Beyond Legalism

| Amnesties, Transition and Conflict Transformation

Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Project Research Staff: Dr Louise Mallinder
Collaborators: Professor Kieran McEvoy, Professor Brice Dickson
Room : 01.026 63 University Road
Tel: 028 9097 1348
Email: l.mallinder@qub.ac.uk

Aims
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this comparative research project is seeking to develop a ‘thicker’ understanding of the relationship between amnesties and transition from conflict. This will be achieved through country visits to explore ‘ideal types’ of amnesties, development of a database of amnesty arrangements worldwide and exploration of the intersection between amnesties and international human rights law.
Despite the centrality of amnesties to the process of conflict transformation, to date few studies have focused exclusively on general debates on amnesty laws, as opposed to the wider fields of transitional justice or conflict resolution, and those which have been undertaken have arguably been legalistic, atheoretical and jurisdiction-specific. As a result, very little existing research is based on extensive fieldwork within transitional states or comparative studies of amnesty laws. This research project seeks to build on the existing literature in order to explore richer and thicker themes in relation to amnesties. In this way, it seeks to move the debate on amnesties ‘beyond legalism’ to consider the phenomenon within the wider political context in which amnesties occur.

Through a combination of research methods, including field work, the project will examine amnesty processes in South Africa, Uganda, Argentina, Uruguay and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It will look in particular at the following themes:

  • Amnesty, political power and the construction of legitimacy
  • Amnesty, truth recovery and public memory
  • Amnesty and accountability
  • Amnesty and the construction of victim and perpetrator
  • Amnesty, forgiveness and reconciliation
  • Amnesty and the limitations of legalism

The project will produce (1) an on-line database of amnesties readily available to all users; (2) a research report; (3) a major international conference and (4) an academic monograph and at least two journal articles.