Transition – (RE)IMAGINING PEACE + JUSTICE

Can Sinn Fein Move Beyond the IRA? The Future of Ireland’s Republican Party

In 1981, Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands – made famous as one of ten men to die during a hunger strike protesting the British government’s refusal to allow IRA members Prisoner of War Status — became the first Irish Republican to win election to the British Parliament. HIs victory, and subsequent death, opened the doors for an upwelling of political support for the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. In 1983, Sinn Fein began to run for Northern Irish and British seats, even as the militant wing of the IRA continued to perform acts of violence — a strategy known as “The Armalite and the Ballot Box”.

Nearly 40 years after Sinn Fein’s first electoral victories, and 15 since the complete disarmament of the IRA in 2005, Sinn Fein’s historical association with IRA violence has continued to cast a long shadow, making the political party a pariah in Dublin and London even as it represents the largest Nationalist (pro-Irish Unification) party in Northern Ireland’s Assembly. Yet two recent elections in both the Republic and Northern Ireland might have forever changed this dynamic. As Sinn Fein witnesses a surge in political support, the question of whether the organization can ever move past its historical association with violence has come into focus, presenting larger questions as to the political normalization of groups previously associated with the terrorism label.

Two Elections, One Party

In the last year, two elections shook the foundations of Ireland’s political scene. During the December 2019 UK General Elections, Irish Nationalist parties won a majority of the votes in Northern Ireland, the first time the Assembly has ever seated more Nationalists than pro-UK Unionists. More recently, In an electoral earthquake in February 2020, Sinn Fein landed the largest share of votes in Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s parliament, overtaking the two dominant center-right parties that have exchanged power since independence.

Part of Sinn Fein’s newfound success may lie in the symbolic break from the past under a new generation of Republican politicians. Sinn Fein’s leader, Mary Lou McDonald, has never been a part of the IRA and joined Sinn Fein only after the Good Friday Agreement ended Provisional IRA violence in Northern Ireland. In the 2020 Irish Elections, Sinn Fein positioned itself not as the political heirs of armed resistance, but as a left-wing alternative to the more center-right politics of the two dominant parties, emphasizing fair housing prices over Irish Unification. But even under a larger generational shift away from the conflict, Sinn Fein’s historical baggage has caused Ireland’s two other major parties to reject a governing coalition with the party. Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland the nationalists’ victory has masked a loss in support for Sinn Fein as voters have migrated to less polarizing parties, such as the SDLP and Alliance Party.

On both sides of the border, Sinn Fein’s history has hindered it from forming cross-border political dominance that could lead to political unification of the island. Although the party has experienced electoral success that would have seemed unimaginable 40 years ago, the terrorism association remains a substantial obstacle — one that Sinn Fein may not be able to overcome.

Escaping the Terrorist Label

Given these realities, Sinn Fein presents an interesting case for the question of if former terrorist or insurgent groups can successfully transition away from the stain of past violence in a political process. While Sinn Fein attempts to reposition itself along the lines of leftist politics rather than sectarian identity, the memory of the IRA has remained strong enough to prevent the party from being fully normalized. Fair or not, the terrorist label remains, 25 years after the conflict officially ended.

In his 2004 paper “Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists”, Charles Tilly states that the “terrorist” label becomes defining for any group that commits acts of terror or terrorism, to the point that a group’s non-terrorism activities and goals become submerged by its acts of violence intended to cause terror. Once identified as “terrorists,” political compromise becomes untenable with organizations linked to acts of terrorism, even after such groups have abandoned violence. For Sinn Fein, while “The Armalite and the Ballot Box” strategy may have permitted electoral success, the strong memory of the Armalite – a weapon used for decades as the IRA’s preferred tool for assassinations – has for now closed the door to achieving political power. The terrorist label persists, years after the men and women who committed acts of terror have been replaced by a generation that hardly remembers the conflict. This reality extends beyond Northern Ireland, from the political toxicity of forming coalitions with Spain’s Basque and Catalan Nationalist parties to the ethically and politically fraught prospect of forming a Taliban power-sharing agreement in Afghanistan.

