations. This article poses the question: Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Drawing upon the literature on nationalism, identity, and collective memory, I argue that the Turkish state has recently taken steps to acknowledge and redress some of the past human rights violations. However, these limited and strategic acts of acknowledgment fall short of initiating a more comprehensive process of addressing past wrongs. The emergence of the Justice and Development Party as a dominant political force brings along the possibility that the discarded Kemalist memory framework will be replaced by what I call majoritarian conservatism, a new government-sanctioned shared memory that promotes uncritical and conservative-nationalist interpretations of the past that have popular appeal, while enforcing silence on critical historiographies that challenge this hegemonic memory and identity project. Nonetheless, majoritarian conservatism will probably fail to assert state control over memory and history, even under a dominant government, as unofficial memory initiatives unsettle the hegemonic appropriation of the past.

This article analyzes the advances and limitations of transitional justice efforts in democratic Chile through the examination of a key political actor: the armed forces. The military's earlier attitude of denial and noncooperation regarding the human rights violations of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) was slowly replaced by dialogue with civilians, institutional recognition of violations and limited cooperation with courts. While strategic interactions with other political actors and generational/personnel change stand out as variables explaining the military's behavioral and ideational transformation, the article highlights a crucial third factor: the pluralization of truth and justice mechanisms, both domestic and overseas, that opened up juridical, political and societal fields of contestation against impunity and amnesia. None of Chile's major political actors, including the military, could exert full control over these multiple channels of truth and justice, and the result was the adoption of new strategies and legitimizing discourses more in line with the human rights norm. The military reoriented its stance on human rights in the context of Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998, a changing political environment and the judicial battle over amnesties for the dictatorship's abuses.

Gerçekler er ya da geç kendiliğinden ortaya çıkmaz; birileri bu gerçekleri ortaya çıkarır. Toplumun belleği otomatik olarak oluşmaz; o belleği bin bir emekle diri tutanlar sayesinde genç kuşaklar geçmişi hatırlar. İhlallerin sistemli, yargı ve ana akım medyanın faillerle işbirliği içinde olduğu her ülkede gerçekleri ortaya çıkarmak ve on yıllar boyunca hatırlatmak, bir avuç insanın ısrarlı çabasıyla mümkün olabilmiştir. İşte Elçi ve dava arkadaşlarının başardığı, avukatlık mesleğini dönüştürürken bir yandan da bu ülkenin toplumsal belleğini diri tutmaktı. Yaşamı savunmanın ölmeye eşdeğer olmadığı, güle oynaya siyaset yapılabilen bir ülke hayaliyle, Elçi’ye rahmet, ailesine ve yoldaşlarına başsağlığı diliyorum.

Dünyanın en uzun süredir devam eden iç savaşı bitmek üzere. Geçtiğimiz çarşamba (23 Eylül) günü Kolombiya devlet başkanı Juan Manuel Santos, Kolombiya Devrimci Silahlı Güçleri – Halk Ordusu (İspanyolca kısaltması FARC-EP) silahlı örgütünün liderleriyle Küba’nın başkenti Havana’da buluştu ve görüşmeden, son büyük anlaşmazlık kaynağı olan çatışma sonrası adalet konusunda görüş birliğine varıldığı haberi geldi. Santos, ‘Timochenko’ kod adlı gerilla lideri ve Küba devlet başkanı Raúl Castro’nun beyaz gömlekler içinde el sıkıştığı resim, 51 yıl süren ve en az 220.000 kişinin hayatına, 6-7 milyon kişinin yerinden edilmesine neden olan savaşın bittiğini müjdeliyor. Peki bu noktaya nasıl gelindi? Bundan sonra ne olacak? Savaş karanlığına döndüğümüz bu günlerde, Kolombiya örneğinden ne gibi dersler çıkarılabilir?

Books reviewed in this issue.Ruth Berins Collier and Samuel Handlin, eds., Reorganizing Popular Politics: Participation and the New Interest Regime in Latin America.Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi, eds., Governance After Neoliberalism in Latin America.Leonardo Avritzer, Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil.Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory B. Weeks, eds., The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile.Michelle L. Dion, Workers and Welfare: Comparative Institutional Change in Twentieth-Century Mexico.Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980.James W. McGuire, Wealth, Health, and Democracy in East Asia and Latin America.