Reckoning with Truth Commissions: Implication in Transitional Justice and Settler Colonialism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The inability to address institutional harm is a criticism of Western, liberal democracies and is particularly pertinent for settler colonial contexts where violence is structural and often seen as occurring solely in the past.Through a lens of "implication," as developed in Michael Rothberg's 2019 book The Implicated Subject, I assess the role of collective responsibility of and for settler colonial institutions.Through a case study of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Mandate and Calls to Action, alongside a review of the commission's summary reports, I evaluate how institutions in settler colonial contexts see themselves implicated (or not) for colonial policies and how these forms of responsibility are negotiated within transitional justice processes.The lens of implication can be a catalyst for understanding our associated relationality to institutional harm/violence, how we are involved in it, and how we can begin to recognize the potential for its dismantling.Wilson 1 "Although not guilty of what precedes us, we remain captive to a communal responsibility by virtue of our participation in a collective way of life."-Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, p. 47 "I have never met anyone that wants to be reconciled with the government.One forgives people, not institutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.095 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".