Yet keeping formerly terrorist-linked parties out of government poses its own risks. In Northern Ireland, the dissident Real IRA has been linked to the nationalist political party Saoradh, which has capitalized on some nationalists’ discontent with the speed of the political path towards Irish Unification and has been connected to recent shootings and deaths, including of Northern Irish journalist Lyra McKee. Even as Sinn Fein is rejected in the Dáil Éireann for past violence, still more extreme organizations wait on the sidelines, prepared to return to violence to achieve their aims.

It is of course up to the people of the island of Ireland to determine whether Sinn Fein can be separated from the terrorist label and be allowed to move past its historic support of violence. For now, the elections in both the North and South have shown that the debate over Sinn Fein’s legitimacy and normalization has not subsided, even as more and more Irish voters seem prepared to offer the political party a second look.

Photo Credit: Devin Windelspecht

A Second Spring? The Fragile Hope for Democratic Transition in Sudan and Algeria

The recent toppling of authoritarians in Algeria and Sudan have the potential to breathe new life into the hope of democracy for North Africa, years after the “Arab Spring.” Yet even as the Sudanese and Algerian people have appeared to have learned important lessons from the events of 2011, fundamental obstacles still stand in the way of democratic transition that echo the failures of the Arab Spring.

By 2019, the eighth anniversary of the Tunisian Revolution, the hopes of the Arab Spring appeared all by extinguished. Within the span of a few years, popular movements that carried the potential to bring about dignity, accountability, and democracy for the people of the Middle East and North Africa were overwhelmed by renewed government repression and the new conflicts of the “Arab Winter.” Then on 2 April, Algeria’s Algeria’s 20-year president, Bouteflika, stepped down after mass protests over his planned 5^th consecutive term in office. Nine days later, Sudan’s 30-year dictator, al-Bashir, was removed by the Sudanese military following months of citizen mobilization. Within weeks, journalists and pundits were already describing these twin revolutions as a “second Arab Spring.”

It’s not a coincidence that two nations, which largely avoided demonstrations in 2011, are now witnessing the toppling of some of the region’s most powerful strongmen. On the surface, the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings appear almost as a delayed second act to the 2011 uprisings, and even have followed a pattern similar to the cases of Tunisia and Egypt: the formation of peaceful and sustained popular mobilization, whose aims were made reality once popular pressure caused military and government structures to eventually turn on the regime. On closer inspection, however, the protesters who brought down Bouteflika and al-Bashir have learned important lessons from the Arab Spring—namely, that democratic transition does not stop with the removal of a single figure and the need for commitment to continue to put pressure on the state even through the transition period.

In Algeria, protesters have already set their sights beyond the immediate fall of Bouteflika, with peaceful protesters calling for the removal of the prime minister and interim president, figures which remain representative of the power structures of the Bouteflika regime. By turning out every Friday to insist on transparency and the inclusion of civil society in the transition period, including free and fair elections under reformed rules, Algerians have signaled that challenging le pouvoir—or “the power”—goes beyond the removal of Bouteflika and instead requires a radical restructuring of state institutions and the electoral process.

Sudan faces perhaps more difficult hurdles—with the difference being the military’s forcible removal of al-Bashir and its significant control over the post-Bashir transition. In a situation that resembles the post-Mubarak military transition of Egypt in 2011, the Sudanese military and security forces have recently inflicted violence against protesters that have mobilized against the military junta, in the process jeopardizing the breakdown of military-protester negotiations. Despite this, protesters have maintained peaceful methods, and, like in Algeria, have continued to protest and call for a civilian-led transition, with a message that democratic aims would not be settled by the merely the election of another authoritarian figure with military support.

Neither outcome is guaranteed to end in democracy. If anything, the events of the Arab Spring show just how ingrained military and government power structures are in the region—and just how delicate democratic transition can be even after a given leader has fallen. In Egypt, a military coup in 2013 has resulted in a government just as repressive and violent as the Mubarak era; in Bahrain, a violent Saudi-led intervention resulted in the crackdown of political dissidents; and in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, conflicts whose origins are derived from 2011 continue to be waged with varying levels of intensity. The shadows of the Arab Spring’s failures loom large over Algeria and Sudan, both of which experienced their own horrific civil wars not too long ago, and whose current power brokers will be loathe to give up control to civilian administration. In this environment, the use of violence to maintain power is all too possible a reality under the transitional, military-led regimes.

