Justice

Author: Elizabeth Stanley

This article seeks to analyse the conditions by which state crime comes to be recognized or misrecognized, particularly through truth commission proceedings. Truth commissions, established in transitions to democracy, often provide the most authoritative documents on state crime. While this recognition of state crime presents an opportunity to challenge popular perceptions and power relations, this approach is commonly detached from the linked imperative of social justice. Building on the work of Nancy Fraser (1997; 2000; 2003) and the author's own primary research, the article details that while truth commissions expose a partial ‘truth’ of state crime, they inhibit recognition of status subordination that would allow a challenge to institutionalized patterns of inequality, discrimination and oppression.

Authors: Cathy Gormley-Heenan and Paula Devine

The issue of trust is one that has been considered to be particularly important in the context of the Northern Ireland peace process. The stunted progress made between 1998 and 2007 was in large part blamed on the absence of trust between the key political protagonists. The levels of trust among the general public, in relation to the various political actors and newly established powersharing institutions, were dismissed as secondary issues, particularly because the powersharing institutions were, from 1998, more often in suspension than in operation. This has now changed. Since May 2007, almost 10 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland’s devolved administration is once again operational. At an initial glance there appears to be much optimism about the political future of Northern Ireland. Such optimism sits uneasily with the widespread cynicism about politics and politicians in the UK more generally. This raises an important question: how might such growing political disenchantment affect the progress of the Northern Ireland peace process, if at all, and with what consequence?

Author: Jennifer Schirmer

Human rights, peace processes, and truth commissions have become standard elements in the international community’s discourse of accountability for societies in transition from war to peace. However, the prevention of future human rights violations and potential nationwide conflict requires the reformation of the state’s repressive apparatuses-a task not easily achieved with the international instruments at hand. Despite advances in international oversight of state violence, most notably by United Nations-directed peace processes in Central America, there is reason to be wary of the influence that long-entrenched state apparatuses and the concepts of security that guide them have on the conditions for peace and democracy.

Authors: June Tweedie and Tony Ward

On 6 March 1988 three members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) crossed the border from Spain into Gibraltar. Within hours they were shot dead by members of the Special Air Services Regiment (the SAS). An inquest took place and concluded that the three were lawfully killed. The purpose of this article is not to recapitulate the detailed analysis of the evidence contained in the observers’ reports, but to focus on some of the major procedural issues raised by the inquest and to show how these reflect the recent development of the coroner’s system.

Author: Andrew M. Jefferson

Analysis based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nigerian prisons and training institutions suggests that human rights training interventions can be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate a deviant state, and as a form of global social control. External intervention strategies and the uncritical use of training as a universal solution are shown to have fundamental weaknesses in terms of their intended ‘rehabilitative’ aims and in relation to the realities of prison practice that they are confronted by. Such interventions are conceptualized as part of a global(izing) strategy that inadvertently reproduces conditions of domination by creating the appearance of a desire to ‘help’, whilst distracting attention from broader issues of global socio-political, economic and material (in)equality.