The Confronting Atrocities Project studies the role of truth commissions in post-conflict reconstruction and democratic transitions by paying attention to the tensions in their truth seeking and reconciliation mandates.
A particular focus of this project is exploring the tensions have shaped official truth narratives about past atrocities and considering the role of truth commissions in reinforcing hegemonic collective memories, subverting or complicating dominant narratives about past atrocities.
We engage these transitional justice issues of local, national and global significance from historical perspectives by studying truth commissions as memory archives — defining sites of contestation over social identities and collective memory.