So too do Algeria and Sudan face a different international community than existed in 2011, with the foreign policy emphasis on security over democracy and human rights—which already largely guided Western policy in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Egypt during the Arab Spring—even more pronounced than it was eight years ago. Without external pressure to respect a civilian transition, military leaders in Sudan and Algeria might feel emboldened to violently crack down on protesters, knowing well how little pushback they will receive from the likes of President Trump or Italian strongman, Salvini.

That is not to say that the Algerian and Sudanese revolutions are doomed to fail; in fact, the protesters who brought down Bouteflika and al-Bashir have already made great strides beyond what was accomplished by many countries during the Arab Spring, and have remained peaceful despite instances of military violence. These steps don’t guarantee a peaceful transition, but they send an important message that democratic, civilian government is the end goal of the revolution, and that citizens will not easily settle for the mere replacement of another autocratic figure.

No matter their outcome, the April revolutions reveal that the desire for rights, dignity, and freedom is still very much alive across the Middle East and North Africa—and always has been. Sudan and Algeria show that even under the most long-standing and repressive regimes, change is in fact possible, through the actions of the Sudanese and Algerian people themselves who dare to struggle for a better future. While the events of April may not yet point to a “Second Spring,” they do suggest that the Arab Winter, regardless of how long it lasts, will one day thaw.

Photo Credit: M.Saleh, CC BY-SA .40

Competing with the ICC for Justice: The Central African Republic

At the ICC, survivors have no choice but to compete for recognition and reconciliation—and ultimately, for justice. Acquittal complicates this inequity: well after the trauma is revisited in testimony, telling the truth becomes a performance for the sake of the Court, not for justice. This article, which examines the role of the ICC in the Central African Republic (CAR), is the first in a series of posts that will explore the impact of acquittal in international criminal justice on ongoing conflict.

A survivor’s participation at trial is heavily limited by legal procedure. While courts aim to produce a public narrative of fact, to do so they must establish their own legitimacy as objective arbiters of truth. Enshrined in the very foundation of a justice process that is considered “fair” and “objective” is the notion that the courtroom is a space designed for telling what is factually true, a space that is not beholden to those doing the telling. Thus, courts find value in only specific types of testimony, given in specific ways.

In the ICC, the rules of procedure dictate the types of testimony—and indeed the kind of victim—it considers too subjective and unreliable to give admissible evidence. The court, therefore, also dictates the kind of testimony, and the victims, that are worthy of public recognition and acknowledgement. As one young Central African woman put it to Marlies Glasius, “We want the Court think about justice but also to support us to redo our life.”

As the ICC struggles to relate to survivors, it is imperative to examine what happens when international crimes against humanity are proven, but go unpunished as commanders are acquitted.

THE PROSECUTOR V. JEAN-PIERRE BEMBA GOMBO

At independence in 1960, political power in CAR was arranged along fault lines of neglect, in a complex network of personal favors and predation left by French colonization. For decades, multiple coup d’états and mutinies formalized violence as a mechanism of political control. The violence that began as unchecked personal animus between President Patassé and former Army Chief of Staff General Bozizé in 2002, escalated over the course of a year to a coup characterized by widespread cruelty and brutal violence targeted against civilians.

Following Bozizé’s bloody and brutal coup, the ICC charged Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo—Patassé’s Congolese rebel commander, who led the Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) while they used sexual violence to terrorize communities—with crimes against humanity for murder and rape and three counts of war crimes for murder, rape, and pillaging. On 20 June 2016, Bemba was convicted, becoming the first person to be convicted of rape on the basis of command responsibility at the ICC. However, two years later, Bemba was acquitted on appeal. Though the Appeals Chamber did not contest that Bemba’s troops perpetrated grave crimes against humanity as well as war crimes, it challenged his responsibility for these crimes as the MLC’s commander.

COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY

According to Article 28 of the Rome Statute, an individual commander is criminally responsible for crimes committed by forces under their direct or effective authority, command, and control, when that commander knew or should have known forces were committing or about to commit criminal acts, and when the commander failed to take “all necessary and reasonable measures” within their power to prevent, repress, investigate, and prosecute those crimes.

