In this public panel hosted by Professor Tim Edmunds (Director of the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol), the question of justice for the disappeared will be explored.
Featuring the participation of Dr Roddy Brett (University of Bristol); Dr. Andrea Purdekova (University of Bath) the experts considerable experience of researching and responding to issues of genocide, enforced disappearance and transitional justice will be drawn upon as the challenges of legal and ethical responses to human denial will be considered.
This event is supported by Arts Council England National Lottery; the Centre for the Study of Violence, University of Bath; ESRC Festival of Social Sciences; the Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol; the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath; and UCC, Cork.
It is also partnered by Bristol Ideas; Locate International; Trebuchet Art Magazine, and The Philosopher.
This Event is part of the State of Disappearance Art Exhibition https://www.historiesofviolence.com/stateofdisappearance
Image: Chantal Meza (2017) Estado de Terror, Mixed Media
Tim Edmunds is Professor of International Security and director of the Global Insecurities Centre at the University of Bristol. Between 2015-19, he was founding Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Security for Cambridge University Press and the British International Studies Association (BISA). His work addresses issues of security policy, capacity building and security sector reform, with focus on the maritime domain. I am author or editor of over 90 publications on these themes, including 14 books and special issues.
Roddy Brett is an Associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Bristol. He studies and writes on political violence, particularly mass collective violence, its causes and consequences, and how states and societies seek to overcome mass violence and its legacy, including through peace negotiations, post-accord peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms. He directs the large study, Getting on with it: understanding post-accord intergroup relations in Colombia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. He also has two decades of experience as a policymaker and practitioner, including in the past with the United Nations, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as with human rights organisations. He worked with the Centre for Human Rights legal Action as part of the original team that prepared the investigation and body of evidence for the trial for genocide and crimes against humanity of former de facto president of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt, which led to Montt’s was conviction for 80 years for genocide in 2013.
Andrea Purdeková is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Conflict and Security at the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath where she also sits on the executive committee of the Centre for the Study of Violence. Prior to the current appointment, she held a Departmental Lectureship in African Politics at the University of Oxford (2013-2017) and a Junior Research Fellowship at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2015-2017). She holds a DPhil in International Development from the Department of International Development (ODID), University of Oxford. Purdekova’s work focuses on the politics of transitional justice and memory in contexts of community-based violence and has undertaken fieldwork research in Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya. Most recently, she has been exploring the nexus between memory and security in the wake of mass violence. Her work has appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals, including most recently in a lead article in Security Dialogue on securitisation of forgetting and sites of anti-memory in the context of Kenya’s counterterrorism. Her draft book manuscript on this topic is entitled Paths to Forgetting: Memory and Power After Violence in East Africa.
Dr. Josefina Echavarría Alvarez is Professor of the Practice and the director of the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) program at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs. As the director of PAM, she leads the Barometer Initiative in Colombia, which carries out official monitoring of implementation of the 2016 Final Agreement between the government and the former FARC-EP. Josefina also directs the Legacy Project for “Preserving and Engaging the Digital Archive of the Colombian Truth Commission”, which guarantees continued access to more than 200,000 files including audiovisual, non-textual knowledge and digitized documents compiled by the Colombian Truth Commission about the country’s 52-year armed conflict to advance transitional justice, human rights and the centrality of victims.
She was previously co-director of the Research Center for Peace and Conflict at the University of Innsbruck and a Fellow at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) and Trinity College (Ireland). She has been a guest lecturer at numerous universities around the world on peacebuilding, peace education, gender, conflict analysis, and research methods. She has also managed diverse international cooperation projects in the fields of gender, citizenship, and curricular development for peace and conflict studies.