Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GREYZONE (Illuminating the \'Grey Zone\': Addressing Complex Complicity in Human Rights Violations)

Teaser

The project explores the “grey zones” of complicity under complex circumstances of political violence. It focuses on the roles of collaborators, bystanders and beneficiaries, whose varied forms of participation in injustice have eluded the theory and practice of...

Summary

The project explores the “grey zones” of complicity under complex circumstances of political violence. It focuses on the roles of collaborators, bystanders and beneficiaries, whose varied forms of participation in injustice have eluded the theory and practice of transitional justice because of its embrace of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy as a lens for thinking about responsibility. The purpose is to enrich the existing toolkit of scholars and practitioners by exploring the potential role that the literary and cinematic representations of the grey zone can play in reinvigorating efforts at reconciliation in societies divided by painful pasts. To this end, we focus on four cases of political violence: authoritarianism plus military occupation in Vichy France, apartheid in South Africa, totalitarianism in Romania and military dictatorship in Argentina.

Working at the frontiers of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature and cinema, the project has three main objectives. Conceptually, we aim to understand the many faces of the grey zone by illuminating the complexities of human agency and responsibility against the background of structurally ingrained injustice. Normatively, we strive to expose the troubling political implications of the failure to engage with the grey zones of complicity. Empirically, we are exploring how artistic representations can problematize the official stories of transition and inspire continuous public debate about the complex nature of complicity in past injustice.

Our research into the three outlined objectives has yielded significant results, while also opening new avenues of inquiry. 1) We have been developing a historically-attuned and temporally dynamic account of complicity, acknowledging the ways that individuals’ choices are conditioned, constrained and enabled by her social position within broader structures and relationships of power. Our insights into the complexities of complicity also drew our attention to the adjacent concepts of resistance and solidarity as crucial for understanding political violence as well as revealing the possibilities for social change. Moreover, we have been exploring the role of memory and imagination in allowing individuals to navigate the social world, project themselves into the perspectives of others and reflect on their contribution to the normalisation of systemic violence. 2) We have been exposing the limits of grand narratives of reconciliation, outlining how their omission of the grey zones of complicity risks reproducing systemic patterns of political violence. What emerged was the need to care for a plural space of meaning, where uncomfortable truths can be voiced and where existing political settlements can be subjected to public scrutiny. 3) Aware of the risk of romanticising art’s political role, we have distinguished between illuminating and obscuring representations of the grey zone. We have considered the specific narrative devices and mechanisms through which we become reflectively attuned and emotionally responsive to the ambiguities of judging and acting under circumstances of systemic repression.

We have disseminated these findings through our website, social media, scholarly publications, participation at several high-profile international conferences and the creation of important research networks. We are especially excited about the up-coming Greyzone Summer School, which will bring together a mix of senior and junior scholars in a dialogue about our project’s objectives. Beyond academic circles, we have been engaged in several outreach activities, including a film series on complicity, which involved the public in a lively discussion on the many faces of the grey zone.

Work performed

Since the inception of the project, the PI has organised and coordinated the following milestones:

I. Recruitment of team members

Through international searches, two post-doctoral fellows and one PhD student were initially recruited for the GREYZONE team.

Dr Maša Mrovlje completed her PhD at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests are oriented by the rubric of international political theory and the history of political thought, with a specific focus on twentieth-century philosophies of existence, poststructuralist and critical theories, and their significance to issues of transitional justice, political judgement, responsibility, evil, violence, critique and resistance in the contemporary world. In addition, she is interested in the relatively recently emergent field of the ethics and politics of narrative.

Maša’s contribution to the GREYZONE objectives:
1. Responsibility and the GREYZONE: she draws on contemporary political theory to understand and conceptualise judgement, responsibility, complicity, guilt and resistance under the complex circumstances of political violence and oppression;
2. The politics of narrative: she engages philosophical and theoretical insights into the ethical and political potentials of narrative (in literature and cinema) in dealing with ascriptions of responsibility in the GREYZONE;
3. Focus on South Africa: she examines the tension between official and artistic engagements with the GREYZONE of complicity and resistance.

In her work, she combines textual and conceptual analysis with a historically-attuned, narrative approach to the GREYZONE problematic, and draws upon philosophical as well as cinema and political and literary texts.