The ICC’s charges against Bemba established that the such criminal acts as sexual violence or forced conscription were the legal responsibility of Bemba himself, rather than that of MLC perpetrators. Sexual violence, pillaging, murder (or the numerous other crimes that the Prosecutor failed to include) were determined not to be individual instances of a poorly managed military “taking advantage of a coercive environment,” but rather the direct and explicit acceptance of crimes against humanity as a means of waging war. Thus, the Trial Chamber treated command responsibility as a mode of liability.

In the context of how to ICC understands the nexus of command responsibility, this is important because it establishes a clear line between a commander’s failure to act and what E. Van Sliedregt describes as “a form of participation” in violence (Clark 2016, 672, see FN 38). Because a commander engages in violence through the actions of the troops they lead, their liability for violence rests not only in their own actions, but on those of their troops. When a commander fails to explicitly discourage a crime against humanity, the commander is personally participating in the crime.

Despite acknowledging that MLC soldiers perpetrated crimes against humanity and war crimes, particularly rape and other forms of sexual violence, the Appeals Chamber’s majority opinion concluded that the conviction exceeded the charges; Bemba could not be responsible for every crime perpetrated by every, and in this case any, MLC combatant, he was not located within CAR at the time of those crimes.

Thus, Bemba’s acquittal served to establish a legal framework centered away from the victim and indeed the violence of the acts of crimes against humanity.

The process of telling, and the outcome of acquittal, effectively flattens public memory of sexual violence. To be the Court’s victim is to inhabit a constructed, liminal identity caught up in the willingness to perform a personal memory of trauma to the satisfaction of the Trial Chamber and its telling of factual truth. While the Trial Chamber memorialized a flattened memory of violence in CAR, the Appeals Chamber atomized the distinct features of responsibility and victimization.

In acquittal, the Appeals Chamber vacates not just the sentence, but substantively, the meaning and legibility of legal justice for survivors. Victims, though welcomed for their participation upholding the legal procedure of justice, are then literally stripped of their recognition as victims and its sole benefit: reparations. In so doing, the Appeals Chamber—and the ICC at large—truncates any actualization of legal justice.

COMPETING WITH THE ICC

It is critical to understand the impact of a survivor’s participation in trial not just for the Court, but for survivors and the larger project of transitional justice. In performing as a “victim” for the Court, survivors become the objects of justice, instruments a court uses to demonstrate that there is someone who needs to be punished. In its process of “unmaking” these victims, the Bemba Appeals Chamber disconnected victims from the crimes that they survived, but also from reclaiming a sense of ownership over what they survived by testifying.

Through this process, the ICC creates divergent streams of justice for victims at trial, preferring the justice that is legible to the institution over a form of justice that is legible to the survivor. Participating in justice at the ICC means that a survivor must allow themselves to be made and unmade a victim at the will of the Court. They must accept a practice of performing justice in which they are given and necessarily then denied the status of victim. Thus, survivors who testify are made into instruments of justice, left waiting for recognition to be able to “redo” their lives and live beyond victimization. Without recognition and reparations, the practice of transitional justice remains located theoretically and practically outside CAR, at the ICC.

Because such institutions of transitional justice reproduce an identity for victims and perpetrators that is caught up in diametrically opposed and competing meanings, the ICC—and the memories the Court constructed as it adjudicated who is responsible—loses sight of survivors needs.

It matters where justice is done, by who and for whom. When survivors and their needs do not drive this process, the process itself loses its legitimacy. Worse still, it excludes survivors from reconciling what they have survived in meaningful ways.

When the practice of legal justice ultimately fails to articulate liability for those criminally responsible, violence and injustice live on in the public memory. Targeting ordinary people with personal and intimate violence becomes the normal business of politics. To date, sexual violence remains rampant in the CAR: ex-Séléka and anti-Balaka rebels who terrorize CAR today use the same methods as the MLC to exert control over communities. And yet, the ICC’s CAR II investigations of Alfred “Rambo” Yekatom and Patrice-Edouard Ngaïssona—though they cover a broad scope of violence over the significant period of CAR’s most recent civil war—don’t include any charges of gender-based violence, sexual violence, or rape. Victims of Bemba’s violence, Bozizé’s violence, and Djotodia’s violence are left without legal recourse for what they have survived and continue to be subjected.

Survivors are left to wonder if the ICC has given up on justice for sexual violence and rape and we are all left to question whether justice at the ICC is really justice at all.

Image Credit: UNICEF | Pierre Holtz

What do you do when your faith in the U.N. is shattered?

