CAS Luncheon Series
Thursday, October 12 at 12:30pm
CASE Building room W311
More than 17 years after the end of Nepal’s decade-long civil war, the country’s conflict victims are still awaiting justice, reparations, truth, and acknowledgement. In her dissertation research, Fehr explores how the Government of Nepal has created a hollow Transitional Justice process as a façade of internationally accepted institutionalized means without adequate support to achieve the goals of Transitional Justice. The talk will focus specifically on the state’s two ongoing commissions—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons. Fehr finds that Nepal’s process operates as Transitional Justice Ritualism and uses ethnographic data to illustrate how a heavy cloud of fatigue has settled over the commissions as legal and resource limitations and political biases have severely impaired their functionality. This study also raises broader concerns about how the international standardization of Transitional Justice can lead to ritualism—particularly when perpetrators of past conflicts remain in power—that may do more harm than good for post-conflict societies.
Tracy Fehr is a Sociology PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. For dissertation research in 2022-2023, Fehr conducted a multi-sited ethnography of Gender and Transitional Justice in Nepal as a Fulbright Hays DDRA fellow. Fehr’s research interests lie at the intersection of gender, development, human rights, law, and peace and conflict. Her research is intimately connected to timely political and social issues and focuses on understanding how broader social forces and power relations shape women’s everyday realities.