Dr Hugh McDonnell completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam, where he worked between the department of European Studies and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. His book Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 (Liverpool University Press) examines ways in which ideas about Europe and Europeanness were articulated and contested in politics, culture, and the Parisian urban landscape. He has also worked on the history of North African migration to France and the corresponding issues of recognition and social justice. His approach combines archive-based historical work with an engagement with political, social, and cultural theory. Hugh‘s work for the GREYZONE is as a historian of France. He is examining the memory of the ‘grey zone’ of Vichy France, looking at how the complex complicity of collaborators, bystanders, and beneficiaries have been thought and talked about publicly. This is the basis of the book project, which will bridge political, intellectual and cultural history and memory studies.


Hugh’s contribution to the GREYZONE objectives:
1. Responsibility and judgement and the grey zone: he builds on his experience as a historian engaged with political, social and cultural theory to examine how these phenomena have been understood and mobilised by a range of state and non-state actors to make sense of the grey zone of violence and oppression;
2. He is particularly interested in the formulation of ‘the official story’ by the key political actors after WWII – some of whom had had an ambiguous stance towards the German occupation;
3. As part of his research agenda, he examines the intertwinement of the politics of memory between Vichy and the Algerian decolonisation process. He examines how certain memory tropes elaborated in response to Vichy have been mobilised to make sense of the faces of complicity in relation to Algeria.

Gisli Vogler is a PhD student in political theory, who completed an MA at Durham University. His research links social and political theory and considers the relationship between structure and agency, judgement and power, intentionality and responsibility. By approaching these issues from the perspective of realism in the social sciences and the humanities, his research seeks to exp

Final results

All members of the research team have been working on reviewing the multiple literatures relevant for this project and formulating new directions of research. We have been studying materials in the fields of transitional justice, arts and political memory, case-study focused analyses in relation to transitional justice processes and artistic production in response to these processes. We have made significant progress on all three objectives outlined in our proposal: a) to offer a precise conceptualisation of the grey zone in its agentic and structural complexity; b) to highlight the risks associated with laxness about the elusiveness of the grey zone; c) to test whether art can supplement the work of typical TJ mechanisms by tackling this difficult—and yet crucially important—reality of political conflict.
Moving beyond the literature review, several research findings have emerged:
1. Resistance and solidarity constitute the flipside of complicity – any account of complicity must take these adjacent concepts into account, unpack them and investigate the mechanisms through which individuals navigate the ambiguous field of moral responsibility. (Objective a)
2. The need to consider how questions of power actively shape individuals’ judgements and complicit behaviour: individuals are socially positioned at the intersection of several axes of identity (class, gender, religion, racialisation, etc.). Their positionality will influence how they will locate themselves within or without the greyzone. (Objective a)
3. The implication of the above point is that complicity with human rights violations sits between structure and agency – this is why we propose a complex theory that takes individual agency (dispositions, embodiment, action, reflexivity, and judgement) into account while remaining aware of its situatedness within structures that simultaneously make it possible, constrain it and normalise it. (Objective a)
4. The epistemic challenges of seeing and learning about the grey zone: given the structuralist account of agency outlined above, we are aware that it is highly difficult – but also counterproductive – to try and separate individuals’ discrete contributions to systemic wrongdoing. We have turned our attention to delineating how different categories of people locate themselves on the spectrum of involvement, depending on their positionality. Moreover, we are acutely aware that individuals’ position within this spectrum changes in response to changes in the political context and in the agents themselves. This is why we argue in favour of a hermeneutical, historically and sociologically sensitive, temporally dynamic account of complicity. (Objectives a, c)
5. The need to focus on the role of the imagination and that of memory in engaging with artworks that problematise complicity in violence: memory and the imagination enable the individual to navigate the social world, by mobilising past experiences and projecting herself into the future, as well as in others’ shoes to see what reality looks like from their point of view; artworks that successfully tap into a spectator’s memories and enable her to see what reality looks like from a victim’s perspective can be politically and morally productive in combating complicity with human rights violations; they can serve as prostheses for the spectator’s imagination, who is invited to reflect on her own contribution to the normalisation of systemic violence. (Objectives a, c)
6. We seek to propose the concept of the ‘banal’ resister – as a counter-weight to the absolute, unwavering hero – whose figure dominates official public memory. In doing so, we foreground resister’s moments of complicity and hesitance, their compromises and ambivalence in relation to the liberation struggles. In thinking about this other grey zone of resistance, we hope to advance a vision of heroism that is more tangible, and thereby more inspiring for the general public. (Obj

Website & more info

More info: http://www.pol.ed.ac.uk/greyzone.