I arrived in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for a Humanity in Action Fellowship in 2017 properly jaded. I had just completed a year-long stint with the U.N. office of PAX, where I worked on a series of reports outlining the particular cruelty and inhumanity of the sieges in Syria at the height of media coverage of the siege of Aleppo. It’s safe to say that I had a lot of feelings about spending the next month somewhere that had been kept under the longest siege in Europe since WWII.

Scrap of paper in front of government building which reads 1 March 1992: "do you vote for a sovereign and independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state of equal citizens and peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and of other people living in it?"
5 April 1992: First victims are killed at a peace rally — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

A frequent theme my cohort returned to—as is often (justifiably) the case in these conversations—was the failure and inadequacy of organizations such as the U.N. or USAID, and the Western states that frequently dominate them, to deliver on their promise to protect civilians and maintain international peace and security. And this is a fair point, the U.N. is one of the most powerful international institutions, but still is unable to effectively prevent, end, or resolve violent conflict—and if the UN is unable (or unwilling) to stir up political will to prevent or end conflicts, then what hope is there?

Scrap of paper in front of monument of canned beef, which reads the UN has trouble sending humanitarian aid to Sarajevo. The average civilian lives on 159g of food a day. When aid does arrive, citizens find biscuits and canned mean that had expired 50 years ago. Meanwhile, the UNSC "strongly condemns these acts of unspeakable brutality." UNSC Resolution 798, 18 Dec. 1992 — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

During one incredibly poignant moment of my month in BiH, I was sitting at the back of the bus with a member of my fellowship who had lived through the war. He told me that as a child he hated the U.S. because of its inaction and resented having to suffer through trauma that no one should have to, while the U.S. stood by waiting, watching, pretending to care. But that wasn’t what stuck with me—it was that he shrugged, rather casually, and said, “but look at what is happening in Syria, and here I am, I’m doing nothing. So, who am I to judge?”

Scrap of paper in front of yellow high rise building which reads, Sniper Alley. Roughly 5-15 people were wounded each day by snipers, despite the presence of UN peacekeepers. — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

Scrap of paper in front of apartment complex, which reads 15 Jan 1993
8 civilians killed, 20 wounded by mortar shell while waiting for water. Azra & Asim Lačević were among the victims, leaving behind their children, Berin & Delila, who were among the severely wounded. — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

But isn’t that the whole point of an international community? Aren’t we exactly who is to judge? If not each of us, then who will judge the massive failure of the West and its international institutions?

Scrap of paper in front of marketplace which reads UNSC resolution 816 "deploring the failure of some parties concerned to cooperate dully with United Nations Protection Froce (UNPROFOR)"
31 March 1993 — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

It is in the spirit of these questions that I compiled this photo essay during my time in Sarajevo. I wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of what the U.N. presents in official documents versus the lived experience of conflict. I was inspired by my colleagues—as well as the speakers who addressed us over the month we were there—to explore a Sarajevo that feels quite distant from the city you’ll find today. It is actually there, right below the surface, which in many ways feels like it is begging to be shown, not to be forgotten. I spent several days reading through UNSC resolutions about Bosnia, especially any that were around key dates and times. I explored the few resources online about the siege, and compiled enough information to create my own “walking tour” of the city.

Scrap of paper in front of broken concrete painted red to evoke blood spatter which reads of the 11,541 people killed during the siege, 1,601 of them were children.
UNSC Resolution 820: "Deeply alarmed and concerned about the magnitude of the plight of innocent victims of the conflict"
-17 April 1993- — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

I wanted to explore things that felt important to me personally, but also call attention to sites that—specifically tourists—might walk past without a second glance. Because of this, all of the sites photographed are easily accessible, notable, and are frequently seen or visited locations. The project is organized more or less chronologically, in order to give the viewer a visual timeline of the siege. The third photo in the series is irony meeting irony, as the canned beef monument—a literal larger than life rendering of a can of beef much like the ones dropped by ICAR, which Sarajevans would “rather die than eat”—is itself a jab at western aid agencies’ complete failure to provide humanitarian assistance.

Scrap of paper in front of state of a man yelling in a park which reads UNSC Resolution 819 "Demands that all parties and others concerned treat Srebrenica and its surrounding areas as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act."
17 April 1993 — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

In the background of the fourth photo, you can see the Hotel Holiday—the infamous yellow hotel that was notoriously inhabited by journalists bravely covering the siege—sitting along what was once one of the most dangerous streets to navigate, but is now one of the main thoroughfares and trolley lines in the city. The photo of the brewery was taken only one block from my apartment in Sarajevo, which felt exceptionally moving, to learn that there had been, within my lifetime, a massacre at a place I had just gotten drinks.

Scrap of paper in front of church which reads on average, 329 missiles were fired at Sarajevo daily. On 22 July 1993, 3,777 missiles hit the city in a single day. — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

The photo after this one is taken at the Markale Market in the center of the city, where some of the largest massacres once took place at the height of the siege. Today there is little more than a memorial wall, mostly hidden by the vendors. The Sarajevo Rose depicted is not one of particular note, as these memorials span the city, serving as their own unassuming reminder that we are never too far from history. I wanted to remind both myself and others, through the juxtaposition of the official documents about the conflict with the current state of the city, that the consequences of our actions are not theoretical—as they can sometimes feel as we sit in our comfortable London classrooms—but are in fact painfully real.

scrap of paper in front of dilapidated buildings which reads 10,000 buildings were completely destroyed. 100,000 buildings were heavily damaged.
UNSC: "Decides to remain actively seized of the matter" — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

It’s something I have come back to a lot during my time at SOAS. As students at a highly critical university, learning about international institutions, norms, transitional justice, and peacebuilding through decolonial and feminist perspectives can make the world seem disheartening—but at the same time it helps prepare you for the realities of how the world functions. That being said, it’s natural to feel burnt out every so often, to wonder why we’re even bothering or if we should have just gone into banking or marketing. Or worse, to feel like you’ll have to end up working for and perpetuating the very systems about which you’ve spent an entire post-graduate degree learning. Because I very much want to continue working in the field of advocacy and transitional justice, this is something I have to reconcile on a daily basis.

scrap of paper in front of view of large village which reads UNSC resolution 900 "emphasizing the crucial importance of achieving complete freedom of movement for the civilian population and humanitarian goods and of the restoration of normal life in Sarajevo, determined to restore essential public services in Sarajevo"
4 March 1994 — © Rachel Salcedo 2019

This was as maddening to navigate in BiH as it is today. Once you become aware of just how deeply broken everything is, it is incredibly daunting—and to be frank, depressing—to feel like one day it will be up to you to fix it all. I wish I could tell you that I’ve come to the solution, but I think we’ll have to keep on working through it together. I desperately want to do something right in a world that makes it feel nearly impossible, I hope that exploring what you can do when your faith is shattered can be one small thing to help us understand our positionality a bit better.

From Low-Level Crimes to Murder: The Failure of the Retributive Criminal Justice System in the United States

In October 2018, my 23-year-old brother was charged with first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. This accusation came only a few months after he was released from a correctional facility for possession of marijuana and theft of the amount between $100 and $750.

In the days that followed his arrest, I grappled with a plethora of questions. Why did my brother escalate from low-level crimes to murder? Was this acceleration related to his history of drug abuse? Did I do enough to support him when he got out of the correctional facility? My brother went into a correctional facility having committed minor infractions, but exited with severe psychological issues and an untreated drug addiction. He re-entered society incredibly unstable and went on to perpetrate a much more serious violation.

This is not to say that my brother should not be held accountable for his actions, but rather that his experience in the system had quite the opposite effect of its intention: instead of rehabilitating him, incarceration helped make him into a murderer.

My brother is a stark reminder that the retributive criminal justice system, which holds that the proper response to criminal activity is a punishment equivalent to their offense, is both inefficient and detrimental to individuals and communities. And he is just one case in a sea of millions of other vulnerable people who now share the same fate.

The Prison-Industrial Complex of the United States

The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of people of color and individuals with lower socioeconomic status represent the majority of the population behind bars. Acclaimed legal scholar, advocate, and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander (2010) writes about how mass incarceration in the U.S. is a form of racial and social control in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She contends that the U.S. targets marginalized communities through the executions of “the drug war” and the “get tough movement.” Supposed crime reduction strategies–along with the ever-expanding policies of targeting undocumented immigrants–allow private prisons to receive a per diem from the U.S. government for each inmate incarcerated. In turn, corporations exploit these individuals for cheap labour, a practice known as the prison-industrial complex (PIC). This is clearly problematic. As the retributive criminal justice funnels mostly black and brown bodies into prisons, companies profit off of their presence in prisons.

The entire retributive system is based on an assumption that once an inmate is released from incarceration, they will reintegrate into society with a better understanding of how to respect the rights of others and follow the societal norms associated with responsible citizenship, but this assumption is unfounded. It is highly evident that the retributive criminal justice system is failing to prevent future crime. In fact, the retributive system tends to induce reoffending at an enormous financial, emotional, and social cost to individuals and communities.

If incarceration actually facilitated rehabilitation, then the assumption that inmates would afterwards reintegrate as ideal citizens might make sense, but there is ample evidence that shows otherwise. Individuals that re-enter their communities after incarceration face myriad challenges, such as stigmatization, barriers to housing and employment, and mental health and/or addiction issues. Alexander describes these challenges as a form of permanent, second-class status in which those who have been incarcerated can be legally discriminated against, denied the right to vote and automatically excluded from juries. While individuals and organizations have diligently tried to aid individuals reintegrating into society, the consistently high rates of recidivism provide insight into the disturbing reality that sending people to jail doesn’t work.

Reform vs. Transformation

In order to confront the failed U.S. carceral state, we should pursue three objectives. First, we ought to follow Alexander’s call-to-action to continue to add and diffuse information on the devastating effects of mass incarceration. Second, we must mobilize a broad-based movement to dismantle the current racist and futile retributive criminal justice system. Third, we need to follow the leaders and organizations–Angela Davis, INCITE!, generationFIVE–who have been calling for the implementation of an interpersonal or community-based model for years.

The transformative justice model challenges the retributive criminal system, which is primarily responsible for the violent oppression of marginalized communities, and policies that serve to legitimize the existing system of crime control. Transformative justice instead relies upon the leadership and interests of marginalized communities who understand that forms of violence take place within the structural conditions of poverty, racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia, etc., and seeks resolutions within the more personal systems of community or civil society. According to Mimi E. Kim, “Communities are…sites for prevention, intervention, and transformation, spaces where interventions can be imagined, initiated, and implemented.” While the transformative justice model may take more time, it may provide opportunities for the victim-survivor, perpetrator, and community at large to find healing after a crime has been committed, healing that a retribution-based system prevents.

Drug decriminalization and prison reform is not enough. We instead must strive to dismantle the entire PIC, the entire retributive criminal justice system, and replace it with a model that has a firm grasp of the real conditions of people’s lives and how we can hold individuals accountable for their wrongdoings without contributing to structural violence. We owe it to ourselves and our communities to create conditions that can prevent future harm, including harm perpetrated by incarceration and policing. It is easy for many to disregard individuals who have been swept up by the PIC and see them only as defined by the worst moments of their lives, but we must see past the singular act of a crime. It is in our best interests, and in the interests of victims and perpetrators, to commit to holistic approaches that foster the rebuilding of individuals and communities. Rather than reacting to the damage after crimes are committed, we need to begin to reconsider the conditions that led to them in the first place.

In light of what my family has been through, I can continue to spread awareness about what this system does to ordinary people with drug addictions–and hope that one day we, as concerned citizens, may be able to deliver other individuals and communities from bearing the excruciating pain that a retributive justice model inflicts.

Photo Credit: Luis Argerich CC-BY 2.0

Is There Still Hope for Reconciliation in Northern Ireland?

Just as the walls have begun to come down in Northern Ireland, Brexit risks putting another back up. The question remains whether the Irish Peace Process can survive the shock.

At the time of writing, just under twelve weeks remain until the United Kingdom potentially crashes out of the European Union without an exit deal. This means that just under twelve weeks remain until border checks are reinstated between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a free-movement zone that has existed in some form since 1923, and completely since 1997.

It’s clear that the return of borders in Northern Ireland is now an all-too-possible reality. As recently as 4^thJanuary, the Guardian reported that some 1000 police officers from Scotland and England were preparing for deployment in Northern Ireland in the event of public disorder resulting from a no-deal Brexit. The return of armed officers from Scotland and England echoes the deployment of British soldiers during the worst periods of political violence in the “The Troubles,” a conflict which witnessed over 3000 deaths in acts of terror and assassination over the course of three decades.

The deployment is a sobering reminder that a conflict thought resolved is still anything but, and although violence almost certainly won’t return to levels seen during The Troubles, the process of reconciliation between divided communities remains fragile. Since 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement brokered a political agreement between Nationalists, who favor becoming a part of Ireland, and Unionists, who prefer remaining a part of the United Kingdom, communities divided by decades of violence have struggled to reconcile. School segregation, housing discrimination, and even physical barriers have created divisions, both physical and otherwise, between neighborhoods which remain long after the conflict’s end.

Tearing Down the Walls

Bringing down physical walls is essential to peace to Northern Ireland. Some 99 “Peace Walls” alone separate Nationalist Catholic neighborhoods from Unionist Protestant spaces in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, while even more exist in other towns such as Derry and Portadown. Before Brexit, the future of these walls looked to be ending: in 2017, the Northern Ireland Department of Justice proposed a deadline of 2023 for all Peace Walls to be removed. The first of these were demolished as of 2016, heralding positive signs for the island’s future.

But a hard border between Northern Ireland and its most important neighbor, Ireland, throws this progress into question once again. Complications don’t just arise due to trade barriers, or the logistics of moving from one part of Ireland to another– issues often cited in Westminster Brexit debates. For the people of Northern Ireland, the physical border is as much a psychological barrier to peace as a physical one. The free movement of people in Ireland is viewed by Nationalists as a step towards a United Ireland, in which Irish people on either side of a border are differentiated by little more than kilometers vs miles on roadside signs. For Unionists, open borders still allow Northern Ireland to remain an essential part of the United Kingdom, an important distinction for many Unionists who identify as British. It’s no surprise that over half of people in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union, a vote largely shared in both Unionist and Nationalist communities.

In this light, a hard border in Northern Ireland doesn’t just mean leaving the European Union – it means tearing up twenty years of hard-earned peace, in which removing barriers between Ireland and Northern Ireland is just as important as tearing down the walls between Nationalist and Unionist neighborhoods. Already, radical political factions on either end of the Nationalist/Unionist divide have used the potential for a no-deal Brexit to push their own sectarian goals, to the detriment of the peace process. Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican party, has called for a referendum on Irish Unity in the event of a no-deal Brexit, a referendum Unionists vehemently oppose. For the hard-right DUP, currently in a loose coalition with Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives, a hard border is preferable to a possible compromise customs border in the Irish Sea, which the party believes would delegitimize the British identity of Unionists in Northern Ireland.

A Fragile Future

Neither of these options will bring about greater peace, but instead could very well serve to destroy it. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was created under the idea that Unionism and Nationalism could live side-by-side in Northern Ireland without violence, and its success was only possible when powerful leaders on both sides – such as Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuiness and the DUP’s Ian Paisley – decided to battle their differences in the halls of the legislature instead the streets of Belfast. Today’s leaders in the still paralyzed Northern Ireland Assembly, Arlene Foster of the DUP and Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, increasingly treat Nationalism and Unionism as a matter of politics instead of peace, and the Brexit debate as yet another a vehicle for political goals. Their brinkmanship in these regards could once again send their tiny corner of the island of Ireland over the edge.

While working in Northern Ireland as a peace volunteer in 2017, I saw firsthand how the shock of Brexit might tear apart the fragile peace. Schoolchildren still receive education in segregated facilities; streets in Belfast are still defined as Nationalist or Unionist—with barriers between them; and the extremist militias of twenty years ago remain the forms of the Real IRA or the Red Hand Defenders, ready to take advantage of a return to sectarianism. While there is hope for Ireland’s future – with young people especially beginning to see past Nationalist/Unionist identities – it is an uncertain hope, and one that is very much fragile in the face of a no-deal Brexit.

Reconciliation is a slow, uneasy process, and Northern Ireland still needs its own time to heal from the traumas of the past. During the short-sighted Brexit vote, the peace process was all but forgotten in the rest of Britain, but as the fate of a no-deal Brexit becomes more certain, it can no longer be taken for granted. As the peace walls fall in Belfast and Derry, another still cannot rise in its place in Ireland if sustainable peace is to be achieved. Either a deal must be made where the return of the border is rejected outright, or better yet Northern Ireland could not leave at all.